Going Astray

Dickens and London

Jeremy Tambling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138176690
• eBook ISBN: 9781317863441
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Among the numerous books on Dickenss London, Going Astray is unique in combining detailed topography and biography with close textual analysis and theoretically informed critiques of most of the novelists major works. In Jeremy Tamblings intriguing and illuminating synthesis, the London A-Z meets Nietzsche, Benjamin and Derrida. Rick Allen, author of The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700-1914

Dickens wrote so insistently about London its streets, its people, its unknown areas that certain parts of the city are forever haunted by him. Going Astray: Dickens and London looks at the novelists delight in losing the self in the labyrinthine city and maps that interest, onto the compulsion to go astray in writing.

Drawing on all Dickens published writings (including the journalism but concentrating on the novels), Jeremy Tambling considers the authors kaleidoscopic characterisations of London: as prison and as legal centre; as the heart of empire and of traumatic memory; as the place of the uncanny; as an old curiosity shop. His study examines the relations between narrative and the city, and explores how the metropolis encapsulates the problems of modernity for Dickens as well as suggesting the limits of representation.

Combining contemporary literary and cultural theory with historical maps, photographs and contextual detail, Jeremy Tamblings book is an indispensable guide to Dickens, nineteenth- century literature, and the city itself.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts
• INTRODUCTION Going Astray: Dickens and London
• CHAPTER ONE The Eidometropolis: A View of London
• CHAPTER TWO Street-Scenes: Sketches by Boz, with Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby
• CHAPTER THREE Newgate London: Oliver Twist
• CHAPTER FOUR London as Ruin: Tales from Master Humphrey’s Clock
• CHAPTER FIVE Camden Town: Dombey and Son
• CHAPTER SIX Modernising London: David Copperfield
• CHAPTER SEVEN London Before the Law: Bleak House
• CHAPTER EIGHT London and Taboo: Little Dorrit
• CHAPTER NINE Traumatic London: Great Expectations
• CHAPTER TEN ‘City Full of Dreams’: The Uncommercial Traveller
• CHAPTER ELEVEN ‘The Scene of My Death’: Our Mutual Friend
• CHAPTER TWELVE Dickens and Gissing
• CONCLUSION No Thoroughfare
• DICKENS’ LONDON: A GAZETTEER
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index of London sites
• MAPS OF LONDON, 1690 and 1827