2 - The Unstable City: Rivers, Railways and Houses in Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend

Summary

In chapter 5 of Dombey and Son, Paul Dombey is christened in a ‘chill and earthy’ (DS 5.61) church that seems to anticipate his own untimely demise. Dickens quotes Hamlet's words to Polonius, ‘into my grave?’ (DS 5.61; Hamlet II.ii), in relation to it. In the manuscript version of the novel an addition appears, in John Forster's hand, describing the font as a ‘rigid marble basin which seemed to have been playing a churchyard game at cup and ball with its matter-of-fact pedestal, and to have been just at that moment caught on the top of it’. This note, whose status is uncertain, is not included in most editions of the novel from the original 1846 serialisation onwards. Yet it usefully points to a peculiarity of architecture in Dickens, that no matter how ‘rigid’ or ‘matter-of-fact’ it seems, it is nearly always infused with movement, even playfulness. The solid, practical font is imagined as being on the verge of instability, poised at the momentary midpoint of a repeated movement up and down, part of a child's game; a fort-da movement perhaps. This instability extends to the text itself, since it is unclear to what extent the description properly belongs to the novel, or to Dickens.

I take this paratextual addition as exemplifying the way architecture in Dickens is always infiltrated by its opposite, by anti-architecture.It is my argument in this chapter that we should read Dickens as expressing a new understanding of architecture that is dynamic, based on movement rather than stability, and therefore appropriate to the modern city. Focusing on Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, I read the railway and the river as forms of anti-architecture which both connect and divide urban space, and in doing so undo the conventional role of architecture as securing and stabilising the environments we inhabit. This anti-architectural tendency extends to the uncanny domestic houses of these two novels, so that what architecture does, and is, and its role within literature, are all called into question.