Good afternoon and welcome to this book at lunchtime event on Charles Dickens and the properties of fiction, The Larger World by Dr.
Oh, sure she does good. My name is Professor Wes Williams.
I'm Professor French and I'm also the director here at Torch, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
I'm delighted to welcome a show. She had to speak about her book. Also on the panel today.
Professor Sophie Upsala and Professor Jeremy Tambling, who will be chairing the discussion.
It's a great pleasure to be here, as I say, to introduce this third book at lunch time of this term book at lunchtime, as regulars will know,
is Torture's flagship event series taking the form of fortnightly,
more or less bite sized book discussions with a range of commentators in our normal times.
We'd also offer you something to eat. In other words, some lunch. But this time it's food for thought.
Please do take a look at our Web sites and newsletter for the full programme of the rest of this term.
And next. The book under discussion today than Charles Dickens and the properties of fiction.
I just say one or two sentences about it and let others talk about it in much more detail for the rest of the discussion.
Well, this book does just demonstrates that a cosy, secluded home life, a strong,
if you like, protected sense of home was beyond the reach of most Victorian Londoners.
Exploring the significance of tenancy in Dickins fiction allows readers to gain
insights into the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in rented spaces.
The loneliness, as well as the sociability, the interactions between ranges of cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play.
And last, but certainly not least, the vital relationship between space buildings and money.
In a moment, I'll hand over to Professor Tambling, who will fully introduce the book and the rest of the panel.
This will be followed by a brief reading by Dr. Dasgupta herself.
Afterwards, our commentators will present their thoughts on the book coming out of it from their very different and distinct disciplines.
Part of the point of these discussions is to kind of animate interdisciplinary debate.
We will then give shochu the chance to respond to some of the points raised before
entering into what hopefully will be a fascinating discussion between all three.
And indeed, you, the audience. I'll come back at around quarter two to pick up any questions that you'd like to
put in the chat box or in the in the cause of question function as we go along.
They'll be passed through to me. Our media them through to the speakers themselves.
All that's left for me to do now, then, is to thank you all for coming and to briefly introduce our chair.
Professor Jerry tangling. Is a writer and critic who had been engaged with education and teaching literature, film,
opera and cultural studies in its richest and broadest sense at many levels and across the world
from amongst his many appointments from Hong Kong to Manchester and beyond as a literary scholar.
He makes tremendous sense of the insights of critical and cultural theory and has a long term focus on the culture of cities,
and in particular that of London. Professor Tambling, many publications include, most recently Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby and The Dance of Death.
It's hard to think of a better chair for our discussion today. So I shall disappear from the screens and hand over to you.
Jeremy. You need to unu mute yourself before you before I do.
Thank you very much. Well, that's a very kind introduction and it's a great privilege and pleasure to be here this afternoon.
And I'd like to be able to welcome our author, Dr Shashi Dasgupta, whose book I read with great pleasure.
And by the way, I've actually managed to review it for the Dickensian.
So and I asked the reviewer I asked the editor if I could take more space for it, because it is an extraordinarily fascinating book.
So he actually gave me double the words allowance. If it is to know this is a book, which is.
Very insightful and and extraordinarily well researched and beautifully produced.
And I I'm going to hope my fans will comments.
I'm I've heard what Dr. Gupta has to say.
But it's more than just lodging. It's about being in the world.
And it's about being in the world from really the cradle as the kinds of private space to the grave from Andrew Marvell.
We know that the graves of fine and private place.
But you actually have a wonderful illustration of from 1828 of the grave of the coffin as a as a space to rent.
And of course, that reminds me of Hamlet, where the first grave digger talks about the grave as the houses and he makes it last to do this day.
That said about the grave digger. So I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say.
And our other panellist is Professor Saffir.
Sara, very much looking forward to hearing what she has to say, because I deduce her interests are actually spot on for this for this afternoon.
And they're also very interesting to me as well personally. Professor Barça is a professor at UCL.
She's a practising architect and she writes about the intersections between architecture and narrative,
architecture and literature, buildings and spaces and literature.
And her work is very exciting.
And I'm looking forward to hearing how she is going to respond now without more do.
I'll hand over to Dr. Dasgupta and look forward to hearing what she's going to say.
Thank you so much. Hi.
I am so delighted to be participating today.
And I would like to begin by thanking towards for the very kind invitation for putting all of this together.
And I would also like to thank the panellists, Sophia and Jeremy, for taking the time to think about my work.
So this is such a wonderful opportunity to talk about Dickens and to meet people when all of us are so far apart.
I'm grateful to you as well for making sure that the book could still come out in the middle of the pandemic.
So thank you all for your support and for being here.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to distil some of the ideas in the introduction to this book just to set the conversation up,
and the PowerPoint simply has a few quotes on it. When Dickens is much loved brother in law, the sanitary engineer Henry Austin died.
