Transitive spaces: mid-Victorian anxiety in the face of change

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Content TRANSITIVE SPACES: MID-VICTORIAN ANXIETY IN THE FACE OF CHANGE by Natasha Alvandi Hunt A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Natasha Alvandi Hunt ii Dedication For Evan and my parents Yousef and Sigrid iii Acknowledgements I am thankful for the funding I have received which has enabled me to complete this dissertation. I am grateful to The Graduate School for both the International Research Grant and the Dissertation Writing Fellowship, the English Department for my fifth year fellowship, and the U.S.C.–Early Modern Studies Association for summer research funding. I could not have finished my dissertation without the help of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin. The HRC's generous research fellowship this year has been particularly helpful in allowing me access to sources and has inspired me to continue my work in the center this Spring as I revise this dissertation for publication. Additionally, I would like to thank the staff at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library, the Harry E. Huntington Library, and the Harry Ransom Center for their research know-how and support. Many of the items I needed to consult were rare and fragile. I appreciate the time and effort the librarians put in to allow me special access to these works. I could not have completed this dissertation without the encouragement and guidance of several key mentors. To begin, I want to thank my dissertation committee chair Jim Kincaid, who has been instrumental in providing feedback which has helped me improve as a scholar of Victorian literature and culture. His wit and wisdom has informed my viewpoint on Victorian literature, teaching, and life in general. Second, I want to thank Emily Anderson for her dedication to my project and her generosity with my work. I owe her for pushing me to think about greater cultural concerns in this project. Additionally, I would like to thank Daniela Bleichmar, Phillipa Levine, John Carlos iv Rowe, and Susan McCabe for their insight into my project during the various stages of its development. At Rice University, I developed my love for reading and writing about Victorian literature. Without Helena Michie, Bob Patten, Thad Logan, and Logan Browning, I would not be the scholar or teacher I am today. Thank you for the time you devoted to an undergraduate. You taught me how to ask the right questions and to continue to search for answers. Additionally, I would like to thank my colleagues at USC in the English Department past and present who have helped me with my dissertation with thoughtful comments and words of wisdom. In alphabetical order because there is no way to rank your impact on my work: Thank you, Jillian Burcar, Beth Palm Callaghan, Jenny Conary, Mary Ann Davis, Mariko Dawson Zare, Laura Fauteux, Nora Gilbert, Barbara Mello, Shefali Rajamannar, Kathy Strong, Trisha Tucker, Erika Wenstrom, and Michelle Wilson. Last but not least, I want to thank my family for their continued love and support. Researching and writing can be lonely acts, and without the friendship of my parents and my sister Layla, I might not have finished my dissertation. Thank you to my mother who read every single word of my dissertation in order to talk with me about my project and ways to improve it, and thank you to my father who always believed that I could and would write this dissertation and who knows how to make me laugh no matter how stressed out I am. A special thank you goes to my cat Chiyo, who has sat by my side as I wrote chapter after chapter (even contributing a few words such as "gjiowarys" and "saoifyd8" as she stepped across the keyboard). She has continued to be my friend v despite the fact that I create precarious stacks of papers and library books around my desk. Most of all, I want to thank my husband and best friend, Evan. He is the reason I was able to complete this project. He was there through the ups and the downs of research, writing and revising. When I doubted my abilities, he proved to me that I was capable of achieving any goal I set for myself. Evan, this project is yours just as much as it is mine, and I cannot thank you enough for your undying devotion to me, my research, and my writing. I hope that one day I can do for you what you have done for me. vi Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii List of Figures vii Abstract viii Introduction: An Exhibition, a House, a Suburb, and a City: 1 Transitive Spaces in the Face of Social Confusion Chapter One: Swimming Upstream to the "Human Hive": 26 Metaphoric Representations of Working-Class Spectators at the Crystal Palace Chapter Two: "A Din of Angry Voices" at Home: 62 England's Class Conflict within the Transitive Space of Elizabeth Gaskell's Thornton House Chapter Three: "Destroying the General Uniformity": 97 Transitive Spaces as Contagious Locations in Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek Chapter Four: "Narrowed to these Dimensions": 134 Progress, Decline, and Stagnation in Mid-Victorian London and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit Coda: Reconstructing the Palace: 170 The Crystal Palace in Modern and Contemporary Fiction Bibliography 195 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Punch's "Dinner-Time at the Crystal Palace." 37 Figure 2: Cruikshank's "All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition." 146 Figure 3: Cruikshank's "The Opening of the Great Bee-Hive." 179 viii Abstract Situated between the Chartist Rebellion of 1848 and the Second Reform Act in 1867, the 1850s traditionally have been viewed as an era of social and cultural peace. The Great Exhibition’s declared intended goal of unity—between the world’s countries and all classes of British subjects—enhances our contemporary stance that the 1850s were a relatively peaceful period in British history. And yet, the Great Exhibition, apart from its proposed and publicized goal of worldwide harmony was not a place in which the classes of Britain and the people of the world could mingle freely with one another. While viewed by many as an unrevolutionary period in Victorian history, the years immediately following the Great Exhibition and the mid- to late-1850s were still affected by the cultural, social, and technological changes inspired by the Chartist Rebellion and the Great Exhibition. In the 1850s and through the early 1860s, writers and speakers from Prince Albert to journalists referred to their own era as "the age of transition" or the "age of rapid change." In fact, the Great Exhibition and other non- governmental spaces prominent in popular literature and nonfiction texts of the 1850s are what I call "transitive spaces." They are locations that enhance or illuminate society's potential for social and physical change and ones in which upheaval is met head on and underlined. These sites are sources, demonstrations, and confrontations of mid-Victorian defined anxiety, especially since they are closed-off systems in their own right even though they overlap with the world outside of their borders. The mid-Victorian period ix with its emphasis on globalization and its cultural apprehension surrounding the potential results of rapid social change allows for these locations to abound. 1 Introduction An Exhibition, a House, a Suburb, and a City: Transitive Spaces in the Face of Social Confusion ‘Nobody who has paid any attention to the particular features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living in a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end—to which indeed all history points—the realisation of the unity of mankind.’ — Prince Albert, 1850 1 Prince Albert's declaration before the opening of the Great Exhibition promotes Great Britain's perceived progress up to the Great Exhibition, but it also propels the continued forging ahead of modern invention and social change by clearly labeling the 1850s "a period of most wonderful transition." Trapped between the unsuccessful Chartist Rebellion in 1848 and the Reform Act of 1867, the 1850s are characterized today more as a stagnant period than an age of rapid alteration. Comparing the "Hungry Forties" to the "Fabulous Fifties," social historians tend to see the 1850s as a welcome respite from the social unrest leading up to the Chartist Rebellion. 2 For instance, François 1 “Short Cuts Across the Globe,” Household Words, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Saturday, April 13, 1850), 68. 2 Responding to a quotation from Mark Pattison's Memoirs in which Pattison posits that if a man went to sleep in 1846 and woke up again in 1850, "'he would have found himself in a totally new world,'" David Newsome does not see the "new world" of the 1850s as one of uncertainty, but one of peaceful prosperity. Newsome argues, "Awakened from the nightmare of the Chartist riots and the grievous problems of a starving Ireland, people came suddenly to realize that their country truly led the world, not only in its maintenance of political stability while governments were crashing all over Europe, but also in its commercial and industrial supremacy and—what affected the population generally and most immediately—in its unrivaled prosperity" (50). Social historians, such as François Bédarida, directly state that the Great Exhibition heralded in a "phase of great economic prosperity of social peace" (4). Bédarida writes, "What a contrast there was between the 1840s and 1850s! Ten years of chaos and conflict, dominated by fear and famine (the 2 Bédarida, in his comparison of the two decades, reads the 1850s as a period lacking in incentive for social change. He writes, "With free trade in force since 1846, Chartism in retreat, Irish agitation broken by the failure of the Young Ireland movement, and the tragedy of the Great Famine, classes and parties no longer had the same motives to oppose each other." 