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Going Astray

Going Astray

Dickens and London

Jeremy Tambling

Oct 2008, Paperback, 400 pages
ISBN13: 9781405899871
ISBN10: 1405899875
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£24.99
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‘Among the numerous books on Dickens’s London, Going Astray is unique in combining detailed topography and biography with close textual analysis and theoretically informed critiques of most of the novelist’s major works. In Jeremy Tambling’s 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 novelist’s 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 author’s 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 Tambling’s book is an indispensable guide to Dickens, nineteenth- century literature, and the city itself.

Going Astray: Dickens and London

By Jeremy Tambling

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: Introduction: Dickens and London

I – Writing London

II – Dickens in London

III – Eighteenth Century London

IV – Wordsworth’s London

Chapter Two: Dickens London, Allegory

I – Street-life: Sketches by Boz

II – London as Ruin

III – Holborn / Holbein

Chapter Three: Mapping the City: Oliver Twist

I – Hanging Clothes

II – Islington to Field Lane

III – Bethnal Green to Chertsey

IV – North London

V – Jacob’s Island

Chapter Four: Tales from Master Humphrey’s Clock

I – Antiquarian History

II – Master Humphrey’s Clock

III – The Old Curiosity Shop

IV – The Old Curiosity Shop and Allegory

V – Towards Barnaby Rudge

VI – Barnaby Rudge and London

Chapter Five: Camden Town: The Railway in Dombey and Son

I – The Railway World

II – London in Dombey and Son

III – Dickens and Ruskin

IV – Trains and Trauma

Chapter Six: David Copperfield

II – The Strand

III – The Borough

IV – The Modern Babylon

Chapter Seven: Bleak House: London Before the Law

II – Legal London

III – Consecrated Ground

IV – ‘Mudfog’

Chapter Eight: London and Taboo: Little Dorrit

I – The City

II – Marseilles/ Marshalsea

III – Mrs Clennam’s Secret

IV – Bleeding Heart Yard

V – Mrs Merdle’s Parrot

VI – The Warm Baths

Chapter Nine: Traumatic London: Great Expectations

I – Smithfield

II – St Paul’s and Newgate

III – Newgate and Walworth

IV – Hanging Fantasies

V – Newgate and Estella

VI – The River

VII – Estella and the City

Chapter Ten: ‘The Scene of My Death’: The River in Our Mutual Friend &nbssp;

III – The River: Bermondsey and Millbank

IV – The River

V – Waste

VI – Headstone and Heterogeneity

Chapter Eleven: ‘City Full of Dreams’: The Uncommercial Traveller

I – Journalism

II – ‘Recollections of Mortality’

III – London and Melancholy

IV – Fashionable London

V – London Institutions

VI – Dickens’s Night Thoughts

Chapter Twelve: Dickens’s London: Dickens and Gissing

I – London after Dickens

II – Gissing in London

III – Realism and Idealism

IV – Suburban London

Notes

Dickens’s London: A Gazetteer

Successfully combines two subjects of enduring interest to the reader, Dickens and London, this is a landmark work of literary criticism and social and urban history.

· After Shakespeare and Jane Austen, Dickens is probably the most widely read and studied author in the English literary canon.

· Comprehensively explores the connections between Dickens’ writing and London’s history in an original and accessible way.

· Draws on all Dickens’ published material (unlike other studies), and provides readings of his novels in the light of the study of London.

Jeremy Tambling is Professor of Literature at the University of Manchester. An acknowledged expert on Dickens and on cities, he is the author of, among others, Re:Verse (Longman, 2007), Blake’s Night Thoughts (Palgrave, 2004), and Becoming Posthumous (Edinburgh University Press, 2001).

Expert Reviews

"Jeremy Tambling's richly rewarding book about the most haunted metropolis in fiction." - The Independent, 15 December 2008 (readership 714,000)

"Tambling delivers subtle and sinuous reading[s] of individual works. He shows how deeply Dickens' fiction inhabits London places."- Times Higher Education, December 2008 (readership 88,000)

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