Dickens took on the role of adviser to his sister, Leticia.
Together, Dickens and Leticia weighed up a range of different options for her future as Dickens took steps to arrange a government pension.
The siblings went back and forth on the matter of Leticia's home.
He encouraged her to leave the house that had witnessed her bereavement and to go into lodgings, counselling her about suitable neighbourhoods,
prudent budgets for the rent, the relative merits of furnished and unfurnished rooms and the lengths of leases.
Shorter leases, he said, were better in this case than he would not be bound to any course.
Until you have had time for consideration and experience, the most striking letter relates to an idea of Leticia's to turn landlady.
Always supposing that she concurs. Dickens writes, I am not quite clear as yet about the idea of taking boarders and I will tell you why.
I don't think your spirits are fit for it or that your nervous condition is equal to it.
And those being unfit and unequal would inevitably lessen the chance of your getting young people to come to you.
We must consider both what the pain would be to you and what the pain would be to them.
And I think it would not do as yet for either side.
But if you let a lodging, a small sitting room and a bedroom or the like, you would not have the same demand upon you.
Similarly, the other person would then have no ground of unwillingness to come to you.
And this is what I would recommend.
And in the fullness of time, it should seem as if it should if in the fullness of time, it should seem feasible to develop the lodging into boarding.
Well and good. But I say most decidedly, don't think of taking boarders now.
Reading between the lines, it's clear that Leticia wishes to surround herself with young people to alleviate her grief,
as well as for a more practical financial reason.
I wanted to start with this letter because it reveals just how central lodging was to domestic culture in this period.
It reminds us that rented space was a PLUR old rather than a monolithic entity.
Dickens points out that taking a single lodger is less demanding than managing an entire boarding house.
So on a large scale enterprise where Leticia would be responsible for providing meals at table.
Noting Leticia's current spirits and nervous condition,
he contemplates the toll of such a serious venture on a landladies well-being and in turn, its impact on her borders.
He's thinking about either side of the transaction. About the small new community the Tyisha proposes to create.
Having offered his opinion on these plans, Dickins then invites Leticia to Gad's Hill, his home, for more immediate solace.
You cannot begin to recover our tone and force, he says.
Until you have had the benefit of change of place. So in these circumstances, mobility seems much healthier than attachment to place.
Of course, Dickens was always more than happy to tell people what to do.
And I suppose this moment is to some extent simply a case in point.
But it also speaks to one of his central literary concerns.
By this stage, he'd been inventing scenarios between imaginary launchers and their landladies for over 20 years.
And as he begins to picture what Leticia's hope might look like, he's clearly thinking as a novelist.
He's thinking about the ways in which people might come into contact and bounce off each other in a constricted space,
participating in the kinds of interactions that are essential to narrative movement.
Meanwhile, when he equates change of place with a renewal of tone and force, he may as well be discussing his own creative project.
And that's what I explore in this book. Tenancy was a governing force in everyday life, and it pulled upon Dickens's imagination.
Broadly speaking, it's the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, which is paid in periodic instalments.
Tenants don't own their homes.
Instead, they occupy rented property for a finite time under the authority of a landlord who is either present or absent.
And they're expected to abide by the rules of an agreement.
This was one of the most widely and regularly performed economic transactions in the 19th century,
and Dickens was an active participant in rental culture. His novels are peppered with characters who are touched by the property market.
The home passed through many hands. Tenancy encouraged and normalised certain living practises.
It influenced the way the Victorians both conceived and negotiated their place in the world.
And it brought particular spatial configurations into prominence.
So was this really just a transaction completed mechanically by the vast majority of the population?
Was it a necessary evil or something that could be celebrated?
What happens when a contract between parties was played out by human actors who existed not in print, but in flesh and blood?
Dickens's fiction offered a survival manual for a generation of renters who were unlikely to experience other modes of dwelling.
But I don't think rented spaces is just a setting or a backdrop for Dickens.
It can be a powerful agent in narrative and his take on what he calls the larger world.
It's often extremely playful. And this, in fact, um, is my central argument in the book.
For the property agent, Alfred Cox, change of residence was amongst the most troublesome of life's chances and changes.
He writes, The incomer begins to discover that house hunting is poor sport,
that it is rather tedious, troublesome and expensive toil attended by disheartening failures,
irritating rebuffs, annoying contests with cupidity, exaggeration and deception,
and consequently followed by disparagement of the world in general and of landlords in particular.
So he rounds off by saying The adventures of a gentleman in search of a home might,
in the hands of a popular novelist, be turned to exquisitely ludicrous account.
While Cox's own task here is with sober realities, Dickens is a popular novelist who does chronicle these adventures.
And that's what the book is about. Thanks very much. I'll now hand back over to Jeremy.
I think the book raises an enormous number of very interesting questions, and your presentation brings some some of them to the fore.
