Spaces of the Sacred and Profane: Dickens, Trollope, and the Victorian Cathedral Town (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)
Elizabeth A. Bridgham
Language: English
Pages: 202
ISBN: 0415542227
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Book by Bridgham, Elizabeth A.
the City, and Philip Collins’s seminal essay, “Dickens and the City, ” to name only a few, Ambivalent Spaces 3 use the general term “city” to mean London, specifically.2 Julian Wolfreys argues in Writing London, his study of literary representations of the city, that when we read a reference to or description of London in Dickens’s novels, a certain idea conjured by this proper name comes to find itself installed. A structure is put in place, conceptually, geographically, figuratively,
mistake any man ever made is to suppose that the good things of the world are not worth the winning. And it is a mistake so opposed to the religion which you preach! . . . Why are beautiful things given to us, and luxuries and pleasant enjoyments, if they be not intended to be used? They must be meant for some one, and what is good for a layman cannot surely be bad for a clerk.” (2.123–124) Lest this speech seem to be merely an impious rationale for personal greed, Trollope indicates twice that
minxes!” exclaimed Mrs. Greenacre. . . . (Barchester Towers 2.133) Trollope’s use of the vernacular here, coupled with the subject of discussion, the Lookaloft ladies’ décolletages, demonstrates the range of topics available for conversation at this Victorian carnival; amid the revelry, none of the guests is bounded by the strict decorum that might prevail at Barchester. This is clear later in the same chapter, where the steward, Mr. Plomacy, attempts to eject one guest from the party “who did
a suave mastery of a narrow genre. They need not be escapists themselves, but they minister unfailingly to the basic human urge to escape—to grab a key and unlock the door to Middle-earth, or 221b Baker Street, or Trollope’s cathedral closes, or the Drones Club. (148) While one could certainly debate any number of assertions in this statement (for instance, that Tolkien, Conan Doyle, Trollope, and Wodehouse are writers of “the second rank,” or that their works conform to the boundaries of
side towards the shop, a little fiction. . . . This poetical heightening of the parlor consisted in the wall being painted to represent the exterior of a thatched cottage; the artist having introduced (in as effective a manner as he found compatible with their highly disproportionate dimensions) the real door and window. . . . To come out into the shop after it was shut, and hear her father sing a song inside this cottage, was a perfect Pastoral to Mrs. Plornish, the Golden Age revived” (478–79).