3 However, Prince Albert's statement suggests that many Victorians in the 1850s perceived their era as a time of potential social and cultural development. Contrary to what social historians, such as Bédarida, believe, the Great Exhibition was not the culmination point of this change; even as Prince Albert's goal for the Great Exhibition was almost within reach, innovation and perceived social progress would not stop with the closing of the Great Exhibition and blissful tranquility would not take over in a easy transition from the turbulent 1840s. Instead, within the speech, as Prince Albert glorifies the revision of British ideals, he offers for view a world that is not yet stable. Just as he looks to the future, the present and the eventual endpoint of Great Britain's "period of most wonderful transition" remains in doubt. In fact, in 1856, Karl Marx declared that Great Britain in the 1850s, while a wealthier nation than it had ever been in the past, was not free from the potential for social change: 'Hungry Forties') were to be followed by ten years of prosperity and confidence, studded with a thousand marvels (the 'Fabulous Fifties'). Bédarida even goes on to note that the Great Exhibition was particularly successful because of London's "tranquil atmosphere" and the "renewed social harmony at home" (4). In this school of thought, G.M. Young famously asserted that "of all decades in our history, a wise man would choose the eighteen-fifties to be young in" (87). 3 François Bédarida (trans. A. S. Forster and Jeffrey Hodgkinson), A Social History of England 1851-1990 (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 5. 3 'On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.' 4 The image of 1850s British society as existing in a time "pregnant" with opposing images of wealth and decay coupled with potential and unknown results for the future of England enhance and counteract the view that the decade was solely one of prosperity with industry heralding in new sources of wealth for the country as a whole. 5 In the face of this ambiguity, writers in the 1850s through the early 1860s utilized a less triumphal variation on Prince Albert's phrase. No longer a "period of most wonderful transition," the 1850s became an uneasy "age of transition." In 1851, M. Digby Watt, a reporter for the Daily News, asserted that the 1850s were different from other 4 Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001), 201. 5 Geoffrey Best, for example, sees the 1850s as a period of "general happiness" and positions his study of economic changes in Britain by beginning his book in 1851 with the opening of the Great Exhibition (5). He argues that "Britain was, in the eighteen-fifties, by far the richest country in the world. [. . .] The wealth of Britain was going up fast all through our period: faster, so far as we can judge with the imperfect tools at our disposal, than it had gone up during the earlier years of the century" (3). And yet, as Marx's biographer Francis Wheen notes of Marx's critique of British society in the 1850s, "The new sources of wealth [during the 1850s], by some inverse alchemy, had become sources of want. And Britain—the wealthiest and most modern industrial society in the world—was also the most ripe for destruction" (201). In 1854, Marx critiquing British society wrote in a letter to the Labour Parliament published in The People's Paper. In it, he proclaimed, "In no other country, therefore, the war between the two classes that constitute modern society has assumed so colossal dimensions and features so distinct and palpable" (Collected Works 13, 57). In the letter, Marx emphasizes that the people of England should utilize their power as workers who have "conquered nature" with industrial strength: "The labouring classes have conquered nature; they have now to conquer man. To succeed in this attempt they do not want strength, but the organisation of their common strength, organisation of the labouring classes on a national scale—such, I suppose, is the great and glorious end aimed at the Labour Parliament" (Collected Works 13: 58). In other words, the 1850s and the emphasis on works of Industry of the Great Exhibition did not herald in a time of peace, but a time of potential social change and revolution. 4 times of transition in British history because recent technological developments allowed for change to occur faster than it could in the past: Wisely and truly did his Royal Highness Prince Albert, in his speech at the Mansion-house banquet, pronounce the present to be eminently an 'age of transition.' There have been many other phases in national history which might have been similarly characterized, but in one essential particular the present differs from all its antecedents, and that one is in the 'pace' at which the work of transmutation is going on. 6 The "age of transition," also sometimes referred to by writers in the 1850s as the "age of rapid change" 7 and, tellingly, an "age of unending change," 8 was not defined by an end goal of peace as "the realization of the unity of mankind" would suggest, but by confusion and disorder brought on by a perceived whirlwind of mutations in technological invention and potential social and cultural developments. As evidenced by the phrases also applied to the decade, such as a time of "rapid change" and "unending change," mid-Victorian writers noticed societal alterations occurred swiftly and were seemingly endless in scope. Change flooded London and the British Empire at large, and there appeared to be no end in sight to the downpour of cultural and social evolution. As a Morning Chronicle writer in 1851 pointed out, "It is not unnatural that we should find ourselves at sea in this great flux of things. Ours is an age of transition; we are in the midst of the breaking up of the great deep of the past, and we are perhaps struggling after a wider and more distinct range of truth." Even though in retrospect, the Chartist uprising 6 M. Digby Watt, "The Exhibition Under Its Commercial Aspect," Daily News (London, England), 5 September, 1851, 6. 7 The Times, 15 September, 1853, 9. 8 "Two members of the present House of Commons," The Times, 31 March, 1852, 5. 5 of 1848 did not achieve its goals for working-class equality and it took until 1867 for the next Reform Act to extend the right to vote, the 1850s were a time of social adjustment for those living in Great Britain, one that involved breaking with tradition, or at the very least, entertaining the idea. Perhaps this social adjustment was not as lightning-fast as mid-Victorians perceived, but it is important to remember that the social modifications, however seemingly insignificant in retrospect, felt substantial at the time, and most importantly, change, however small, opened up the possibility for future unknown societal transitions. Further, destabilization brought on by momentous cultural changes, such as the Great Exhibition, and historic social uprisings, such as the Chartist Rebellion, made everything seem capable of a potential sudden and immediate shift. Victorian society was "at sea" and it was unclear at what point the ground would surface beneath England's feet. I am not the first person to note that the 1850s were the self-declared "age of transition." Walter E. Houghton in writing on the mid-Victorian obsession with the past declares, "For although all ages are ages of transition, never before had men thought of their own time as an era of change from the past to the future." 9 He continues, "By definition an age of transition in which change is revolutionary has a dual aspect: destruction and reconstruction. As the old order of doctrines and institutions is being attacked or modified or discarded, at one point and then another, the new order is being 9 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957), 1. 6 proposed or inaugurated." 10 While my examination of the "age of transition" shares in common with Houghton's analysis an observation that mid-Victorian writers declared themselves to be in a time of change, my project differs from Houghton's and others who wrote about transformation in the Victorian period after him specifically because I focus on future anticipated social change, not transformations which actually occurred, such as advances in technology. My project focuses on individual anxiety during this self- declared era of adjustment as mid-Victorian characters in fictional representations of the era looked to the future. While it is true that modern "anxiety" (a psychiatric neurosis) did not exist in the 1850s, Victorian "anxiety" (uneasiness and mental distress) did and was a popular diagnosis by mid-Victorians. To begin a discussion on mid-Victorian anxiety regarding future social change, we need to understand medical definitions of the condition in the 1850s. Included in the extensively reprinted volume Lecture to Ladies on Practical Subjects, Physician George Johnson not only details how anxiety can physically manifest itself on one's body ("The physician examines the heart, and finds there no indication of disease; but a glance at the patient's face suffices to convince him that, whether the patient choose to acknowledge it or not, he must be suffering from intense mental anxiety." 11 ), but also anxiety's main source: a fear of change. He writes, "the dread and 10 Ibid., 3. 11 Lectures to Ladies on Practical Subjects, George Johnson, "Lecture III. on Over-Work, Distress, and Anxiety, as Cause of Mental and Bodily Disease" (Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1855), 75. 7 anticipation of future evil appear, in many instances, to have a more injurious effect, both upon the mind and the body than does grief on account of past or present calamities." 12 Despite Johnson's examples which detail the working-class's increase in anxiety exacerbated by over-work and fear of an unknown future, he does extend this to other classes: "There are few men or women in any class of society who have not dreaded many evils which have never come upon them, and we have frequent opportunities to observe the miserable consequences to mental and bodily health resulting from over- anxious care for the future." 