I was very struck by checking in OED under the word to let this morning how the two citations reading gives from the eighteen thirties to
the idea of letting accommodation what one is from 1837 and has to do with the idea of accommodation being let's just opposite Hyde Park,
which obviously was very fashionable and which therefore gave a kind of entree to a kind of snobbish middle class.
And the other one was making 39 were the reference was actually to Nicholas Nickleby because it was being cited and.
And as for a poor part of the town, which had given itself over to lodgings.
So there's the two aspects of Victorian life here,
becoming the respectable bourgeois or sinking down into the world and becoming like the property, which is which is erm.
Going down in the world, you yourself are going down in the world.
And you have to go into threadbare rented accommodation.
It's a it's a very interesting topic. And Dickens seems to be catching on the strength of those OED references.
I say I would say Dickens is catching a whole new mood whereby people are coming in to towns to work and to work as clocks.
And we all know how important the clock world is for Dickens and not just make a very quick cross reference to Bartleby.
The script another. The Melville text, which is so Dickensian in character.
But to thinking about that Clark world that does the figure of the Clark who has
his evening mail and in the city and then goes home to his place in Islington.
This is one of the sketches and sketches by Bozz. And it raises so many interesting questions about this.
The status of people who are unable to have any kind of independence, any kind of privacy, any kind of sexual or marital relation.
What happened in those circumstances? What were the absolute economics of that?
When and how much money was left over? And how did that limited income impact upon their ways of thinking?
All of these are issues which you you, Shashi, whose spotlight system in which Dickens is has brought to light.
I'm actually fascinated by them. And it seems to me there's a whole new creation of a kind of petty bourgeois in Dickens novels,
and very much work needs to be done on exploring all of that.
I was also fascinated.
These are just random thoughts about about the multiple houses that Dickens became very interested in, along with Angela Burdette Coots,
who is, of course, the richest woman in Britain, apart from Victoria and who wanted to set up mobile housing in Bethnal Green.
And you write about that very well. And it got me interested in the whole question of Mogel housing.
You are on your page one five two. You have an illustration of the of the first model houses in London in 1850.
And in fact, you maybe go around, look at them because I've forgotten all about it.
But it is very interesting, but also implies that the model becomes a new word round about the time for 1846 through to the eighteen fifties.
And I was not just thinking about model homes,
but I was thinking about Carlile's I say on model prisons and how Dickens parodies that with model prisoners.
I think about hard times with the Motal school. Mr Gradgrind has.
That's 1854 and there seems to be a very interesting pattern here of the emergence of the idea of the model.
And on one side, I was connecting that with the idea of architectural plans being not the kind of anatomy and the model in that sense,
since we know how architectural plans gain a new force.
The second half of the 18th century and I was also thinking about the idea of modelling a society.
Well, people need homes. So they and Dickens writes to Angela budget cuts about what these homes should look like in Bethnal Green.
And he shows himself to be quite the architect. And that fascinated me, too.
I remember that in 17 in 1849 says it's two years before that, Dickens had read Ruskin's several lamps of architecture.
Now, we might not think of Ruskin as the greatest expert on the forensic details of architecture,
but but nonetheless, Dickens is interested in reading. Ruskin, I think, is also something to be explored.
Why did Dickens read? Seven names of architecture is clearly something which is pointing to an interest in the architect,
which is there, of course, with Mr Peck's sniff in in Martin Chuzzlewit slightly earlier the Asian forties.
And it's the.
When Joe Gartree comes to visit Pip in Great Expectations and he's been looking at architectural drawings and he calls them to architectural Laurel,
and the neologism is a wonderful one.
Of course, it's truly baroque.
It's your lines of of the the interest that there is in.
In thinking self about building self consciously thinking not only about the function,
but about ornamentation and thinking about then this idea of the the lodger and the
relationships between the lodger and the landlord or landlady is as it so often is,
and the relationship between that's implausible. I thought the book was excellent in the way it negotiated some of the ways in which plot
details are set in motion by the relationship between the inhabitants of the House.
I thought the section on Bleak House by Mr Crook has the ground floor and then the Mr Nimmo, who of course is Captain Holden, who is a very important.
Virtually Off-stage figure until he dies in Chapter 10.
But whose influence just permeates the novel and then living above that Miss Flight,
the mad woman whose name needs to be righted by the courts of Chancery and has been waiting all these years.
Putting those three figures together, it's an astonishing instance on Dickens is part of all of cultural sensitivity and imagination.
But I think your book also brings out beautifully how all that forwards the plot and plots and this Richard itself.
Well, now I've said quite enough at the moment. I'm going to hand over the stage to Dr. Sophy as Sara and look forward to more.
VNU need to unmuted. Can we go?
Great. Yeah. Can you see that, my screen. We can.
Sorry. Thank you very much, Jeremy.
And thank you very much for inviting me on this interesting event. I read the book by you, Sassy, with great interest,
and I'm happy to talk about the fabric of space and time intersections between architecture and literature.
