N I N E S - View Exhibit

My9s

HOME News Classroom Community Publications Search

What is NINES? | Peer Review

This exhibit has not been peer reviewed. [Return to Group] [Printer-friendly Page]

Charles Dickens and Literary Tourism

maeasley

University of St. Thomas

Gustav Dore, Over London by Rail, ca. 1870
Introduction

In the second half of the nineteenth century, London was viewed as the very center of literary culture. It was in London that most of the great Victorian writers had lived and worked. Yet due to rapid urbanization during the second half of the nineteenth century, the literary landmarks of London were increasingly difficult to identify or interpret with any degree of certainty. Where was it possible to experience the cultural heritage of Great Britain if not in London? Yet London was "constantly shifting," as Francis Miltoun put it in 1903, expanding into the suburbs and abandoning traditional centers of meaning (11). Lamenting the loss of a cultural center, writers of the late Victorian era attempted to preserve the city's landmarks though various forms of representation. Periodicals, guidebooks, and photographic inventories all served as media concerned with locating and describing London's cultural landmarks. In determining what was worth preserving, journalists turned to the emerging canon of British literature--specifically to the novels set in the city during the time of Britain's cultural and economic ascendency. Thus, the "reading" of London, the search for the city's timeless cultural landmarks, was simultaneously a reading of literary texts.

Inevitably, the works of Charles Dickens were the focus of these interconnected discourses. In the eyes of many traveler and journalists, Dickens's novels had assigned permanent meanings to the city's landmarks, even if these locations seemed always in danger of disappearing entirely. As long as the "real" London remained in Dickens's oeuvre, so, too, would the nation's image of itself remain untarnished and unchanged. The search for the sites associated with Dickens's novels was by definition a quest for meaning in a city that was increasingly meaningless, a desire for certainty in a city that was increasingly uncertain. Yet it was the search itself--sorting through the dross of urban life, examining layers of reconstructed architecture, and investigating the city's labyrinths--that was infused with meaning.

“Our ‘100-Picture’ Gallery: Through Dickens’ Land,” Strand Magazine (April 1907): 411.

Photographing Dickens's London

In guides to Dickens’s London, photography became the medium of choice for documenting literary shrines. The impulse to photograph these sites was also a desire to make permanent the literary significance of London’s urban geography and preserve the cultural markers of the past—the moral vision of Dickens himself. Yet by employing a technology that was very much of the present—photography—the discourse on literary tourism aimed to promote a modern kind of cultural travel. For example, a 1907 titled “Our ‘100-Picture’ Gallery: Through Dickens-Land,” provides images of the sites associated with Dickens’s novels. Each photograph is captioned with a location and a literary reference point. For example, photo six is captioned “Staple Inn, Holborn, Edwin Drood,” thus connecting place to text. The tourist is invited to overlay the narrative of Dickens’s novel onto the scenes of London. Photographs documented these sites as real locations in the city while at the presenting them as literary settings peopled by fictional characters.

A. D. McCormick, “London Bridge Steps,” in “Charles Dickens and Southwark,” by J. Ashby-Steery, English Illustrated Magazine 62 (November 1888): 106.

Collapsing the Fictional and the Real: Guidebooks to Dickensland

The use of non-photographic illustration in guidebooks and periodical essays was equally significant as a device for collapsing fictional and extra-fictional worlds. For example in Frank Green’s The London Homes of Dickens, illustrations of Dickens’s homes are interspersed with images of the Artful Dodger, Captain Cuttle, Mrs. Bardell, and other characters from Dickens’s novels. Such illustrations seem intended to populate the sites of London with characters from Dickens’s novels—almost to suggest that they, too, lived in London and were just as real as Dickens himself. As guidebook author Robert Allbut puts it, “We never think of them as the airy nothings of imaginative fiction, but regard them as familiar friends, having ‘a local habitation and a name’ amongst us” (4). William Hughes, in A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-land (1893), goes so far as to assert that Dickens’s characters “are more real than we are ourselves, and will outlive and outlast us, as they have outlived their creator” (xv-xvi).

An 1888 article by J. Ashby-Sterry goes so far as to place readers inside Dickens’s texts, allowing them to imagine what it would be like to experience the city as one of his characters. Ashby-Sterry presents himself as a virtual guide, asking the “confiding reader” to “take my arm, trust in me” as he guides him “through one of the pleasantest provinces of Dickensland” (105). One of the first sights he invites the reader to visit is the London Bridge steps, the “exact spot -- with precisely the scenery of half a century ago—of the interview [in Oliver Twist] between Nancy, Rose Maylie, and Mr. Brownlow” (106). He then invites the reader “go there about twelve o’clock on a dark night” and “lurk around the pilaster at the bottom of the flight and play at being Noah Claypole” (106). The invitation to impersonate Noah Claypole at the “exact spot” depicted in the novel is also an invitation to merge conceptions of fictional narrative and real-life experience. The overall effect is one of both familiarization and de-familiarization of urban landmarks; the city is at once fictional and real, virtual and experiential.