13 Johnson goes as far as to describe the mental effects of an uncertain future as "the paralyzing influence of fear and anxiety," an arresting phrase which implies not only a bodily manifestation of anxiety, but also a state of powerlessness in the face of the expected or unexpected hereafter. According to Johnson, money and social position cause this future-produced anxiety, and while he does not say in so many words that this anxiety over one's future place in society could expand beyond the working-classes (the sole examples of his study), the implication when he declares that "there are few men or women in any class of society who have not dreaded many evils" directly connects to the possibility that mid-Victorian men and women of all classes could experience anxiety and that this unease could physically manifest itself as a result of potential loss of financial and social position. According to popular thought and physicians in the 1850s, when mid-Victorian defined anxiety struck, sensory overload could create a paralysis of the body and mind 12 Ibid., 78. 13 Ibid. 8 which could lead to the loss or enhancement of one's senses (meaning both mental capacity and sensory perception). 14 In Alexander Bain's The Senses and The Intellect, originally published in 1855, he argues that anxiety is a "depressing passion" accompanied by fear and terror which dampens the motor influences of the brain, and relaxes all of the muscles and faculties of the body including one's ability to process information through sensory perception. Bain writes, "The feet will not support the body, the features hang as without life, the eye is fixed, the look is completely vacant and void of expression, the voice feeble or extinct." 15 Others, such as James Copland, in his popular A Dictionary of Practical Medicine, argue that while it is possible for anxiety to manifest itself as a dulling of the senses and even muscular paralysis (as in Bain's image of an anxious person with his eye "fixed" on a static image), the senses can also become "morbidly acute" 16 meaning that every sight or sound and the perception of it is heightened or sharpened by the continued exposure to the source of anxiety. Along with the idea that anxiety-provoked sensory perception could become increasingly heightened, physician George Freckleton, in the Outlines of General Pathology, declares that a physician can use the reactions of what he calls the "external 14 C. Hering, Analytical Therapeutics (New York: Boericke & Tafel, 1875) 1: 301. 15 Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1868), 272. 16 James Copland, A Dictionary of Practical Medicine. Comprising General Pathology, The Nature and Treatment of Diseases, Morbid Structures, and the Disorders Especially Incidental to Climates, to the Sex, and to the Different Epochs of Life with numerous Prescriptions for the Medicines Recommended; A Classification of Diseases according to Pathological Principles; a Copious Bibliography, with References; and An Appendix of Approved Formulae (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1858), 3: 486. 9 senses" (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) to diagnose anxiety. He writes that anxious patients can experience "increased or diminished sensibility" 17 of sight, either "too acute" or the loss of hearing altogether, for example. In mid-Victorian definitions of anxiety manifesting on the body, an individual's senses can either be heightened or dampened to near, if not actual, loss. At the same time, too much sensory perception can overload the senses creating sensory overload and anxiety. Therefore, when it comes to mid-Victorian defined, physical anxiety, it is a bit of a paradox whether the anxiety creates the sharpened or dulled sensory perception or whether intense sensory experiences create anxiety which then manifests as changes in sensory perception. Nevertheless, locations create and can lessen this anxiety, which usually results in physicians recommending that patients move away from the source of the anxiety to less stimulating scenes. With "the paralyzing influence" of the "dreaded many evils" in mind, my project specifically makes an intervention in the study of the mid-Victorian period and how this future-produced anxiety manifests itself in fictional spaces in this time. While locations have been examined as expressing gender-related anxieties, 18 in most works on Victorian spaces, issues of social change and anxiety related to this change, apart from issues relating to gender, are either ignored or given a secondary thought after gender-related 17 George Freckleton, Outlines of General Pathology (London: John W. Parker, 1838), x. 18 See Igna Bryden and Janet Floyd's Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior (1999), Doreen B. Massey's Space, Place, and Gender (1994), Joan Rothschild and Alethea Cheng's Design and Feminism: Re-visioning Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things (1999), Patricia McKee's Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1997) among many others. 10 issues. Even when spaces are written about according to class, 19 the works tend to focus on issues relating to city planning, and not the anxiety relating to the future of England within these spaces themselves. This work seeks to bring to the forefront the notion that Victorian spaces during this time of transition both exhibit, create, and confront in different ways mid-Victorian apprehension over social change and the future of Great Britain. While England's impending future plays an important role in all of the novels I examine, none of the novels are set in a futuristic or alternate world. Additionally, the future is not a large element of the plot, apart from the natural progression of the narrative. Instead, each narrative is grounded in the present of the mid-Victorian period or the past with prominent concerns of the 1850s at the novel's center. Significantly, each novel was popular according to publication standards of the decade, and each reflects cultural concerns for the future similar to that found in nonfiction of the 1850s. Unlike other writers of the 1850s, Dickens, Collins, and Gaskell wrote for the masses (North and South was serialized in Household Words, for example), and I argue that the subjects of their novels highlight and reflect the uncertainties present in the minds of the British reading public. In coupling my study of fictional spaces with fictionally-constructed narratives of actual spaces, I seek to demonstrate that writers utilize these fictional and 19 See Pamela K. Gilbert's Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004), Lynda Nead's Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (2000), selected articles from Karen Sayer's Victorian Space(s), among others. Lara Baker Whelan's Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era nearly achieves the object of my study. While her book primarily focuses on urban planning, she turns to fiction in the form of fantasies of suburban utopias, and yet, she does not focus on locations as sites of anxiety over potential or future change. 11 fictionalized spaces as a means of confronting and working through perceived and uncertain social change. At the beginning of this chapter, Prince Albert's quotation marked the association of the opening of the Great Exhibition with change and a sign of impending reevaluation of the social workings of Great Britain. While Prince Albert publicized the Great Exhibition as a place in which the "unity of mankind" could be achieved, in actuality, the Crystal Palace existed as a focus of confusion, an extraordinary Victorian phenomenon in which everything perplexed and defied clear definition. It was touted as an exhibition of the world's industry, yet the objects on display were divorced from the laboring classes who produced them. Its creators designed the Exhibition supposedly to teach the working-classes "taste," but no text (apart from the satirical Punch) examines if anyone attended the Exhibition in order to learn or if the project was in the least bit successful in its supposed plans for mass education. Even the Crystal Palace's very building construction invites confusion. Its glass and iron structure allowed it to envelope trees and blend into Hyde Park to a certain degree; all the while, the Crystal Palace was anything but a part of the park itself, as evidenced by the fact that if one does not get inside the structure (as do the Sandboys family of Henry Mayhew's 1851, Or the Adventure of Cursty Sandboys), then one has not "seen" the Great Exhibition. 20 20 Mayhew writes, "All they [the Sandboys family] wanted was to be able to say they had seen the Exhibition. Mrs. Cursty did not hesitate to confess, that after all she had suffered, she did not, for her part, care whether she saw it or not. All she desired was just to put her nose inside the door, [. . .]" (148). While the Sandboys family does spend a great deal of time in Hyde Park (they even witness the Royal Family's procession into the Crystal Palace), they need to step inside the Crystal Palace to experience the Great Exhibition, even if it is just for a moment so Mrs. Cursty Sandboys can "put her nose in the door." While the Sandboys family spends a great deal of time in Hyde Park, unless they step inside the Crystal Palace, they have not experienced the Great 12 The Crystal Palace is a strange location, one that clearly perplexes and functions as a site of many conflicting spaces within its semi-transparent walls. Victorian scholars, such as Barbara J. Black, have linked Victorian exhibitions and public museums to Michel Foucault's concept of the heterotopia as a space that is the combination of other spaces yet distinct in its own way. Foucault's heterotopia is a location, grounded in reality, unlike the idealistic utopia. It is a complex space, like that of the Great Exhibition, "capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible." 21 Like a heterotopia, the Crystal Palace is both natural landscape and manmade structure, fairy palace and material location, permanent museum and impermanent exhibition, and belonging to "all the world" while decidedly an exhibition of British ingenuity. Even if we are to applaud (as many Victorians did) the vast numbers of working-class visitors who were admitted to the Crystal Palace, it was still a public space which required admission that isolated many who could not afford the shilling entry fee. Foucault writes, "Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place." 