Touring the Metropolis: The Shifting Subjects of Dickens's London Sketches

Abstract

ABSTRACT In his London sketches Dickens engages in a kind of local tourism where he invites the reader to accompany him to unfamiliar but near locations. These tours or visits focus on ignored or suppressed groups of the city's population. Taking bearings from contemporaries such as Thackeray or George Sala, the essay explores the strategies Dickens used to convey the alienation and rapid changes of urban life, and considers the self-consciousness he frequently wove into his sketches over the implications of his exercises in observation. ********** By the early nineteenth century the city sketch had firmly established itself as a literary genre at times combining social observation with antiquarian interests. Thus, in 'The South-Sea House' (collected in Elia (1823)), Charles Lamb invites his reader to turn aside for a moment from the commercial urgencies of city business to contemplate the 'melancholy looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice' of a bygone era. (1) Or in his Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-20), Washington Irving proposes Westminster Abbey as a site for meditating on the transience of life which his other sketches point up. His melancholy perception of how all things pass is offset by his delight when he discovers surviving traces from earlier periods and, as we might expect from the sketch genre, this delight is expressed in visual terms. 'The Boar's Head Tavern' is playfully sub-titled 'A Shakspearian Research' [sic] but actually describes Irving's exploration of The Masons' Arms where he contemplates 'with enraptured gaze' the antique objects displayed by the landlady. (2) Lamb expressed his enjoyment of the metropolis as an 'accumulation of sights--endless sights', and in a famous letter to Wordsworth of 1801 describes London itself as a 'pantomime and a masquerade'. (3) In the streets themselves it would have been difficult for the stroller to avoid the solicitations of beggars and others. To avoid this possibility Pierce Egan opens his Life in London (1821-23) with the following analogy guaranteed to reassure the reader: 'The author [...] has chosen for his readers a Camera Obscura View of London, not only for its safety, but because it is so snug, and also possessing the invaluable advantages of SEEING and not being seen' (emphases in original). (4) As Deborah Epstein Nord has pointed out, Egan's method constantly suppresses the social implications of episodes in his concern to supply the insulated reader/spectator with sights to be consumed. (5) Like Lamb, Dickens encoded his perceptions of city life as an ongoing and varied performance. Looking back on a time in his childhood when he got lost in London, Dickens diverts the potential disturbance of the episode into his younger self's relish for the urban spectacle: 'I wandered about the City, like a child in a dream, staring at the British merchants, and inspired by a mighty faith in the marvellousness of everything'. (6) These lines establish the credentials of the mature urban reporter Dickens had become by 1853 but give no indication of how Dickens might have shared Engels's appalled perception of the atomization of Victorian London, whose packed inhabitants seemed totally estranged from each other. Dickens's allusions to spectacle constantly shade into references to the theatre that, J. Hillis Miller has shown, expose the 'unwittingly imitative' nature of characters' behaviour and reveal it as theatre and pretence. (7) In other words, there is already a self-fictionalizing process at work in Dickens's subjects. As early as Sketches by Boz (first series 1836, second series 1837), Dickens had begun to construct a complex perspective for his reportage, striking a balance between the miscellaneous implications of the term 'sketch' and his social concerns. (8) When Thackeray was considering a series of travel sketches for Punch the editor advised him not to go abroad because the 'British public like to see representations of what they have seen before'. …