I'm an architect myself, so I come from an architectural perspective. And my take on the book is a very architectural one,
trying to establish this dialogue between architectural and literature from the viewpoint of the architect.
So Schatz's book is an intensely rich exploration of the lived experiences by characters that were lodgers and tenants alongside the homes,
the states and the communities that were created by Ray Charles Dickens novels.
They they can work through tenancy. USC studies how the lease in a real estate interchange of money bedding periodic instalments
alongside the people he touched in the space configurations he brought into prominence,
gave Dickens a canvas to render London the experiences of his characters and the relationships of one another.
But she also argues that lodging lettings and the buttons are behind occasionally encouraged,
also fuelled Dickens imagination and helped to shape his fiction,
quote, rented space formed a powerful agent in narrative as an imaginative discourse,
encouraging with the fictional thinking ad of Quand in this presentation.
I take inspiration from Schatz's notion of modern fictional thinking,
the generative opportunities offered by speciality and sociability to a novelist,
and now will attempt to expand this notion by looking at the generative opportunities for the Laxton of like addiction Woodly.
As an architect and architectural educator,
I have frequently looked at the architectural strategies used in fiction and the role of literary strategies in architecture.
Fiction can make architects think more critically about the future realities they design and motivate people to claim the right to the imagination.
It can also activate people's collective imagination associated with shared buildings, spaces and experiences.
There are many interactive possibilities and parallels between the two media, some of which I cover later in great detail.
But first, I would like to discuss the more general subject of the relationship between architecture and language.
And it is only through this foundation of perspective that the relationship of architectural and literature can be best understood.
Architectural has both interactive and analogical relationship with language and design, building originates in the room,
the design briefs in the case of public buildings dedicated to organisations knowledge, it says, libraries, museums and art galleries.
The classification of contents in space are preceded by classifications and got it in text and reflected the history of thought in a logical
relationship between the two media goes back to the 19th century and the idea that works of architecture should be read like books,
narratives or texts. Quite a Quincy like, and historical monuments to libraries, public inscriptions for records of people.
The idea came on the store.
Strong criticism, however, in the 20th century after Modernism asserted that buildings were to be read as autonomous works.
Yet as architectural historian Adrian, 40, explains.
Even if architecture is not a language, this does not lessen the value of language for understanding architecture.
Architectural theorist Beeliar, for example, has made a productive analogy between the syntax of space and the syntactic and semantic structure,
which the characteristic space relationships are defined the culture and computational space.
Similarly, wasta griddles. We think we if the principles of space of structure function similarly to those of ordinary language.
What about narrative motifs, or do you think literary texts or what about buildings are social objects?
The line of social context and the order mechanism of language to organise cultural mechanisms in the relations of power.
So we'll explore these questions through the work of John Soane and Carlos Scarper, separated by a century and a half.
Well, faculties have a strong relationship with historian conflicts as inspirational resources and
decent competition organised by the curators of the Science Museum in Lincoln's Infeld's,
an area that, incidentally, provides the context for Dickens Bleak House.
Ask participants to name their favourite object in the building.
A winning entry drew attention to relationships intentionally created by the architect, the nymph by Richard Westmar.
Code in the picture is overlooked in attempting back Jovani in the Max Pardillo the Gothic low in the basement.
The fictitious monk was a satirical. How did he go? John Stone. Visitors to the museum come across the names first in the picture.
But we see here when the huge banners open revealing the statue in the recess, presiding over the void that connects with the monk spon.
They deface of the statue with a hammer to take it to meaning only later when they look up from the monk's cell with the picture and banners open.
They congeries encounter between the classical sensuality of the nymph and the gothic melancholy of the monk is dramatised
through the synchronous viewing of the two spaces and the sequence in which they're visited for such an encounter or event.
Spacetime manipulation is frequently found in literature or film and drum.
It communicates that life is not framed by rationality and predictability.
Characteristically, the opening paragraph of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
As these many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
Colonial Orianna India was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to
discover ice be pretty menacing about his Follman experiences and great expectations.
He's another example. Although, like in one hundred years of solitude,
the narrative fall follows a simple chronological structure to help me to comprehend
the complex events of the characters lives known as paralysis and analysis.
The motifs of flash forward to plus backward, often structural.
A large part of a narrative and well-known example of family literature is almost odyssey,
which begins immediate is when no desales carbon escape from Calypso's Island
and Fed amorous advances is shipwrecked amongst the victims and tells his game.
The story moves backwards in time, and as the hero narrates his many adventures and only books acting.
Does the text written where we weigh Book eight, as he said,
say 40 Kooka in the silversmiths does take from the front to the rear of the building and back,
while diagonal vistas that he will distant parts of continue circumnavigation of time.
