Bleak London: (Neo-)Dickensian Psychogeographies

chapter 5 Bleak London: (Neo-)Dickensian Psychogeographies

Susanne Gruß

Abstract

It is by way of the gothic topography of Victorian London that readers are lured into Lynn Shepherd’s recent Tom-All-Alone’s (2012), a neo-Victorian detective novel in- spired by Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53). Shepherd’s detective Charles Mad- dox roams a dark, labyrinthine city in which a very young Jack the Ripper has just em- barked on his deathly career. Maddox, a neo-Victorian hard-boiled detective, is shaped as much by the city he explores as by the dark secrets he seeks to expose – our own, twenty-first-century notion of ‘London’, the intrusive narrator of Shepherd’s novel im- plies, our ‘sense’ of what London is, is deeply rooted in Dickens’s vision of the city. In this article, I establish Dickens as a proto-psychogeographer who is currently miss- ing in accounts of psychogeography, by focusing on Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist and the urban gothic elements of Bleak House. Neo-Dickensian novels by authors such as Michel Faber, Essie Fox and Dan Simmons are used to demonstrate in how far psycho- geographical elements seep into contemporary neo-Victorian accounts of Dickensian London. Shepherd’s Tom-All-Alone’s, finally, is read as a neo-Victorian spin-off (or rip- off?) of Bleak House which makes use of Dickens’s sense of place in a novel that allows contemporary readers to consolidate their feeling of connectedness to Dickens’s bleak London.

Key names and concepts

Charles Dickens – Michel Faber – Essie Fox – Lynn Shepherd – Dan Simmons – Iain Sinclair – heritage industry – literary tourism – London – neo-Victorianism – psychogeography – urban gothic

1 Dickens and London – Dickensian Londons

‘Dickensian London’ has long been understood as a synonym for ‘Victorian London’ – Dickens is, Alison Booth reminds us, “diffused as an adjectival association of ideas of Victorian England” (2009: 150). The ‘Inimitable’ and

Bleak London: (neo-)dickensian Psychogeographies 75

London are inextricably bound to each other, as the opening of Lynn Shep- herd’s 2012 novel Tom-All-Alone’s, a Bleak House spin-off to which I will return at the end of this article, illustrates:

If a single man can ever be said to stand for a city, then it is this city, […] and the name of that man is Charles Dickens. But if that name conjures up colour and carol singers and jolly old gentlemen, then think again. These streets are no cause for comedy, and know no tones but grim and grey. […] Night and day London moves and sweats and bawls, as riddled with life as a corpse with maggots. (Shepherd 2012: 1)

The beginning of Shepherd’s novel not only positions Dickens as the ultimate London writer and her own novel as Dickensian, it also points to several clichés about the famous Victorian – Dickens is linked to the carol singers of Christ- mas (and his own annual Christmas stories), to the jollity associated both with the writer and his characters – and invites the reader into a text that evokes the more gothic aspects of the writer’s work. Dickensian London – the city de- scribed in his texts – as well as Dickens’s London – the metropolis that served as the inspiration for these texts – have become an important part of the tourist industry,1 a commodity habitually endorsed in walking tours of London or, more recently, in Dickens World, his own theme park; fans can even buy their own Charles Dickens cuddly toy, courtesy of the ‘Little Thinkers’ series, which also includes Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes and William Shakespeare. The in- separability of Dickens and London becomes most obvious in literary guides to London: Tales of the City: London Adventure Walks for Families (2010), for example, not only expresses its Dickensian leanings in the titular reference to A Tale of Two Cities (1859), it also (quite predictably) contains a chapter entitled “Great Expectations: Charles Dickens and a Victorian Childhood” (Jones and Lewis 2010: 32–39), which cuts Victorian London (and the Dickensian canon) down to size in order to make it delectable for tourist families.2 A guide to London devoted exclusively to Dickens, Lee Jackson’s Walking Dickens’ London

1 See, for example, Juliet John, who points out that the use of Dickens in the Dickens industry promotes “an association between Dickens and the idea of Englishness that combines cosy communality with reminders of the ‘greatness’ of Britain’s past” (2011: 74). For the notion of literary tourism see Nicola J. Watson, “Rambles in Literary London” (2011). 2 Quite conventionally, the chapter provides a ‘Dickens walk’ and a glossary of Dickensian words and Victorian money. Proving that it has become hard to actually taste Dickens’s London, tips to dine out include “a mix of both pizza places and some of London’s best res- taurants” close to Smithfield Market (Jones and Lewis 2010: 38).