22 Black continues this idea Exhibition. Mayhew connects privilege and exclusivity to the interior of the Crystal Palace: "Never was there such a crowd congregated in any part of London, and certainly in no other part of the world. The multitudes that had entered the Building were but as a few grains of sand collected, as it were, from the vast shore of human beings without. [. . .] It has been said that not less than half a million of people were gathered together in the Parks alone, and doubtless with truth, for it had been declared a general holiday, as it were by universal acclamation, throughout the metropolis" (144). 21 Michel Foucault (trans. by Jay Miskowiec),"Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16, 1 (Spring 1986), 25. 22 Ibid., 26. 13 when she writes that the museum had "something distinctive from the chaos of the city streets, for the museum experience was monitored and controlled. The antithesis of the city, the museum was well-ordered, beautiful, quiet. [. . .] So much like the city, so dissimilar to it [. . .]." 23 Even as the Crystal Palace shares in common with Foucault's heterotopia its capacity to combine conflicting concepts and locations within its walls coupled with its ability to be both opened and closed to the British public (and the world), a key difference between the Crystal Palace and Foucault's heterotopia lies in the fact that the Crystal Palace enhanced social confusion, not serenity. Unlike Foucault's heterotopia which functions as a way to "create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy," 24 descriptions of the Crystal Palace do not include praise for its scrupulous organization. (In fact, the sheer number of exhibits and its arrangement overwhelmed visitors and incited symptoms of anxiety; despite the efforts of the seemingly infinite number of guidebooks published to help those inside the Crystal Palace, many could not find their way around the building in a logical progression.) Writers did not extol the Great Exhibition as flawless or as a truly positive contrast to London's city streets. Instead, the Crystal Palace exists within Victorian literature and culture, not as a contrast to the mid-Victorian chaotic and transitioning 23 Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums, (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 26. 24 Foucault, 27. 14 world, but a puzzling and unruly space which confronts the issues of a world in transition head on. All in all, the Crystal Palace is both a location with obvious material boundaries and a site of uncertain social margins, an ever-shifting space symptomatic of a world perceived to be in transition. In order to describe the phenomenon of the Crystal Palace and other anxiety-provoking spaces of the 1850s, I coined the term "transitive space." The word “transitive” is no longer employed today apart from its use as a term in mathematics and as a type of verb, but in the mid-Victorian period before it was replaced by the word “transitional” in the late 1860s, the word described a location that was “characterized by or involving transition, in various senses: that has something passing through it; that itself passes through stages; that forms a transition (real, or in thought) between two stages, positions, or conditions; that is in an intermediate stage or position; transitional; intermediate; transformational.” 25 Much like the spaces I describe, the word transitive itself was a word in transition. During the mid-Victorian period through the late nineteenth century, the word began to retain a somber tone. Less about the physical, social, and emotional space between stages, the word transitive became associated with a finite ending. Also no longer used today, transitive became something that was “passing away, transient, transitory” by the early twentieth century. The history of the word combined with its undertones of longing for the fleeting make it the ideal term for the peculiar spaces that are the focus of my study in the mid-Victorian "age of transition." 25 "transitive, a.," The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press, 10 October 2010 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50256300>. 15 As indicated by the prefix "trans-", a transitive space is a site of confusion, one with seemingly clear material and social limitations and boundaries, but one that also possesses an equal uncertainty in regard to how the space functions and will continue to operate within the world. Transitive spaces are defined clearly with material boundaries (such as the iron and glass of the Crystal Palace), but within narratives, they lack definitive social and cultural margins, which incites and also allows for the confrontation of mid-Victorian anxiety as characters interact with the locations. The transitive space is a particularly mid-Victorian phenomenon. I plant my study of the transitive space within the years following the Great Exhibition specifically because this time, while viewed by many as an unrevolutionary period in Victorian history, was, in fact, still affected by the cultural, social, and technological changes inspired by the Chartist rebellion and the Great Exhibition. While other time periods may also allow for transitive spaces within literature, the mid-Victorian period with its emphasis on globalization, its hyperawareness of the past, present, and future, and its apprehension surrounding rapid change allows for these locations to abound. Further, transitive spaces in mid-Victorian Britain, unlike locations created during other times of cultural and social transition, are unique in that during this time, medical and cultural thought emphasized that locations could influence and incite bodily reactions. Even as the transitive spaces I examine reflect on cultural and social misgivings of the mid-Victorian period, they are not microcosms of Great Britain, but intensified reflections of mid-Victorian social and cultural anxieties. Unlike the microcosm, the transitive space is not a world in miniature or a small symbolic system demonstrative of 16 greater societal issues. Instead, the transitive space overlaps and is capable of becoming one with the space of the world outside of its borders. Its ability to be both its own location and that of the world around it (along with its social and cultural sites of contention) allow for the space both to illuminate problems with Victorian culture and become the site and the cause of these troubles itself. The Crystal Palace is not the only area that functions in this manner. A transitive space also describes other less traditionally viewed locations of upheaval: the house, the female, disabled body, and the metropole, specifically London within mid-Victorian novels. These seemingly unrelated nouns—house, body, and city—all connect in that within each novel (North and South, Hide and Seek, and Little Dorrit), published during the years immediately following the Great Exhibition), these spaces share a great deal in common with the Crystal Palace in terms of how these spaces function as sites of anticipated social confusion. Within each novel, these locations function as sources of mid-Victorian defined anxiety for characters due to their perplexing boundaries and confusing social roles in the texts. 26 At the same time, the transitive spaces allow for the illumination and direct confrontation of social issues of the time which means that they are vital to the narrative structure of each novel. For example, my second chapter explores the notion of the home as a clearly class-coded space and how the Thornton 26 Within all of these novels, the transitive spaces must be clearly defined in order for the narrative to end. Yet within these novels, these sites of confusion function within these texts as stimuli for their narratives. The twisting and puzzling nature of the transitive space encourages narrative and, therefore, spurs the continuation of the story. Once the space becomes defined as belonging to someone (a social class, a new breed of Londoner, for example), the story can conclude. Without these spaces of social confusion, the story loses its ability to carry on, yet throughout the narrative, characters struggle to control these spaces. Transitive spaces are sites of conflict, and once resolved with social boundaries, they are no longer a threat to characters and the narrative can successfully conclude. 17 House at Marlborough Mills breaks down the assumptions of what a middle-class home with disorder stemming from its perplexing role as both a working-class factory and a middle-class home. In my third chapter, Mary, the deaf and mute foundling and heroine of Hide and Seek, becomes a walking transitive space: a source of sensory distortion and contagion in the text until she finds her place within the middle-class by the end of the three-volume novel. London as a site of globalization and technological transition creates a source of cultural apprehension both for Londoners and writers abroad in my fourth chapter. Within the novel Little Dorrit, London as a city is particularly confusing; it is both contracting as it closes itself off from the rest of the world and expanding as it continues its global presence. Without these transitive spaces, which physically affect the novels' characters, each of these novels would not be able to tell the same story. Significantly, the spaces I study are not governmental. Contrary to the notion of highly-controlled governmental offices or systems popularized by Dickens in which nothing happens, transitive spaces, by their very nature, must be sites of high energy and action, not inaction. Unlike the stagnation inspired by bureaucracy of the Circumlocution Office, for example, a transitive space is a place of excess not lack. The overproduction of ideas and potential for future social change allow for the transitive space to become anything and create myriad futures, which can range from empowering to threatening and anxiety-provoking by mid-Victorian standards. Further, because these spaces are not governmental or owned by the aristocracy, they demonstrate the power structures present in mid-Victorian society from the bottom up. As Foucault demonstrates, "One must suppose rather that the manifold relationships of force that take shape and come into play 18 in the machinery of production, in families, limited groups, and institutions, are the basis for wide-ranging effects of cleavage that run through the social body as a whole." 