The time it takes to walk through the sacred isn't this way, just to pose with synchronic time where rules and objects are instantaneously
linked by cross views that even a bike dextra paralysis and analysis suggested
on a logical relationship of architecture with little language maintain active
relationship defines a building and its meaning in a real world context,
except in a large collection of historical objects and building fragments.
So this museum has his story added schematic cultural context such as you of few.
Study, however, is, according to him, fanciful,
smitten with love of novelty in animated by direct defiance of all established rules of the architectural schools,
end of quote DOMAs colonnades, crepes, vol skylights, recesses, knishes and anterooms.
Did he study has a pantheon of forms in both distortive combinations like interplay of space and time before the new classical architect is a
need to change of past and present that is both sequential and synchronic from the Georgian front rooms to the back areas of the basement,
with the classical Roman and Egyptian to displace the museum from a dieses history as an imaginative,
abounded and directly accessible supra historical world, freed from the constraints of historical, stylistic and also logical knowledge.
Interestingly, Dickins region of London, such as in dojos neighbourhood in Martin Charles's feet, two lanes and byways in court.
Yes, and Passages is one when, quote, you never want some words about anything that might be reasonably called the street.
Like his description of Venice in pictures from Italy.
He's a kind of doges resist protection, nomic and systematic interpretive framework of language in museums,
catalogues or guidebooks offering an impressionistic aesthetic that confuses the city with the idea of the Lovering a dream with reality.
Candidates got a relationship with Venice and Houston is also based on the notion that the past,
present and future are mineable in the Olivetti showrooming that gets US and Marco Scarabus inspiration from the Línea vertical slicing of space.
The narrow walkways in the mezzanine. The sculptural staircase. The water in the central zone.
The glass, mosaics and all. Take inspiration from the great catalogue of forms that is Venice with its narrow passages,
fundamental sort of porticos, bridges stretching over the water. What did flooding the edges of space.
The range of colourful materials. And that itself was decorations. By extending circumnavigation all time through twists and turns of circulation.
Scarper contrasts, synchronic, views from the front and back end of the showroom with the seniors progress of the view through the 92.
There are many similar views in Venice extending over the linear stretches of the
canals to link places that they reached only indirectly by their meandering,
intersecting canals and alleys. Stagings movement through a locked sequence is the device frequently Garba,
even with spaces are not linearly shape, as if she's extension to Canada's museum persona,
where the divided positioning of statues of different size and height requires the visitors to walk around them,
crossing their own butts multiple times.
There's another linguistic motif that Scarper uses, which is Miss Zombi, which means placing a copy of an image or object inside itself,
like the snow globe in Orson Welles Citizen Kane Metonymy Gallery fading to the clatter story windows at the corners of the doll
space and the kind of young extension the glass cabinets containing figurines function as many galleries inside the larger gallery,
linking the scale of the building as a home to that of the windows and displays.
Beam has a strong presence in Saul's museum to the vault sale in the breakfast room.
The Cocomo doesn't.
Pompei and Joseph Gandy's paintings of the museum are demonstrations of desire to embed his own architecture into the historical ancestry.
DOMAs Marcosson Deborah Cameron explains that language is a neglected subject in discussions of architectural conventionally approach as a visual.
Neither does verbal statement. Any social practise like architectural has both verbal and aesthetic dimensions.
While the syntax of space structures, social relationships, these relationships,
the meaningfulness and the sub in the relations of power are also a function of the Oden's systems of language.
These operate in the interactive production of the architectural brief,
as well as other Deusen conventions that enable exchanges between architects, clients, contractors and builders.
As to the aesthetic function of the linguistic analogy.
Any epical meets from the odyssey to a child's journey to adulthood demonstrate the age old relationship between space and language,
a symbolic media that interlaced in imbuing our experience of buildings with narrative sense.
This is perhaps what Stone aim to demonstrate in his house museum to the unit of
architecture with boys in the arts through the intersections of architecture,
the display and the powerful illusions constructed by the many metres. Thank you.
I will now bust of Jamie. Lerma, you need to meet yourself with.
But we the bad news is good.
It is very interesting to bring together that language of architecture with the language of of narrative.
I think, for example, what you say about the crypto, what you say about the the active and the labourers,
these are all very fertile images for for for Dickens,
for architectural theory and for for critical theory as well as conclusions that with your you want from before anything we've been say.
Thank you both so much for such rich and fascinating responses to the book.
I wish we had about four hours to talk together about about this material.
And it seems like this relationship between architecture, space and narrative and language, on the other hand,
seems to be a topic we've all been circling in various ways and both today and and more broadly.
Jeremy, just on the on the phrase to let. I feel that another kind of definition of that phrase Dickins is really receptive to see is
the fact that it also means to allow something that really comes up in Great Expectations,
where Pip sort of comes into London for the first time and sees all of these signs that say to let.
To let. To let it. And it kind of really worries him.
He feels that he's being given licence to do something.
