Victorian excesses: The poetics and politics of street life in London

This dissertation claims Victorian writers depicted London’s streets and public spaces as visible and material analogues to the abstract workings of capitalism. Excess and lack intermingle in Victorian representations of London’s streets and the underclass who inhabited them. These spaces served both as backdrop for representing and reflecting conceptions of capitalist exchange and provided the possibility of such representations. These chapters identify the internal economies of several literary texts and demonstrate how these economies serve as metonyms for the marketplace. Rather than being arranged according to principles of conservation or expenditure, these internal economies demonstrate a system in which excesses and remainders are produced by and serve to disrupt the system. Two categories of excess appeared in Victorian writing about London’s streets. The first, which is explored in chapters one and two, is excess as residue or waste. Chapter one, which examines Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend , positions the waste collector as a figure for the residue that haunts the modern city and impedes both narrative and capitalist progress by reintroducing into the capitalist system what it seeks to expel. The second chapter explores another kind of residue: the residuum, a name that was used for the non-working poor. Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago and Émile Zola’s Parisian novel L’Assommoir , this chapter argues, describe the non-working poor as a form of capitalist and thermodynamic waste that threatens the system which creates it. The second kind of excess, which is the concern of the final two chapters, is produced by consumption rather than labor and as such is the surplus of capital accumulation and commodity culture. Chapter three explores James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night and its articulation of urban time as recursive. The poem develops a notion of time that in the process of looking backward—in terms of both form and theme—creates excess by multiplying itself infinitely. The final chapter identifies an economy of replication in two texts which combine the visual and the verbal to depict London’s crowds: Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold’s London, A Pilgrimage and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss. In these texts, the city’s celebratory crowds open up the possibility for the multiplication of meanings and subject positions while simultaneously conveying a sense of pressure toward dissolution.