Abstract
This chapter extends Bachelardian theory through discussion of Charles Dickens’s fascination with rented houses. Such houses have typically been excluded from Heideggerian–Bachelardian readings of architectural space, yet Dasgupta argues that imaginative engagement with the rented house significantly informs the plots of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. Focusing on David Copperfield and Great Expectations, she demonstrates that Dickens’ metaphors of rented space indicate how his narrators perceive the world around them, make sense of their lives and express themselves on paper. Like Swift, Dasgupta is concerned with the location of the self; like Chaudhuri, she examines ways in which the house may be imagined as a kind of self, while the self in turn is understood in terms of the domestic sphere.
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Notes
- 1.
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. by Jeremy Tambling (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 567. Subsequent references appear in the text.
- 2.
Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 48.
- 3.
Karen Chase, Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot (New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 54–55. On the ‘openness’ and ‘fertility’ of Victorian psychology as a discourse and discipline, attracting ‘economists, imaginative writers, philosophers, clerics, literary critics, policy-makers, as well as biomedical students’, see Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
- 4.
On metaphor and nineteenth-century psychology, see, for example, Michael Davis, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology: Exploring the Unmapped Country (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Suzanne Juhasz, The Undiscovered Continent: Emily Dickinson and the Space of the Mind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); Michael S. Kearns, Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987); and Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 5.
Sam’s words appear in Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, ed. by Mark Wormald (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 587. Subsequent references appear in the text.
- 6.
Lauren Cameron, ‘Interiors and Interiorities: Architectural Understandings of the Mind in Hard Times’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 35 (2013), 65–79 (p. 66). In 1796, Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue listed the ‘Garret, or Upper Story, the head. His garret, or upper story, is empty, or unfurnished; i.e. he has no brains, he is a fool’. ‘garret’, n.1, 3.a., b., in the OED Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), www.oed.com/view/Entry/76861 [accessed 29 March 2017].
- 7.
Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. by Helen Small and Stephen Wall (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 53.
- 8.
‘THEORIES (AND ARGUMENTS) ARE BUILDINGS’ is just one of the countless metaphors that ‘partially structure our everyday concepts […] this structure is reflected in our literal language’. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 46, 52–55.
- 9.
Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. by Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 364. Subsequent references appear in the text.
- 10.
On coverture and women’s property rights, see, for example, Deborah Wynne, Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 6–7, 34–35. On Dickens’s deeply ambivalent portrayal of ‘forceful women of property’, whose real estate is ‘vulnerable to loss or destruction’, see p. 58. On the way Satis House is ‘dismantled and converted into moveable property’, see pp. 84–85.
- 11.
Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, ed. by David Paroissien (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 18. Subsequent references appear in the text.
- 12.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 92–93.
- 13.
Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. by Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 199.
- 14.
Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. by Patricia Ingham (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 190. Subsequent references appear in the text. For readings of architecture in Martin Chuzzlewit, see, for example, Nancy Aycock Metz, ‘Dickens and “The Quack Architectural”’, Dickens Quarterly, 11 (1994), 59–68; Jeremy Tambling, ‘Martin Chuzzlewit: Dickens and Architecture’, English, 48 (1999), 147–68.
- 15.
Dickens to John Forster, 26 February 1849, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. by Graham Storey et al., 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–2002), V, p. 502.
- 16.
See Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 83–132.
- 17.
Dickens, ‘The Boarding-House: Chapter the Second’, in Sketches by Boz, ed. by Dennis Walder (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 338–61 (p. 360).
- 18.
Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ed. by Richard Maxwell (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 63.
- 19.
These examples are drawn from Marcus Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 10, 22. On the established use of architectural metaphors to describe society, especially in the eighteenth century, see F. S. Schwarzbach, Dickens and the City (London: Athlone Press, 1979), p. 83.
- 20.
Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. by Andrew Sanders (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 171.
- 21.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis, ed. by Donald Hawes and J. I. M. Stewart (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 188. Subsequent references appear in the text.
- 22.
On the kinds of ideas that had currency in the nineteenth century and helped shape this genre, see, for example, Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987).
- 23.
Dickens to W. W. F. de Cerjat, 7 July 1858, in Letters, VIII, p. 597.
- 24.
Beth F. Herst, The Dickens Hero: Selfhood and Alienation in the Dickens World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), pp. 53–54.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jane Griffiths and Adam Hanna for bringing us all together at The House in the Mind, to my fellow panellists Leah Edens and Iain McMaster, and to those who attended our session. Their comments were extremely helpful and illuminating. This work is drawn from my doctoral research; my heartfelt thanks to Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Clare Pettitt and Sophie Ratcliffe for their guidance and support of the project.
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Dasgupta, U. (2020). ‘Drawd Too Architectooralooral’: Charles Dickens, the Bildungsroman and the Spatial Imagination. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_8
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