You know, now that he's kind of come into his inheritance but doesn't really know what to do with that permission.
So that's the third definition that I found so interesting. And so fear that this this relationship between.
Between architecture and narrative.
Jeremy, you referred to Dickens's own kind of desire to kind of be an architect and to orchestrate kind of domestic space.
And all of the stories in various ways. I think that's why he loves rented space so much.
He thinks that it's particularly fertile for maybe two reasons.
Firstly, because when tenants come and go, they invariably bring new stories with them.
And so narrative is refreshing itself constantly and infinitely over time.
In the same maybe not particularly exciting architectural location.
I mean, the other thing is, of course, that because, um, you know, with rented space comes atomisation.
And so there's always various stories jostling for attention in close proximity with each other.
And I think, you know, I think he's very, very excited by the fact that there might be another story just on the other set of a door.
So on the other side of a door or, you know, on the other side of a set of floorboards.
So those are just a few sort of initial responses to maybe where the intersections between are areas of interest might be.
And I don't know if either of you had any any further perspectives on that. Can I please?
I thought that this is a wonderful idea, essentially.
And that's what what I really loved in the book, the book is so rich that, as you said, we can, but not for hours, but 40 hours talking about it.
But this is a really wonderful idea that people have crammed together in spaces.
And these people come together with their own stories and the ways in which the building really arranges the encounters
either through the spaces or through the economic transactions and everything else that is happening socially,
culturally and economically is really creating a very rich world of opportunity for you.
Not it is for new stories, in a way. I think that you discussed this in the introduction, if I include this at all.
It is. And. Michel Foucault gave this kind of disciplinary view of architecture in the 19th century through his model, the Panopto School.
But this ator really discusses the ways in which people can transgress any kind of impositions imposed from
society on them simply by rehearsing the role roots and their own modes of interacting with each other.
And I think that that in your book, you really make the point so clearly manifested in the work of Dickens.
It's just so fascinating, isn't it, to think that kind of the John Stone Museum is just, you know,
a stone's throw away from so many neighbourhoods that Dickens is exploring not only in Bleak House, kind of throughout his career.
So that sense of kind of proximity and kind of there we are a case in point, Jeremy.
Well, yes, sure. Of course, it's the same museum as Lincoln's and feels just right.
I think those two were talking born lives and dies, of course.
And the point about this made me think about another form of lodging.
I referred earlier around the to the grave urban hamlets saying that talking about the coffin and the grave as places you rent until doomsday.
And the point, of course, is that nobody occupies space forever and that they all know that there are in
that case that there's nobody who's outside the lodging world in that way.
If that's the case, it gives a whole sense of the power of the ghostly power of the homeless.
The there's the sense of of spaces which are which have got multiple things taking place inside them.
I'm sure that Dickens is Dickens is so.
Oh, I'm well aware of that. But it's always a sense of how things are being redescribed with value.
There's a memory of what has been inside inside the place.
With Talking Hall, for example, the Baroque. I've used that word before.
I'm fascinated by Dickens in the Baroque, the baroque ceiling,
which looks down upon something whole and which Fiz shows that ultimately with the with the the Roman looking down and pointing at toffy home,
the talking home is no longer there. It's just the staying on the floor by his chair, as it were.
The inhabitants is gone. The tenant has gone. And then the next chapter, virtually, we have the this extraordinary funeral of talking horror,
which is based upon the funeral Duke of Wellington, where it isn't people who've come to see the man being buried.
They've set their coaches. And so you've got these empty coaches, empty spaces, lodgings, if you like,
without lodges which have moved around to see the person die, the way in which Dickens works up in terms of emptiness.
And what has been and what will be.
And the sense in which he he he gives a sense of of properties and peoples as as, uh, transferable as a word is is very interesting to me.
It's so interesting because I think he's so receptive to this to this metaphor
and he uses it everywhere who I think refers to the great marching house.
You know, I remember the great boarding house, the world in a very, very early story.
I mean, he's constantly kind of looking at the metaphorical potential of the space and saying that actually we're only just ever launching,
we're only just ever passing through. And this sense of history.
And also, I think is is absolutely key to what he's trying to argue about.
About any space, but especially rented ones. And that there's something ghostly about any rented room.
And there's always kind of a whisper from that person who inhabited before the passing that inhabited before them.
And then, you know, going on far out for however long. So that that seems to be a central concern for hasn't interfered.
I'm just interested in that relation, in that relationship between architecture and history.
I guess architecture is it's meant not to almost meant not to change.
It's meant to endure. Yes. You know, this was very much the view in the 19th century in the way up to the middle of the 20th century.
But Dutch and particularly after the war, we have new thinking coming.
That had to do a lot with the temporariness in architecture.
Really bringing along thinking that had to do with such people and how people use spaces and how people change spaces called the adapt them,
how they come into contact with each other, what the users want and how the users really interact with the space.
