Little Dorrit’s ‘land of fragments’

Abstract

This chapter takes as part of its title a phrase commonly employed from the late eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth to describe the perception of London’s institutional, governmental, financial, and other systematic relationships. Specifically, what is of interest is the ways in which Dickens maintains a certain spectral effect of the fragment in order to announce the condition of reading, writing, and representing London differently. Such an act on Dickens’ part, which is effected as we will see through the exploration of a spectralized epistemology of urban sound as the traces of a revenance constituting the city, is readable as an act of remembering; thus the tracing of the urban conjures, in Peter Nicholls’ words, ‘a forgotten history [which] has the power to shake the social and metaphysical forms against which it breaks …’ With these haunting effects, Dickens arguably projects another city as a resistance to institutional politics in the present, and with that ‘the idea of history as a violent intrusion from somewhere else’.¹