Dickens and Demolition

Traces and measures the material impact of Dickens’ fiction in London’s built environment

Dickens and Demolition examines how tropes, characters, or extracts from Dickens’ fiction were repurposed as a portable terminology in arguments for large-scale demolition and redevelopment projects in London during his lifetime. Commentators with public voices repeatedly mobilised a Dickensian vocabulary to communicate their opinions about how and where London’s built environment should be improved in the mid-nineteenth century, or to justify proposed alterations. In analysing allusions to Dickens in a variety of archival sources, including dramatizations, press reports, political debates, and the visual arts, this book asks what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives, and whether we can trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit.

Key Features

• Intersects with cross-disciplinary scholarly interests in studies of Dickens, histories of London, literary afterlives and urban studies
• The first study of how Dickens’s works were appropriated and mobilised by other people within his lifetime
• Offers close analyses of literary and non-literary texts
• Engages with critical discourse around of literary afterlives