Overview

When Dickens was nineteen years old, he wrote a poem for Maria Beadnell, the young woman he wished to marry. The poem imagined Maria as a welcoming landlady offering lodgings to let. Almost forty years later, Dickens died, leaving his final novel unfinished - in its last scene, another landlady, Mrs Tope, sets breakfast down for her enigmatic lodger. These kinds of characters are everywhere in Dickens's writing. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World explores the significance of tenancy in Charles Dickens's fiction. In nineteenth century Britain the vast majority of people rented, rather than owned, their homes. Instead of keeping to themselves, they shared space - renting, lodging, taking lodgers in, or simply living side-by-side in a crowded modern city. Charles Dickens explored both the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in rented spaces, the extreme loneliness and sociability, the interactions between cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play, and the relationship between space and money. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction demonstrates that a cosy, secluded home life was beyond the reach of most Victorian Londoners and that Dickens's conception of domesticity was more nuanced. Tenancy maintained an enduring hold upon his imagination, offering him a set of models to think about authorship and giving him new stories to tell. He celebrated the fact that unassuming houses and rooms brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, and detective plots take place behind their doors. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World wedges these doors open.

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9780191891670

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Ushashi Dasgupta, Associate Professor of English and Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow, Pembroke College, University of Oxford, UK Ushashi Dasgupta is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow of English at Pembroke College.

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