Charles Dickens by Jenny Hartley

Author:Jenny Hartley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191024627
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2018-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

Coming to the city

The young man coming to the city to seek his fortune is an old story. Dickens told it himself many times, with its stages of initiation, familiarization, taint, and survival. After all, he was himself a migrant to the city at the age of 10, and he situated many of his novels in this period of the 1820s, when the city first imprinted itself on his mind. Like David Copperfield at the same age, his impressions were filtered through the lens of the bookish child:

What an amazing place London was to me when I saw it in the distance, and how I believed all the adventures of my favourite heroes to be constantly enacting and re-enacting there … I vaguely made it out in my own mind to be fuller of wonders and wickedness than all the cities of the earth.

(chapter 5)

City of extremes, and always the magnet. Living in the northern suburbs, Harriet Carker in Dombey and Son looks ‘with compassion’ on the weary ‘stragglers’ on their way to London.

Swallowed up in one phase or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death,—they passed on to the monster roaring in the distance, and were lost.

(chapter 33)

To Harriet’s sad fancy the crowd goes one way, towards the devouring ‘monster’. But Dickens can also describe the two-way in-and-out of commuting—a new phenomenon observed by Boz in ‘Omnibuses’ and ‘The Streets—Morning’. Crowds surge through the Dickens city, a place of constant movement and change, above all the maker and marker of modernity. He can be brisk about nostalgia for the past, and his handling of the railway illustrates this well.

Dombey and Son is Dickens’s novel of the railway, which is introduced as a force of nature erupting in the northern suburb of Camden Town: ‘The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre.’ Sentence structure is shaken and strained to convey the fractured landscape: ‘Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood.’ With zigzagging energy Dickens catches the details of the massive construction site:

Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsy-turvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable.

Crashing his paragraph to a standstill in the ‘mounds of ashes [which] blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood’, Dickens now suddenly switches direction from destruction to creation, with a sharp new paragraph: ‘In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all

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