Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture by Parkins Wendy

Author:Parkins, Wendy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

The river and ethical space within the city

Dickens’s riverside idylls are not just the victims of polluting influences, however. The tidal river spreads urban problems but also develops narrative connections. Dickens’s characters use the river to carve out quiet space inside the metropolis, whilst the association of imagery draws upon ethical lessons learnt outside London. Franco Moretti sees country and city spaces as fundamentally different, and so argues that connections between characters are different in these two locations; for Moretti, cities are more ‘complicated’ (1998: 64–5). His theory rests on the conviction that spaces cannot be linked, or merge, but must have clear-cut distinctions, as ‘this specific form needs that specific space’ (1998: 70, original emphasis). However, a river is a liminal space that complicates Morretti’s theory of distinct spaces, as Pamela Gilbert points out (2005: 97). The flow of the tidal river links up- and downstream in Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, and so complicates the traditional distinction between country and city.14 This suggests the potential for sustainable progress within London, as well as without.

This link between urban and rural spaces enables Dickens’s narratives to develop. Arthur connects the possibility of Amy being in love in Little Dorrit with his experiences with Pet; the narrator asks coyly: ‘had the suspicion been brought into his mind by his own associations of the troubled river running beneath the bridge with the same river higher up…?’ (220). River imagery connects across countries as well as country and city: in Little Dorrit, the expatriate community is ‘a superior sort of Marshalsea,’ showing ‘general unfitness for getting on’ whether on ‘the shore of the yellow Tiber or the shore of the black Thames’ (428, 491). In Great Expectations, Pip finds that the escape attempt with Magwitch finds him in a part of the river ‘like my own marsh country’ (401), as the end of the novel brings Pip back to the beginning. As Jeremy Tambling puts it, ‘this journey downstream is linked with the first part of the novel […] the locales are not two, but one, and the marsh country is not different from London, but its expression’ (2009: 207); the river connects across time as well as space. The banks and bridges of Dickens’s rivers are liminal spaces where different classes can meet, and this occurs inside as well as outside the city. As well as Arthur and Amy’s encounters on the Iron Bridge, Eugene first encounters Lizzie down by the bank at Limehouse in Our Mutual Friend, and crosses the bridge at Millbank to visit her at Jenny Wren’s. Pip’s precarious status as a gentleman is threatened from the start by the Thames, as he is told by his rowing tutor that he has ‘the arm of a blacksmith’ (GE 179), but it is on the river that Pip learns to value Magwitch as ‘a much better man than I had been to Joe’ (408). These connections stake a claim for attention on behalf of the lower-class characters.

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