So there was this incredibly creative British architectural centric Bryce.
That was creating a whole new school around this notion alongside a group of critics called Archigram.
And and it is bringing in a completely different idea about architecture in comparison to the monumental, the long lasting.
They're sort of Peter, I mean, the regift to Egypt or the Parthenon looks to architecture,
which is about to the dance and the changing the changing nature of architecture and the boarding houses.
Very, very crucial in that, because it is a probabilistic mechanism of mixing,
because people come and stay for a certain period, maybe they stay for longer period, but then they move on.
And that move in Leelee shifts and reshuffle society. And Ed and Dickens really capitalises on certain words.
I think you wanted to say something else.
Yeah, I just thought I'd come in and bring some of the questions that are in the both in the function and also in the Q and A,
but largely because they carry on, if you like, the discussion that you're already having around well,
around time around different uses of space and so on. And the question, first of all, from Allison, I think,
which of or wonders how difficult it is for us now to think historic liberal society where renting and not house buying is the norm.
In other words, are we starting from a position where we think that the best thing possible is to have your own space,
your own property, your own house, etc, etc.? And that might not be where people in Dickens time is starting from.
Well, let's just have a minute or two on that question and your thoughts on that. We shall see.
I can see you nodding your head. No. Thank you so much, Alison.
So this idea that the Englishman's home is his castle. You know, I think it's very much bandied about in the 19th century,
but only in so far is that it's an ideal and that no one actually thinks that this is a
description of the reality or indeed maybe something that we should be aspiring towards.
I think this idea of homeownership has is actually a recent one.
And, you know, maybe people might be able to correct me.
People who know more about kind of the history of the 20th century, but I'm guessing 70s, 80s is one that really takes hold.
And well, I think what we're noticing now is that we're returning to the idea that we're going to rent for the rest of our lives.
I mean, so kind of we're going back to the 19th century in a certain way.
I mean, I think and I think the Victorians were aware of that what renting might imply for their kind of desire for security or privacy,
but didn't really have any particular kind of expectation that this was going to define the way that they lived in their own lifetimes.
I hope that starts to answer the question. I'm Sophia. Jeremy, I am sure that you have you have thoughts on this as well.
Well, I was looking at the websites about the number of Americans asleep in their own cars.
And I was wondering what the statistics would be actually for how many people do have home ownership, even though, as you say, with a new situation.
I wonder if I might build on that idea of people flipping their cars to ask for a shuttle with questrom,
which is to what degree is letting space domestic space that's being repurposed as opposed to.
Which is part of Alison's question space that's being built in order to let.
Have you thought from the different, if you like, between a repurposing and a kind of purpose, building speculation that that this will eventually.
Yeah. It's meant for this kind of habitation. Yeah. So there is a bit of both.
I think in the 19th century, so Geremek and Jeremy mentioned the model lodging houses that were being kind
of purpose built and private kind of philanthropic enterprises to kind of,
um, I don't know, deal with the problems with poor housing.
And so on the one hand, those out, those are specifically made tilak for very specific reasons and for specific inhabitants.
But also, you know, this is so much of lodging was about kind of, you know,
finding a room over and over at a shop or dividing up much broader house and for particular purposes.
So I would say it was a little bit of both. It's it's both makeshift and purpose-built at the same time.
I mean, I think it just shows how absurd the concept is and how we can't necessarily come to any particular generalisations or definitions either way.
Mm hmm. Thank you, sir. You're nodding your head vigorously here. You want to say more about this?
I think that we are experiencing now a period where a lot of repurposing is going to take place because of the changes that Calvet brought
to the world of the office and also legislation that allows transformation of the buildings that were designed for one purpose to homes.
Just briefly,
the changes that took place in the 20th century with legislation and with the policy were intended to create a specific society that owned the homes.
So in the 60s, there was the Thomas Piketty report,
which was commissioned by the government to create some guidelines about the ideal design of social housing.
Unfortunately not. It came to a demise.
And then there was the financialization and then the new legislation that.
And it stopped social housing. And so people started buying the homes.
But now, definitely we are going into models of good living, good working and so on and come to commodities.
Thank you. For the most recent questions, just come in. I said from Rebecca H.
You're sort of answering this now. But could anyone comment on today's whole Shia culture?
So. And in particular in relation to racism in space?
David, on the surface, as I have through time,
but to move when his family was targeted by the National Front who immigrated to to Gateshead from Nigeria and the inequalities of space.
And if I could just tell you what Sophie has just been talking about, the disease, the pandemic pestilence,
the kind of, if you like, the racialized distribution of of what it means to be at home at any given moment.
I don't know. I confess I haven't read your book yet. I don't know if it's part of the book.
I wasn't sent a copy yet, but I will clearly. I will do.
And I'm wondering, is that is that part of Dickens story or is it something we learn from Dickens when we think about today?
There are so many ways in which to approach that question.