27 In other words, my project focuses on locations traversed not solely by British royalty and members of the landed gentry, but it centers on the very places of contention in which the middle and lower classes are reinforcing mid-Victorian power dynamics. Within the transitive space, the way in which mid-Victorian power definitions could change is highlighted along with the self-regulating systems of power operating society. Because of our contemporary tendency to celebrate the Great Exhibition as an idyllic space, the Crystal Palace, on first glance, might seem like an odd launching point for a work on fictional representations of social confusion, individual anxiety in the mid- Victorian sense, and cultural unease, yet it is an apt location to delve into how the transitive space functions within mid-Victorian novels and fictional metaphors constructed in non-fiction. As I explore in my first chapter, the Crystal Palace was a site of confusion for Victorian readers specifically because its mission included the notion that all people from all classes of Great Britain and the world could mingle within its walls. This seemingly democratic social agenda inspired many writers to fret that access to the Crystal Palace would invite rebellion from England's working class and that everyone's lives (including those of Queen Victoria and the Royal Family) would be in danger within the Great Exhibition's walls. As George Johnson said, this social confusion, coupled with the Crystal Palace building's ability to be many different spaces 27 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One. Trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 19 at once, allowed for "the paralyzing influence of fear and anxiety" to manifest as sensory distortion for those within the Crystal Palace. Published in Punch, W. M. Thackeray’s poem “Mr. Moloney’s Account of the Crystal Palace” tells the story of an Irish visitor’s impressions of the Great Exhibition. In the thick accent of the character Mr. Maloney, Thackeray writes, “With conscious proide/ I stud insoide/ And looked the World’s Great Fair in,/ Until me sight/ Was dazzled quite,/ And couldn’t see for staring.” 28 Of course, Thackeray did not know what it was like to “stand inside” the Crystal Palace when he wrote from the perspective of Mr. Maloney. After all, the poem was published before anyone had walked inside the Great Exhibition; yet, the idea that the interior of the Crystal Palace was believed to be capable of rendering a viewer blind (at the very moment when he should be using his eyes) stresses the cultural emphasis on the divergent space of the Crystal Palace and the anticipated danger of the space itself. Further, as Mr. Maloney describes the Crystal Palace's effect on his body, he shifts away from the "I" subject position. The "I" is erased from the sentiment "I couldn't see for staring" meaning that in the process of experiencing the Crystal Palace, Mr. Moloney has not only lost his ability to see, but the very features that make him an individual. Similarly, the cover sketch of the comedic picture book about the Great Exhibition, Mr. Goggleye’s Visit to the Exhibition of National Industry to be Held in London on the 1 st of April 1851, 29 shows a short man, Mr. Goggleye, who is all eyes and 28 “Mr. Maloney’s Account of the Crystal Palace,” Punch, 26 April 1851. 29 Anonymous, Mr. Goggleye’s Visit to the Exhibition of National Industry to be Held in London on the 1 st of April 1851(London: Timy Takem'in, 1851). 20 spectacles in many of the pictures, barely supporting a globe that is too large for his body. Within the space of the Crystal Palace, he has experienced literally too much for his eyes and body to handle. Throughout the book, the sights of Hyde Park leave the confused country visitor “perplexed” and generally overwhelmed, his body rendered insignificant and incapable compared to his larger-than-life, dilated eyes. The character, much like other fictional Great Exhibition visitors, attempts to assuage his confusion by purchasing a guidebook, but even the guidebook proves too heavy for him. In other words, any attempt to organize the space of the Crystal Palace into an easy-to-navigate exhibition only results in more physical and mental anxiety for those inside. Even Queen Victoria was overwhelmed by what she experienced inside. In The Queen’s Exhibition Journal, Victoria writes of physical exhaustion caused by seeing too much before the opening of the Great Exhibition on April 29, “I came back quite dead beat and my head really bewildered by the myriads of beautiful and wonderful things, which now quite dazzle one’s eyes.” 30 According to the OED, if one was “dazzled” during the nineteenth century, there were mental as well as physical implications. While the use of the verb “dazzle” has connotations through the seventeenth century of mental confusion and stupefaction, the verb’s origins and association with mental and physical insensibility is particularly useful to a study of anxiety-produced sensory overload in the nineteenth century. Particularly noteworthy is the now obsolete definition: “Of the eyes: To lose the faculty of distinct 30 C.R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and Its Fruits, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 45. Also quoted in Heather Glen's Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 221. 21 and steady vision, esp. from gazing at too bright a light” a definition that could be applied literally and figuratively through the late seventeenth century. Even as the verb changed in definition, in the 1850s, “dazzle,” used in the transitive sense, meant to “to overpower, confuse, or dim (the vision), esp. with excess of brightness” and “to overpower or confound (the mental facilities), esp. with brilliant or showy qualities; ‘to strike or surprise with splendor.’ Both of these definitions share the key word “overpower” demonstrating perhaps a danger of the Exhibition that everyone from Irish working-class visitors to the Queen could be rendered powerless by what they experience within the glass and iron walls of the Crystal Palace. In the Crystal Palace and other similar locations I will explore, visitors could experience bodily manifestations of change as society at large was in the process of transforming. In Chapter 1, entitled “Swimming Upstream to the ‘Human Hive’: Metaphoric Constructions of Working-Class Spectators at the Crystal Palace,” I begin my study with an analysis of nonfiction written before, during, and immediately following the Great Exhibition. In this chapter, I explore the subject position of the middle class writer and how he negotiated the transitive space before and after the introduction of shilling days, which were designed to allow working-class visitors an opportunity to experience and learn from the Crystal Palace. Within this chapter, I argue that the middle- class writers employ metaphors, such as the image of a “human hive” and a “human stream” to create class distinction in the distorting and confusing space of the Crystal Palace. Even though the shilling days were designed to allow for working-class education and the Crystal Palace was touted as a space where all classes could intermingle, these 22 metaphors allow for writers to distinguish themselves and others from what they deemed the unthinking, working-class masses. In this chapter, I argue that the fear of revolution stemming from the Chartist Rebellion can be seen in the need to control the working- class spectators within the Crystal Palace. Faced with a space that could potentially allow for distortion and the elimination of social class since working-class men and women could see and experience the same sights as the Queen herself, these writers employ metaphors of the human hive and stream to dehumanize and deindividualize working- class Great Exhibition attendees. Within transitive spaces, such as the Crystal Palace, this type of future-anticipated anxiety possesses the power to overwhelm the body and the body's ability to appear and function normally and instead, creates sensory distortion in anxiety's wake. Transitioning from the first chapter in which I explore how nonfiction writers positioned themselves in the confused social space of the Crystal Palace, my second chapter turns to the traditional middle-class space of the house. In "'A Din of Angry Voices' at Home: England's Class Conflict within The Transitive Space of the Thornton House," I examine the role of the Thornton House in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Instead of a refuge from the factory, the Thornton House embodies and enhances the class conflict within the novel. Both a throwback to older ideas of home and labor in which one's dwelling would be close to one's place of business and reference to an unknown future in which working- class issues and conditions would pervade the safe refuge of the mid-Victorian, middle- class home, the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills functions within North and South 23 as a site of future-produced anxiety that must be resolved through Margaret, the future owner's, education. Chapter Three, "'Destroying the General Uniformity': Transitive Spaces as Contagious Locations in Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek," revolves around the class- coded suburb at the center