Abstract
This chapter discusses connections between character and property in Victorian fiction and contemporary US culture. It argues that the nineteenth century in general, and Dickens’s work in particular, established metonymic links between the solidity or unreliability of character and a relation to ownership, developing a rhetoric of permanence versus impermanence and order versus disorder. The chapter describes a trajectory from transience to mobility in these representations, based in the idea of the “speculative pedestrian” enacted in Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1837–1838) and contemporary landlords as represented in Matthew Desmond’s study of eviction (2016).
The quotation headlines a 2018 New York Times article by Jen A. Miller.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
- 2.
See Desmond (2017) for a discussion of the relationship between property ownership and inequality.
- 3.
Tenuous identity can also mean illness and even death, as Desmond (2016) makes clear.
- 4.
Coriale makes this point (2008, 802).
- 5.
Garcha (2009) provides a detailed account of movement and stasis in Dickens’s Sketches. I thank Elaine Hadley for her help with this formulation.
- 6.
The idea of decay also works metonymically, tying persons to structures.
- 7.
When Oliver arrives at the Maylies’, the ragged, dirty clothes he wore as a member of Fagin’s establishment are memorably (and repeatedly, since he is rescued several times) swapped for clean, well-fitting ones.
- 8.
Also ephemeral was their initial form of publication: Boz’s sketches appeared in newspapers and magazines before being collected in a single volume as Sketches by Boz. See Schlicke for a full account of individual pieces.
- 9.
As Danielle Coriale points out, the publication of the Sketches in book form “transformed his writing from journalism to literature” (802).
References
Agathocleous, Tanya. 2011. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bryson, Bill. 2010. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. London: Doubleday.
Chittick, Kathryn. 1990. Dickens and the 1830’s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Coriale, Danielle. 2008. Sketches by Boz, ‘So Frail a Machine’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 48 (4): 801–812.
Desmond, Matthew. 2016. Evicted: Power and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown Books.
———. 2017. How Homeownership Became the Engine of American Inequality. The New York Times Magazine, May 9, 2017.
Dickens, Charles. (1836–1837) 1995. Sketches by Boz. Edited by Dennis Walder. London: Penguin.
———. (1865) 1997. Our Mutual Friend. Edited by Adrian Poole. London: Penguin.
———. (1848) 1998. Little Dorrit. Edited by Stephen Wall and Helen Small. London: Penguin.
———. (1853) 2003a. Bleak House. Edited by Nicola Bradbury. London: Penguin.
———. (1839) 2003b. Oliver Twist. Edited by Philip Horne. London: Penguin.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger. New York: Routledge.
Forster, John. 1872–1874. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Cecil Palmer.
Garcha, Amanpal. 2009. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harvey, David. 1974. Class-Monopoly Rent, Finance Capital and the Urban Revolution. Regional Studies 8 (3): 239–255.
Hunt, E.K., and Mark Lautzenheiser. 2011. History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective. New York and London: M.E. Sharpe.
Kleinfeld, N.R., and Kim Barker. 2018. Where Brooklyn Tenants Plead the Case for Keeping Their Homes. “Unsheltered”. The New York Times, May 20.
Miller, Jen A. 2018. When a House Is So Much More. The New York Times, August 5.
Miller, J. Hillis. 1971. The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank’s Illustrations. In Dickens Centennial Essays, ed. Ada Nisbet and Blake Nevius, 85–153. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Schlicke, Paul. 1999. Oxford Reader’s Companion to Charles Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2005. Risen Like a Rocket’: The Impact of Sketches by Boz. Dickens Quarterly 22 (1): 3–18.
Trollope, Anthony. (1883) 1999. An Autobiography. Edited by Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woloch, Alex. 2003. The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jaffe, A. (2019). Rent. In: Hadley, E., Jaffe, A., Winter, S. (eds) From Political Economy to Economics through Nineteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24157-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24158-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)