Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Leckie

Abstract

Reviewed by: Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Barbara Leckie Carolyn Betensky LECKIE, BARBARA. Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 312 pp. $79.95 hardcover. Barbara Leckie’s Open Houses is an original study that will make scholars reconsider the social and political investments of the nineteenth-century novel, as well as the evolution, in the period, of the novel form itself. This provocative and lucid book locates an unexpected dialogue between novels that have not been read, for the most part, for their concern for housing, and the profusion of mid-nineteenth-century nonfiction texts describing and re-envisioning the homes of the poor. By demonstrating the responses of novelists such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James to a crisis of humanity and representation, Leckie shows us a self-reflexive, protomodernist side of the Victorian novel. Representations of poverty have long drawn the attention of literary critics and historians, but seldom have scholars focused on the ways Victorian writers across genres made peering inside the homes of the poor into a compulsory feature of their texts. Understanding interior scenes of abjection as metaphorical settings more than as sites of interest in their own right, critics have overlooked novelists’ engagement with architectural and housing policies that were being promulgated in the public sphere. The proliferation of nonfiction writing on the built environments of the poor has not been appreciated as a phenomenon with its own distinct, obligatory tropes; scholars have understood this writing, rather, as being concerned more generally with poverty or sanitary reform. Consequently, they have not appreciated the profound effects the discourse of housing reform had on the institution of the novel. So many mid-century reformists issued invitations to their middle-class readers to view in situ the inhabitants of urban slums and rural cottages, and the language of these invitations was both so urgent and so predictable that Leckie wonders: why were middle-class readers being summoned so insistently and repeatedly, at this historical juncture, to look into the homes of the poor? The impulse to expose the interiors of these homes related, in part, to the fear that the dwellings of the poor were incubating different forms of immorality. As Edwin Chadwick and other reformers argued, squalid living quarters bred not only unsanitary conditions but also—more significantly—vice and the vitiation of national character; better housing design would lead directly into better, more wholesome, more tractable workers. At the same time, however, the constant invitation to readers to look into the homes of the poor also implied anxiety among the most fervent reformists over the potential power, or powerlessness, of the exposé itself to function as a mechanism of social change. Leckie shows how doubts about what the exposé could accomplish began to crystallize in the reports and plans of reformists even before novelists came [End Page 322] to consider ways to cajole readers into focusing on persistent problems that seemed to make demands on these same readers. Leckie’s attention to the ways Victorians understood the limits of the exposé leads into a provocative set of claims relating to the mutual influence of what she calls “the architectural idea” and the novel. With breathtaking boldness, she attributes to novelists’ concern for housing their inclination to (1) rethink the genre of the novel in terms of form; (2) offer a subtle and compelling case for the novel as a work of architecture; and (3) offer a persuasive argument for the novel’s intervention in social debates (19). Leckie is arguing here for nothing less than a revised understanding of the nineteenth-century British novel in its formal evolution and social function. Working with contemporary architectural theories of interpenetration and mediation as well as recent literary approaches to form, she resituates the architectural idea at the center of Victorian aesthetic and social dialogues. Open Houses devotes its first two chapters to close analysis of several mid-nineteenth-century nonfiction genres: reports, articles, architectural plans, and other policy interventions. Leckie shows how authors ranging from Chadwick to Bessie Rayner Parks, as well as...