of Collins's three-volume novel and a female character who shares affinity with the one deviant house in the neighborhood. In actuality no mid- Victorian suburb was as meticulously planned and controlled as Collins' setting for his novel, yet the clear class lines that are in the background allow for Mary's body to serve as its own site of class confusion spreading sensory distortion throughout the class-coded world of the novel. Similar to how the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills functions as a space that disturbs and educates Margaret about class-related issues by overwhelming her body, Mary's presence in Hide and Seek serves as a living and walking transitive space in her own right. Like the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills and the Crystal Palace, Mary's body lacks clear social boundaries, and therefore, she needs to be clearly placed in a class for the novel to end. While material locations, such as the Crystal Palace and the Thornton House, might be able to exist as transitive spaces, Mary, as a female foundling, must be controlled. In my final chapter, "'Narrowed to these Dimensions': Progress, Decline, and Stagnation in Mid-Victorian London and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit," I turn to the transitive space of the metropole, specifically the confusion surrounding London as it grows in population during the "age of transition." I explore Little Dorrit in this chapter because even as the novel contains nostalgia for a lost time, it emphasizes that the forces 24 at work in mid-Victorian Britain could bring about both constructive and destructive change. Published in parts between 1855 and 1857, Little Dorrit presents London and the world at large as locations with ever-shifting centers. While Little Dorrit is one of Dickens's most international novels, the distinctions between the social and cultural novel's international locales become blurred. Every place Amy and other characters travel become London, and yet, London itself lacks a clear center and definition within the novel. After exploring the notion of the mid-Victorian transitive space in my four chapters, in my coda, I turn to representations of the Crystal Palace after the Great Exhibition. Specifically, I examine how the Crystal Palace has been constructed as a representation of democratic ideals after it was torn down in 1852. Exploring reminiscences for the Crystal Palace which range from being written shortly after the Great Exhibition ended to our contemporary representations of the Crystal Palace in romance novels, graphic novels, and film, I argue that the Crystal Palace, once a space of transition, has now become a clearly grounded site for our contemporary imagination. No longer a space of confusion, the Crystal Palace represents a location of Victorian modernity, a celebration of new ideals and innovation. Even contemporary scholars, such as Tony Bennett connect the Great Exhibition to a "mid-nineteenth century reconceptualization of museums as cultural resources" which allowed for a "significant revaluation of early cultural strategies" as he compares the "new conception" of a museum "as an instrument of public instruction" to the "earlier phase" which lacked "openness" and "served to distinguish the bourgeois public from the rough and raucous 25 manners of the general populace" (28). As my dissertation demonstrates, while the Great Exhibition did allow for an attempt at education, the concerns of Great Exhibition observers and critics clearly place the Crystal Palace not as the first modern public museum or even a forerunner of the public, educationally-oriented museum defined by Bennett. Instead, I argue that the Great Exhibition and the novels published during the 1850s demonstrate a cultural fear of a working-class uprising which dictated descriptions of working-class spectators as unable to see or hear critically and only capable of physical destruction. 26 Chapter One Swimming Upstream to the "Human Hive": Metaphoric Constructions of Working-Class Spectators at the Crystal Palace When a Victorian journalist is faced with the task of describing the working-class crowd within the Crystal Palace, he 31 must begin the tricky verbal dance determining how he will describe his physical location as observer as well as those he is observing. This positioning becomes all the more complicated when he writes about the process of being a spectator viewing those who are participating in spectating gazes themselves. After all, the writer does not view himself as one of the masses since he has different motivations for viewing; he most likely observes the crowd purposefully to write about it. At the same time, he usually occupies the same physical space as those in the crowd (even if he fictitiously and fantastically elevates himself above others to depict the crowd as a whole). He looks at the same objects (material or, as in the case of the Great Exhibition where the upper classes would go “to see and be seen,” 32 he engages in a similar, if not identical, activity of looking as he chronicles the people in the Exhibition itself). The 31 Most of the nonfiction writers with which I will be engaging are anonymous. Surely, some of these articles were written by women. Nevertheless, for the sake of simplicity and because the majority of Victorian journalists were male, I will employ “he” throughout this section. 32 In The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, Jeffrey A. Auerbach writes, that “fashionable society virtually ignored the exhibits altogether, preferring instead to remain in the transept of the Crystal Palace ‘to see and be seen’” (128). In late May, The Times criticized the upper classes “amusing themselves” and the writer “fear[s] that they have, upon the whole, made but an indifferent use of their opportunities” “lounging” in the transept nave. Nonetheless, the article’s writer concedes that “the aristocratic, the fashionable, and the well-to-do portions of the community” have the privilege of “leisurely inspection,” something that the predicted hordes of working-class visitors on Shilling Days will lack (The Times, 24 May, 1851, 8). 27 writer walks the same corridors, presumably bumping elbows with those he later will describe. If one were to look at his interaction from the outside, without the privilege of his internal subject position, he too would appear as one of the masses. But in his article, the writer goes to great lengths, even employing images and metaphors which miniaturize working-class spectators within the Great Exhibition. For example, in metaphors, such as the "human hive," the writer floats over the crowd to distinguish himself from the others who are “below” him, while in images of a human stream, visitors are deindividualized and not granted a subject position. Following the Chartist uprising, these images in which writers shrink working-class spectators to the size of insects or droplets of water abound. Susan R. Horton, in her analysis of Victorian optics, writes, “No spectators are entirely comfortable knowing that the eye is fallible—or seeing themselves as spectators.” 33 I argue that authors who employ these metaphors when describing transitive spaces are clearly uncomfortable with their roles as spectators. They are unable to report on the scene as they would have experienced it inside the Great Exhibition as a member of the crowd. Instead, they must create a subject position above a miniaturized “human hive” or stream with a lens that allows them detailed, class-biased zoom capabilities. In discussing cinema, Christian Metz posits that spectators need a “sanctioning construction” to justify to themselves their role as viewers. 34 This 33 Susan R. Horton, “Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves,” in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995), 13. 34 Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton and Annwyl Williams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 12. 28 construction can be translated to first person narration as the reason a speaker tells him or herself that it is acceptable to keep looking, or as Horton writes the sanctioning construction is “something that makes it ‘all right’ to be just a spectator.” 35 The authors' sanctioning construction is the “human hive” or stream; both metaphors allow them to miniaturize working-class subjects, and therefore, clearly differentiate their role as observers. Leading up to, during, and even after the government allowed working-class attendees discounted entry into the Crystal Palace on Shilling Days, images, such as the human hive, flourished. While classical bee imagery usually emphasizes an "ideal" class structure in which the drones work to support the Queen, 36 writers describing working- class spectators within the Crystal Palace utilize bee and other miniaturizing metaphors in order to classify and distinguish between the classes in a space fraught with social confusion and potential for change. In the transitive space of the Crystal Palace, class distinctions could potentially deteriorate at any moment; and yet, with the clear power structure of the observer and the hive, for example, writers could create a fictionalized world in which they could clearly demonstrate that the status quo was being maintained. Even as these writers attempt to emphasize their own non-dangerous objectivity, in positioning and describing the classes in unrealistic ways, they align themselves 35 Horton, 14. 36 George Peabody’s speech on October 21, 1851 regarding the Great Exhibition is just one of the many examples of the image of the hive being used as a means of celebrating English industrial structures. Peabody said of the Crystal Palace, “In this bee-hive, have been represented the inventive genius of man, his rise and progress in the industrial pursuits, and all that makes him and ennobles him” (Peabody 65-66). 