‘Is This an Hotel? Are There Thieves in the House?’

This chapter suggests that tenancy plays a major role in nineteenth-century detective fiction, an emerging genre that counted Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Warren Adams as enthusiastic early practitioners. The chapter starts by investigating the relationship between geography, class, and morality in contemporary social discourses, focusing on the ‘low’ or ‘common’ lodging house in London. Low lodging houses were widely associated with criminal behaviour, and Dickens and Collins were interested in the function they could perform in their fiction. The chapter moves on to examine the murders that take place in Bleak House, The Moonstone, and The Notting Hill Mystery, and argues that rented space becomes a tool in the battle between detective and criminal. The chapter ends with an extended reading of Krook’s lodging house and rag-and-bone shop in Bleak House. Here, a mystery narrative intersects with farce and the Gothic, attesting to the porosity between aesthetic forms.

‘To Let To Let To Let’

This chapter explores the significance of rented spaces in the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, reading David Copperfield and Great Expectations alongside novels by Catherine Gore and WM Thackeray. Some of the most memorable characters in these coming-of-age narratives are landlords and landladies, who act as mentors to the protagonist as he tries to find his place in the world. Dickens interrogates the idea that it is a rite of passage for a young man to take lodgings before he moves into a private house. The chapter reveals that Dickens uses spatial and architectural metaphors, including images drawn from the world of tenancy, to articulate the process of growing up. It ends with a section on the window tax debate of the 1840s and 1850s and the traces it leaves in the fiction of the period; the window is a site charged with symbolism for characters preoccupied with their ‘prospects’.

Building a Career

This chapter discusses Dickens’s journalism and fiction of the 1830s and 1840s, and identifies the features of his urban style. It places his writing on tenancy in the context of comic theatre: namely, an influential tradition of lodging-house farce. The chapter surveys a number of plays and identifies the conventions of lodging-house farce, and it explores how Dickens adapts these materials to paint a vivid picture of life in London lodgings. The two-dimensional characters of the farce universe offer Dickens a reference point for theorizing the ‘flattening’ of identity in the city’s rented spaces. Dickens is especially interested in the landlady as a comic trope, social reality, and important figure in women’s history. Both the landlady and her lodgers provide Dickens with a set of tools to contemplate the nature of nineteenth-century authorship and readership: the lodging house, he discovers, is a literary space, and his early writing is witty and metafictional.

Introduction

The Introduction offers a preliminary discussion of what Charles Dickens calls the ‘lodger world’, and it establishes the book’s main lines of argument. It explains that tenancy, an economic transaction realized in space, was a central aspect of everyday life in the nineteenth century. An overwhelming majority of Victorians did not own their homes outright. Instead, they were tenants: while single families could take entire houses on lease, lodgers lived in rooms overseen by landladies, and these many kinds of rented space captured Dickens’s imagination. The pervasive need to rent in the period encourages a reassessment of middle-class domestic ideology. The Introduction surveys the history of the property market, reviews Dickens’s active participation in rental culture throughout his life, and describes a number of his creative relationships. It considers the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, and ultimately sets up a link between rented space, narrative, and genre in Dickens’s thinking.

Coda

The Coda discusses the changing representations of tenancy after Dickens’s death in 1870. It moves through the fin de siècle, offerings readings of novellas by Wilkie Collins and tracing Dickens’s legacy in these texts. Collins’s novellas use rented space as a prism through which to address broad concerns about modernity. The Coda briefly notes the role of rented space in works by George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. It concludes by shifting its focus to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and considers examples from literature, film, television, and contemporary installation art, including Tatzu Nishi’s 2002 project, Villa Victoria.

How to Live Together

This chapter discusses Dickens’s late career, reading the multi-authored Christmas numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round alongside Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and novels by Marmion Savage and WM Thackeray. For Dickens, Christmas is an opportunity to clarify and problematize definitions of ‘home’ and ‘family’. He compares three modes of dwelling: living alone in chambers, living with another person, and lodging. While chambers generate a particular kind of urban loneliness, Dickens suggests that sharing accommodation with a friend consolidates homosocial and homoerotic ties, turning rented space into queer space. Many of the Christmas numbers are set in rented spaces, and contemplate the joys and trials of cohabitation. These collections suggest that the dynamics of the lodging house capture the politics of Dickens’s circle. Here, Dickens and his collaborators reflect upon literary sociability, asking what it means to be territorial on the page.

Interlude

This short interlude leaves London in order to consider the seaside as a site of pastoral retreat. It discusses the popularity of resorts in the period. Dickens, Samuel Beazley, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, WM Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope transplant traditional pastoral narratives to the seaside; here, hotels, inns, and boarding houses witness scenes of escape, liberation, and personal transformation, many of which are more ambivalent than they appear. The Interlude begins with a study of class, wealth, and the rags-to-riches tale in the rented spaces of Brighton, Margate, and Ramsgate, and then moves on to stories of romance, heartbreak, and sexual license in Brighton, Deal, Lowestoft, Margate, and Yarmouth. The final section focuses on health, convalescence, and death.

‘The Property of 1851’

This chapter, which discusses Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, George Augustus Sala, and the writers for Punch magazine, explains that the Great Exhibition of 1851 led to a sudden demand for short-term accommodation in London. A popular display of ‘model’ cottages at the Exhibition spoke to wider concerns in the period about the condition of working-class housing. Though Dickens went to see the cottages, the literature of the Exhibition year reveals an interest in other kinds of rented space, which are sites of negotiation between the local, national, and global. Mayhew and the Punch circle saw the growth of the hospitality industry and the resourcefulness of Londoners as a cause for laughter. Meanwhile, Dickens, Collins and Sala were drawn to the cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Leicester Square. Here, hotels and lodgings brimmed not only with tourists but also with Continental spies and exiles, arriving in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions.