Earthly intermundia: office space in the works of Charles Dickens

Abstract

ABSTRACT Charles Dickens’s literary preoccupation with bureaucracy reflects its ascendant, but often contradictory, position in Victorian society. Exclusive, disordered, and in parts archaic – but at the same time increasingly pervasive, and visibly cohering into a recognisably modern form – bureaucratic organisation became a major (albeit neither infallible, nor uncontested) phenomenon in fiction during this period as much as in real life. In this article I explore such portrayals by focusing on Dickens’s aesthetic of the ostensible centre of bureaucratic power, the office itself, as a space. By rooting his ironical and often paradoxical uses of this setting within the broader crises of social knowledge and materiality that underlay nineteenth-century bureaucratisation, I argue that the Dickensian office, between The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House, performs a range of functions directly linked to its multifaceted condition of interstiality. These interstices are literal, in the office’s capacity as a physical intermediary, but also social, conceptual, and in terms of literary form.