“The (Reputed) ‘Old Curiousity Shop,’” in Dickens’ London, by Francis Miltoun, (Boston: Page, 1903), 126.

The Old Curiosity Shop

Before Dickens’s Doughty Street house was opened as a public museum, the focal point of Dickens’s London was the supposed original of the “Old Curiosity Shop,” a waste-paper shop on Portsmouth Street near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Francis Miltoun remarks in 1906, “There is no question but what it is the relique of the first rank usually associated with Dickens’ London, as witness the fact that there appears always to be some numbers of persons gazing fondly at its crazy old walls” (127). The owner of the shop, he notes, capitalizes upon this reputed association by selling “souvenirs, prints, drawings, etc.,” to the crowds of visitors, particularly Americans (127). Indeed, he reports, an American “collector” has offered to buy the shop and transport it to America as a way of saving the “humble shrine” from demolition (127). The identification of the Portsmouth Street storefront as the original of the Old Curiosity Shop in the novel was viewed as specious by most journalists, including Charley Dickens, who called the shrine “bogus” and his son, Charles Dickens III, who referred to the building’s “false sanctity” (834). As evidence of its misidentification, Charles quotes from the text of his grandfather’s novel, which pointedly notes that the “old house had been long ago pulled down” (834). Amusingly, the literary text becomes a means of calling into question the authenticity of a physical building in a particular London location. Yet for Francis Miltoun, the building’s authenticity had little to do with textual evidence; rather, the tourist “must decide for him or herself” (127). Thus, in the debate over the “Old Curiosity Shop,” the literary text is both relevant and irrelevant. For some readers the shrine was “real” only inasmuch as it was authenticated by the literary text, but for others, the “truth” of the shrine was constructed in more subjective terms as the imaginative reconstruction of Dickens’s world in an urban context.

Dickens's London: Postscript

The process of seeking Dickens’s London would of course continue in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. With the development of new technologies came new opportunities for viewing the city as a Dickensian text. The 2007 opening of Dickens World, an indoor theme park in Chatham, Kent, can be interpreted as an extension of the earlier discourse on literary tourism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This attraction, built in a hangar-like facility, features scale models and amusements inspired by scenes from Dickens’s novels, including the “Haunted House of 1859,” “Great Expectations Boat Ride,” a “4D cinema show at Peggotty's Boathouse,” and an 1832 “Victorian School complete with nasty schoolmaster.” The attraction promises that in the courtyard visitors will “come face to face with some of Dickens’ literary characters in their magnificent rendition of a Victorian town courtyard.”

The development of a simulacrum focused on Dickens’s works can be seen as a logical extension of the discourse on literary tourism in the popular press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When visiting Dickens World, tourists of today view a “fake” city designed to imitate a London that had, after all, always been a kind of fiction. “Faux worlds,” journalist Dea Birkett notes, “are always cleaner, happier and more ordered places that the gritty, flawed world we actually inhabit” (25). Such “worlds” have always been the product of literary tourism, which reconstructs landscape imaginatively in idealized terms. The tourist industry focused on the works of Charles Dickens, including Dickens World, promises a reference back to “reality” in the same way that Dickens’s realism promised an understanding of the urban environment. Yet the effect was a layering of fictional narratives on the material facts of urban life. In fact, Dickens World is situated in an area which had long been associated with Dickens tourism in the Rochester-Chatham vicinity. Gad’s Hill Place, which will be opened as a Dickens visitor center in 2012, is just five miles away, and the theme park itself is built near the site of the Royal Dockyards where Dickens’s father worked as a clerk. Dickens World thus acts as a literalization of a longstanding imaginative practice among Dickens enthusiasts, which involved superimposing narrative upon narrative as a way of understanding and interpreting an increasingly fragmented urban landscape.

Works Cited

Allbut, Robert. Rambles in Dickens’ Land. 1886. Reprint, New York: Truslove, Hanson and Comba, 1899.
Ashby-Sterry, J. “Charles Dickens and Southwark.” English Illustrated Magazine 62 (November 1888): 105-15.
Birkett, Dea. “Fake Snow and Faux Fun.” New Statesman 136 (December 17-January 3, 2008): 25.
Dickens, Charles, III. “Relics of Dickens’ London.” Munsey’s Magazine 27.6 (September 1902): 833-42.
Hughes, William. A Week’s Tramp in Dickens-land; Together with Personal Reminiscences of the “Inimitable Boz” Therein Collected. London: Chapman and Hall, 1893.
Miltoun, Francis. Dickens’ London. Boston: Page, 1903.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 United States License.