Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I ORIGIN STORIES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1740–1870
- PART II PRODUCING THE CONSUMER
- 3 Market indicators: banking and housekeeping in Bleak House
- 4 Esoteric solutions: Ireland and the colonial critique of political economy
- 5 Toward a social theory of wealth: three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
3 - Market indicators: banking and housekeeping in Bleak House
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I ORIGIN STORIES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1740–1870
- PART II PRODUCING THE CONSUMER
- 3 Market indicators: banking and housekeeping in Bleak House
- 4 Esoteric solutions: Ireland and the colonial critique of political economy
- 5 Toward a social theory of wealth: three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
Summary
In 1858 Walter Bagehot, finance writer and editor of The Economist, published a review essay on Charles Dickens. In it he writes:
Mr. Dickens's genius is especially suited to the delineation of city life. London is like a newspaper. Everything is there, and everything is disconnected … As we change from the broad leader to the squalid police-report, we pass a corner and we are in a changed world. This is advantageous to Mr. Dickens's genius. His memory is full of instances of old buildings and curious people, and he does not care to piece them together.
Bagehot argues here that Dickens's strength is in representing the discontinuity of modern urban life: the clashing juxtapositions, and the odd simultaneity of unrelated events in every second of the urban clock. This temporality of the “disconnected” (“we pass a corner and we are in a changed world”) is what Walter Benjamin refers to in the famous formulation “homogeneous, empty time,” the time of the newspaper, the telegraph, the crowd, a time that attenuates the telos of the Christian calendar. But for Bagehot this discontinuity of simultaneous lives is merely a semblance, a surface effect that belies a hidden order. The “disconnectedness” of events and objects in Dickens becomes, as Bagehot's argument in the review develops, not a condition of history but rather a quirk of Dickens's imagination itself, a symptom of his “irregular genius” (CD 80). Thus the seeming disunity of the city is “advantageous” to Dickens's “irregular” mind.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003