29 politically with those who resist potential social and cultural change following the Chartist rebellion. As evidenced by fables such as the 1847 Christmas fairytale The Good Genius that Turned Everything into Gold, or The Queen Bee and the Magic Dress not to mention the late eighteenth century text, which was reprinted through the early Victorian period, Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories, Victorian adults and children alike were educated to believe that the hive was ruled by a queen and reinforced by the work of the drones, much like their own British society. 37 In an 1849 article entitled “The Swarming of the Bees” printed in the periodical, Eliza Cook’s Journal, 38 the author uses the bee metaphor to help justify the “natural” desire for members of a society to want to break with tradition: WHEN Bees get too thick in the hive, and want elbow- room, they swarm; leaving their parent nest behind, they fly away, and commence business on their own account. And when the Bees of the human hive find their villages, towns, and cities, become too populous and crowded for the territory on which they are planted [. . .] As with Bees, so with men. The young, the enterprising, the adventurous, go forth on their new career, leaving to the old members of the hive the enjoyment of their comfortable nest” (1). Even as bees are used as natural models to help justify a break with traditional structures, the writers emphasize the bees’ association with hard work and commerce with phrases such as “commence business on their own account,” “new career” and “enterprising.” 37 According to Gale Turley Houston, Queen Victoria read Mrs. Trimmer's Fabulous Histories as a child (18). 38 May 12, 1849. 30 Even as they break free of the established hive to build new “nests,” bees cannot break away from their lot in life: labor. The Mayhew Brothers, in The Good Genius that Turned Everything into Gold, celebrate bees as good workers referring to the product they create as “golden” and their hive as a “little savings-bank.” 39 In the story, a queen bee rewards a destitute woodsman with a house and riches for his ability to relate to the bees’ work ethic when he chooses not to steal from their hive. His ability to say to the bees “we are fellow labourers, and misery has taught me mercy, even to such as you” 40 allows him to be granted wishes by the all-powerful queen. In other words, the tale rewards its main human character for accepting his affinity with worker bees and his role in society as a small, insect-like working-class subject. If the main character had attempted to rise above his station as a laborer and taken the “savings” of the queen, he never would have been showered in riches. In the world of the Mayhew fairytale, embracing one’s place in society as a laborer and not disrupting the social workings of the hive will bring happiness. But while the image of the hive carries the connotation of social order reinforced by strict class boundaries, the use of the hive to describe human, working-class subjects in spectator positions does not serve always as a celebration of the current social order, but the hive and subsequent insect metaphors are a means of distancing the writers as viewers from those in the working classes. Writers “see” the miniaturized whole crowd without focusing on the individual wants or needs of the people that inhabit the transitive 39 The Brothers Mayhew, The Good Genius that Turned Everything into Gold, or The Queen Bee and the Magic Dress: A Christmas Fairy Tale (London: David Bogue 86 Fleet Street, 1847), 3. 40 Ibid., 3. 31 space of the Crystal Palace. In this chapter, I argue that the hive, with its particularly rich visual nature in terms of being a metaphor for describing class relations and its connection to Victorian material collections as spaces in which naturalists and amateurs alike could display nature, allows for writers, and by implication readers, to position themselves as spectators, distanced and aloof in the face of those wishing for social change. Despite the Great Exhibition's emphasis on Industry, the bee was the only worker (human or otherwise) featured at the Great Exhibition, even if it was in order to demonstrate to visitors how a hive could effectively function without the then newly- controversial process of killing the bees at each harvest. 41 Alfred Neighbour, who displayed one of his hives at the Great Exhibition (significantly a glass hive within the famous glass and iron structure of the Crystal Palace), includes reminiscences of his hive in his book The Apiary; or, Bees, Bee-hives, and Bee Culture. Neighbour incorporates the following quotation from The Express on the Great Exhibition’s display of bees at work: “'These useful little creatures have been highly honoured by the Executive Committee, for all the animal workers that contribute to the interest of the Exhibition, they alone are allowed therein to display their matchless ingenuity and skill.'” 42 In 1851, under the 41 Alfred Neighbour wrote about the new hives exhibited at the Exhibition that they produced “the purest honey, without destroying or even injuring the bees, thus humanely superseding the barbarous and hateful system of murdering these interesting insects to obtain the produce of their industry” (258). 42 Alfred Neighbour, The Apiary; or, Bees, Bee-hives, and Bee Culture: Being a Familiar Account of the Habits of Bees, and the Most Improved Methods of Management, with Full Directions, Adapted for the Cottager, Farmer, or Scientific Apiarian, (London: Kent and Co., Paternoster Row; Geo: Neighbour and Sons, 1865), 258. 32 clearly visually-oriented title “Pictures for the Exhibition of Industry,” a Punch author wrote: The Great Exhibition of Industry will not be complete without an addition which Punch proposed to make to it. An exhibition of manufactures and commodities is not an exhibition of Industry, but only the results of it. A real exposition of Industry would require that the INDUSTRIOUS themselves should be exhibited as well as their productions. In a glass hive we ought to show the bees at work. 43 Of course, Punch is a satirical publication; 44 nonetheless, its satire speaks to a tension in the establishment of the Great Exhibition itself. While placing the workers on display is not a genuine suggestion as Punch points out that “a needlewomen cannot be starved, nor tailors ‘sweated,’ nor miners blown up, amongst a multitude of people,” the establishment of the Exhibition, despite its emphasis on the all-encompassing works of industry (as indicated by its title “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations”), ignores industry’s effects on laborers and the physical dangers and damages it creates. 45 While actual bees are allowed to be shown at work in glass hives such as 43 “Pictures for the Exhibition of Industry,” Punch, Vol. XX,(London: Published at the Office 85, Fleet Street, 1851), 42. 44 The preface to Punch’s twentieth volume reads, “To the self-respecting People of England, with affectionate and admiring hearts now mingling in amity and brotherhood with men of all climes in that Crystal Palace, PUNCH offers his own Collection,—the accumulation of vast Intellectual Wealth, and the produce of the richest Mines of Wit, brought together by the combined resources of Art and Industry. As in the Great Hive to which the World’s Bees have contributed their labours, PUNCH has here concentrated the treasures of his own hive, in which ,though there may be a little taste of the sting, there is no lack of honey. His Exhibition has the same object in view as that now collected in the Crystal Palace, to which he stood Sponsor, and gave the name,—THE ADVANCEMENT AND HAPPINESS OF MANKIND, With the Peace and Goodwill of all Nations” (i-ii). The parallel between a collection of works, such as those found in a volume of Punch and a collection of objects will be further explored in Chapter Two. 45 It is difficult to ignore that the Exhibition specifically featured a hive created by J. Rowbottom which allowed for “the taking of honey without destroying the hive or bees” according to the 33 Neighbour’s, 46 the workers themselves are only “displayed” indirectly as viewers of the objects of their labor visiting on Shilling Days in publications such as The Times. While the image of the hive is clearly associated with anthropological observation when applied to human viewers, the “human hive” (or "Crystal Hive" as it was sometimes called, directly referring to the Crystal Palace) was utilized in one significant way to indicate the workings of the upper-classes, however indirectly. The Crystal Palace’s transept, which was the area that the upper-classes congregated for the main purpose of being viewed and viewing other people at the Great Exhibition 47 and the site of controversy as the working-classes began to take over the area on Shilling Days, was also the area housing a hive that allowed for the intermingling and free movement of bees Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851 (62). In the Punch article, the writer immediately makes the transition from the metaphor of the hive to the images of death associated with labor, perhaps playing upon the convention of mercilessly not caring about the lives of the workers (and purposefully doing them bodily harm) in order to harvest the product of their labors. When beekeeping and instruction manual writers, such as Neighbour, Edward Bevan (The Honeybee, 1834), and Samuel Bagster (The Management of Bees, 1843), among others, describe the product of the bees’ labor (the honey), they usually use the word “industry” as a means of praising the bees for their hard work. 46 The glass (or significantly “crystal”) hive was a common design theme, most likely inspired by the fact that the Great Exhibition was housed in Paxton’s Crystal Palace. While the hives on display differed in design and name, on the whole they emphasized the ability to view the bees at work. From Neighbour and Lynes’ “ladies’ observatory hive” to J. Sholl’s “Castle bee hive,” an “observatory bee hive” (Official Catalogue 139. 52). Neighbour writes about how one of his observatory hives made of glass particularly interested Queen Victoria and family: “Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Consort, with the Royal Children, were some time engaged in watching with deep interest the busy scene before them, and putting many questions to the habits and economy of the honey-bee” (259). 