And I suppose the first is temporary to the current current moment, which is why I think that the question is being stemmed.
Yes, I think we are kind of really beginning to see how spatial justice and spatial injustice work in very, very profound ways.
And in terms of kind of what what Dickens has to tell us about this.
He is interested in immigration to a certain extent,
so that the book has a chapter about the great exhibition and which was very much a kind of an offering,
an official narrative of British imperial power and saying, well, come, come and see how great we are,
but also bring your own kind of objects and things attempted to celebrate and can come together.
But at the same time, he's interested in what happens to two boarding houses and lodging lodging houses in the same year.
And what happens when kind of people from different nations and of different races come together in these less and monitored locations?
I mean, he has quite a lot to say about that. This is a fear.
Jeremy, I don't know whether you want to want to come and come in on this, but I was thinking that Mr Casby,
of course, isn't a perfect example of the authority of the kind of rent to figure whom Dickens despises.
Quite right. Who has a cold? Mr. Pank says his as the guy with the necessary go between banks,
turns back on him and the treatment of bleeding, bleeding heart yards, I think is very powerful.
And, of course, as an Italian living and in pleasing yards.
So, Mr. Senor Candidato.
But I mean it it's that that's an obvious part of the news to actually discuss Kaspi.
Would be going inside. Go for it, Sophia.
Very quickly, Thomas Boots and Charles sorry, a map of London where he mapped the different social classes and then an east end.
The Jewish community in East End is perhaps an interesting reference in relation to this question, Alison.
Put exactly that reference into the into the trap, in fact. So that's great.
Two quick more things, really.
One is right after the first question that came in was from David Postles about David Englander's research into landlord tenant relationships.
Does anybody here know anything about that? With Dickens familiar with the legislation noted by Englander.
I mean, could I have a little bit more detail? I appreciate it's not something that I have put a lot of thought into.
OK, David, I'm afraid we'll draw a blank on that one, but that's exciting.
I mean, Jeremy, could you comment on this, Jeremy? You know, I can't. I would love to have the reference.
OK. In that case, David, can you send us the reference, please?
And we'll talk about that leaves just one, one or two minutes to think again about the last question from nature thing, which is.
Thanks for your insightful conversation.
How did contrapuntal readings offer an insight into an understanding, absence and presence of imperialism in these homes?
Again? Trust me, you're nodding. You'd understand what that means.
If you give me a minute or two on that contrapuntal reading is where I'm kind of canonical 19th century novels,
which seem to be very much based in the workings of the nation and register the presence of of,
you know, what's going on on the other side of the world. I'm usually kind of colonial relation.
So the most seminal reading of that is probably Edward cites chapter on Mansfield Park.
I'm just reading it for the audience just to situate the question on.
I think absolutely, yes. I mean, this is you know, Dickens is really interested in what's happening in other other parts of the world.
And for example,
you mentioned there and the great exhibition chapter where he kind of registers these stories of political exile in continental Europe,
in these novels that are meant to be very, very much about what's going on in London at the time.
So a place like Leicester Square in particular is highly cosmopolitan.
And that's because of what's happening just off the edges of the page and, you know, on the continent.
And I hope meeting that's starting to answer that question. But again, Jeremy and Sophia, you might have some thoughts.
Well, I find it very interesting that the door it's the home of Arthur Pelham coming about from China, Juanjo and.
And the historically prisoners conditions.
He would have been in there because the space allows to the Europeans was it was tiny.
And Marshall said life, actually. And, of course, a link.
So the question of what was Arthur Selam doing out in China? Why was he so guilty?
And obviously, there's a relationship between opium,
which Dickens is very alive to and is circles with namers death and continues into our mutual friend.
Veneering is certainly a drug dealer. And I obviously think those connexions are very, very subtle.
And in the case of the authorities, I think they account for us with guilt.
And then in the low, they can't speak about your past because your past actually is so compromised politically and economically.
That's absolutely right. And this story, of course, begins with a return to Marseilles.
There's a there's a quarantine situation. And because of that unnamed plague from from the east as as as Dickens describes it.
So. So I think that's definitely kind of, you know, very, very well into contrapuntal reading.
She suggested this might take for us so fearful it would take at least 40.
I think we could be here for four days or 40 nights, some, you know, a biblical time.
It's been amazing and really, really interesting. We have the reference from David.
Thank you. In the chat. Now to David Engenders. I keep you speaking as if it were a German name, Englander.
If anybody wants to pick it up, all it leaves me.
People need to go by, too. So I will just thank everyone enormously.
Jeremy and most of all, Shashi, for writing a book in the first place.
For what's been a really, really interesting discussion. Thank you all.
Everyone present for coming along. And I'll remind you to look, please, again at the website Porche for our next book at lunchtime.
It's people like yourself who make this worthwhile. So thank you enormously.
And see you again in a couple of weeks. Goodbye.