Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Barbara Leckie; Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development, by Joanna Hofer-Robinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Leckie, and: Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development by Joanna Hofer-Robinson Sarah Bilston (bio) Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Barbara Leckie; pp. 303. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018, $79.95, £66.00. Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development, by Joanna Hofer-Robinson; pp. 264. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £75.00, £24.99 paper, $110.00, $39.95 paper. London still draws our fascinated eye. Like Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Jenny, looking for the city through the "blown grass," we seek out and try to make sense of a London at once real and mythical, a city that exists beneath the feet as well as on the page, in song and dreams and cultural memory (The Collected Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, edited by William Rossetti, vol. 1 [Ellis and Elvey, 1890], 131). Generations of historians have explored and cataloged London's buildings, infrastructure, demographics, and, more recently, its heterogeneous communities, its startling "congregation of diversity" (as Roy Porter put it in London: A Social History [Hamish Hamilton, 1994], 10). More recently, scholars like Erika Rappaport have turned to how, in the face of London's multiplicity, the idea of a city was produced discursively and in daily practices such as shopping and travel. Barbara Leckie's Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Joanna Hofer-Robinson's Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development make sense afresh of London, beginning with a deep appreciation of the place of their scholarship in a tradition that can feel almost as vast, venerable, and complex as the city itself. Both writers focus specifically on the part the novel played in dissecting nineteenth-century urban and [End Page 348] architectural problems. Hofer-Robinson sees Dickensian tropes playing a crucial role in effecting real-world transformations, while Leckie explores three well-known novels that, she contends, respond to the failure of documentary writings to bring about social and architectural reform. Leckie's meticulously researched text is especially interested in the gaze—the fascinated, exploratory eye—and in how what was seen was framed to give impetus to architectural reform movements. The first two chapters of Open Houses work on a granular level to uncover the politics of nineteenth-century architectural debates, specifically those concerning the housing of the poor. Leckie points out that key social reformers produced detailed documentary examinations of housing interiors as a means of inspiring empathetic interest in the populace. Many reformers were also motivated, she adds, by a commitment to "the architectural idea," the theory that the built environment directly influences human lives and that advances in architecture can produce demonstrable social improvement (5). "Looking into" poor home interiors and encouraging readers to look, too, enabled (or was thought to enable) urban reforms that would better the health, well-being, and prospects of the residents (6). Yet, as Leckie argues, the act of "looking inside" called attention to the disturbing permeability of the boundary between inside and outside in low-income areas, problematizing the business of the exposé; perhaps what was seen was not so hidden after all, in which case what was the business of looking really worth (32)? Writers increasingly evinced doubt about the exposé's ability to generate change, and it is here that Leckie makes some of her most provocative claims, suggesting that the novel's evolution may have been directly shaped by a growing loss of faith in the exposé's potential: "frustrated by the lack of traction the documentary exposé approach was getting," Leckie suggests, novelists began "to see their genre as offering an alternative approach to petitions for social reform" (18). Locating "the discourse on housing [as] a central and shaping component" of the mid-century novel (19), Open Houses seeks to return heated discussion about the housing of the poor to our understanding of three well-known fictions: Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), and Henry James...