Overview

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 studiesThe first study of how Dickens's works were appropriated and mobilised by other people within his lifetimeOffers close analyses of literary and non-literary textsEngages with critical discourse around of literary afterlives

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9781474420983

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"Hofer-Robinson's analysis of these adaptations is particularly refreshing because she offers original close readings of the texts themselves rather than defaulting to an account of Dickens's reaction to his works being repurposed for the stage, a well-versed narrative.--Katie Holdway, University of Southampton ""Victorian Periodicals Review, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2020"" Dickens and Demolition shows how Dickens shaped London. Not only was the novelist actively involved in urban sanitation schemes, but his fictional depiction of London's most deprived areas helped to bring down buildings, and construct new streets. As Hofer-Robinson vividly demonstrates here, novels have afterlives, and literary tropes sometimes have decidedly material effects.-- ""Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin"" An important contribution to our understanding of Dickens's work and of Victorian London. Dickens and Demolition is profoundly and productively focused on the impact of fiction on the real, on the part literature has played in literally as well as discursively constructing the city. [...] Dickens and Demolition importantly reminds us how, all too often, society's most vulnerable exist only in haunting absences.--Sarah Bilston, Trinity College ""Victorian Studies"""

Author Information

Joanna Hofer-Robinson (n�e Robinson) is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at University College Cork. Joanna completed her doctorate at King's College London, where she held an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, and then moved to University College Dublin to take up a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Irish Research Council. With research interests in nineteenth-century literature and theatre, Joanna is Project Lead for a practice-led research project (Dickensian Drama), which has staged two rarely-performed plays.

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