Abstract
This article examines the strategies of heritage making in Riddell’s City novels, popular in the 19th century, but little known today. Drawing on late Victorian debates about the preservation of the past and its material remains, the article focuses on the relationship between fictional and non-fictional elements, in Riddell’s urban realism, which frequently pivots on heritage concerns. The main argument is twofold: 1) heritage discourse provides an apt frame for the self-validation of the author’s daring narrative choices; 2) Riddell’s understanding of heritage changes as her vision of capitalism darkens, culminating in a vocal denunciation of the destructive forces at work in the very idea of progress. Her novels generate heritage value in the very gesture of recording the many disappearing acts mournfully witnessed by the narrator.
Highlights
The current notion of heritage emerged in Europe, in France, Germany and Britain, in the nineteenth century
Heritage studies is a blossoming field of research attracting in its orbit a vast array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences remit
How heritage is experienced and apprehended in “moments of encounter” (Tolia-Kelly, Waterson, Watson 2017, 5); how people engage with and mobilise the past; what everyday structures of historical narration and awareness subtend different forms of past presencing in the “memorylands” of the present (Macdonald 2013): these are some of the questions posed by the phenomenology of heritage, which have oriented my readings
Summary
Heritage studies is a blossoming field of research attracting in its orbit a vast array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences remit. Riddell’s urban realism does not document the waves of demolition and reconstruction affecting London and its surroundings Her novels, I have argued, generate heritage value in the very gesture of recording the many disappearing acts mournfully witnessed by the narrator. I have argued, generate heritage value in the very gesture of recording the many disappearing acts mournfully witnessed by the narrator It is the vernacular heritage of the City that Riddell is most keen to safeguard, the everyday, non-monumental, unsanctioned heritage associated with trade, business and other prosaic occupations. As the material traces of the old City were being erased, Riddell’s narrative strategies became even more attuned to public concerns with the fate of ancient buildings and relics, her preservationist outlook extending to fictive as well as real houses fast disappearing under the hammer of the speculative builder. Riddell’s acute awareness of these concerns motivates her plea, addressed to the City in Mitre Court, which concludes with a question that brings the future to bear on the present: “In the future who will be found possessed of sufficient courage to write a novel about your present?” (Riddell 1883, 1: 72)
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