Dickens and Demolition

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 voca [...]
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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.