47 A Punch author describing the scene on the first Shilling Day wrote, “The high-paying portion of the public go to look at each other, and to be looked at, while the shilling visitors go to gain instruction from what they see; and the result is, they are far better behaved than the well-dressed promenaders who push each other about, and stare each other out of countenance on the days of the high price of admission” (“The Shilling Days at the Crystal Palace,” 240). 34 in and out of the Crystal Palace. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge describes the view of the transept and hive from above the scene, but curiously, no people are described as being in or near the transept area, despite its popularity: The best view of the transept was obtained from a spot in the gallery, immediately over the south entrance doors: the arched roof, with its complex ribs and arches of daring span, was here seen to great advantage, and the great fan-like window at its extremity appeared to form a beautiful termination to the view. [. . .] From the northern gallery of the transept an interesting view, [. . .]. Close to this spot a hive of bees were exhibited in full work, being allowed an exit to Kensington Gardens through a small aperture made in the pane against which the hives were placed. 48 The transept, the section of the Crystal Palace in which the height of ceiling was significantly higher than the rest of the building (to help accommodate the trees originally in the space), 49 housed statues of people such as those of Adam and Eve, a girl praying, Prometheus and a blind Milton with his daughter; but it also accommodated the transept gallery where from above “hundreds of delighted ladies and gentlemen are also sitting upon splendid couches; and at this nearest point, take as good a view as we can of the whole interior edifice.” 50 From this fantastic vantage point, “we [the ladies and gentlemen looking down from the gallery and the author himself] are now at a point to command as can be had of the tout ensemble of this grand Exhibition.” 51 While Jeffrey A. Auerbach 48 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, The Industry of Nations, as Exemplified in the Great Exhibition of 1851, (London: The Committee of General Literature and Education, Appointed by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1851): 181. 49 Horace Greeley, The Crystal Palace and Its Lessons: A Lecture, (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1851), 12. 50 William A. Drew, Glimpses and Gatherings, During a Voyage and Visit to London and the Great Exhibition in the Summer of 1851, (Austusta, ME: Homan & Manley, 1852), 335. 51 Ibid, 335. 35 argues that “the Great Exhibition also forced the classes into unprecedented degrees of proximity to one another,” 52 when depicting the working-classes engaging in the act of looking, it was still important for the author to position himself above those about which he is writing. While it might be tempting to agree with the sentiment inspired by the Economist 53 that the Great Exhibition allowed for the “meeting” and “sharing” of all classes and to celebrate the Great Exhibition as a “social space—where all classes could coexist,” 54 as Auerbach does, the distinction between the heights at which the different classes are allowed to be described is significant. Even as the working-classes “take over” the Crystal Palace on Shilling Days, writers do not depict them as occupying the vantage point over the Transept, although one can only presume that they would have explored and spent time in that area as well. Instead, observers such as Gideon Mitchell, describe working-class visitors as sitting below the marble statues when he writes: ‘Went again to the exhibition; the crowd tremendous; [. . .] Vulgar, ignorant, country people: many dirty women with their infants were sitting giving suck with their breasts uncovered, beneath the lovely female figures of the sculptor. Oh! how I wished I had the power to petrify the living, and animate the marble.’ 55 Mitchell's statement is fraught with disturbing images of conceptions of class and gender, not to mention an unsettling statement on beauty and perceived differences between urban and country people. Additionally, Mitchell's comments speak to privileged, class- 52 Auerbach, 155. 53 Cited in Auerbach, 154. 54 Auerbach, 154. 55 Cited in Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 155. 36 biased apprehension regarding England's future. Both Mitchell and a Punch cartoon, “Dinner-Time at the Crystal Palace,” (Figure 1) which pokes fun at the nervousness associated with the working-class people taking over the popular transept area of the Great Exhibition, depict a working-class woman breastfeeding a child at the center of their verbal and visual images. While Mitchell’s disgust at seeing the “dirty” skin of women nursing their children beneath what he deems to be the far superior marble figures from history and literature, inspires his violent desire to “petrify” those he deems unworthy of sharing the same physical space with the statues, the Punch illustrator makes the working-class figures the more positive focal point of the cartoon. A statue of Shakespeare serves as the backdrop for the working-class crowd at the center of the picture, but it is the only statue in the picture and its lighter lines and downcast eyes draw the observer’s eye to the darker and more detailed focal point at the base of the statue: the image of a mother breast-feeding an infant as a woman to her right looks on. Significantly, the woman to the right is wearing spectacles, emphasizing her ability to see and focus on the baby nursing. The bespectacled working-class woman ignores bourgeois convention when she disregards the statue and the other objects in the Crystal Palace. Instead, she is focused in on the mother feeding her child, or symbolically, the future of England, the very image that disturbs Mitchell. He does not want the working-class child to become England’s future. Instead, he wishes to substitute the newly-petrified mother and child with those he has “animated” from England’s fictional and historical past. 56 56 According to Richard D. Altick in The Shows of London, a similar situation occurred in British public museums, such as the South Kensington Museum, when they attempted to accommodate the working-classes. For example, the South Kensington Museum, as the first noncommercial 37 Figure 1: Punch's "Dinner-Time at the Crystal Palace." museum in London, tried to stay open two nights a week from seven to ten, but even though the mission of the museum included equal access for all, writers depicted drunk and disorderly working-class museum visitors instead of Henry Cole's idealistic vision of working-class families enjoying the museum as a learning experience (499-500). 38 At the focus of the Punch cartoon, the approximately twelve figures are eating or drinking from their picnic baskets, demonstrating the stereotypical physical quality that the working-class were expected to bring to the Exhibition. At the base of Shakespeare’s statue, a quotation from Troilus and Cressida reads, “One Touch of Nature Makes the Whole World Kin.” Punch's statement in incorporating the quotation demonstrates the irony present in the scene: the “natural” act of feeding one’s young or fueling one’s body are the very acts which are viewed as significant desecrations by viewers such as Mitchell. Furthering the irony, this brush with nature and the workings of the human body do not unite the classes in kinship, but only serve to distance them further. The classes are not united in kinship. In fact, as Shakespeare looks down on the working-class subjects who do not meet his gaze, we are reminded of the Great Exhibition journalist who looks down on the scene of working-class subjects from his artificial position above them. Along the lines of Mitchell’s description, the Times depicts working-class viewers of a family’s material collection as not worthy of individual attention because of their social class and motivations for viewing. As the Crystal Palace became a transitive space when it went from being occupied by middle and upper classes to upper, middle, and working-classes on Shilling Days, the estate of Stowe went from being a space clearly coded as upper-class to one overpopulated by the working-classes over night. On August 14, 1848, a horde of British working-class spectators swarmed Stowe, the estate of the bankrupt Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, to observe and perhaps revel in the downfall of one of Britain’s most powerful aristocratic families. The Times describes the 39 mass of viewers as “an endless succession of visitors, who from morning to night have flowed in an uninterrupted stream from room to room, and floor to floor—not to enjoy the hospitality of the lord, or to congratulate him on his countless treasures of art, but to see an ancient family ruined, their palace marked for destruction, and its contents scattered to the four winds of Heaven.” 57 The act of spectating is celebrated in the article as the author revels in the important objects of British history which are now up for sale (not to mention his own powers of observation). Viewing the people inside Stowe from his vantage point outside and above the house, he specifically calls the scene a “human hive.” Yet, within the hive, not all spectators are equal. The author clearly points out that there is a right way and a wrong way to visit Stowe. If the act of looking is motivated not by a conventional desire to marvel at the aesthetic or historical value of a family’s treasures, but at the ruin of a family itself or, perhaps worse, provoked by the thoughtless attraction to see the house because everyone else is visiting, the act, according to the author, is destructive. Further emphasizing the violation is the insect imagery used to describe Stowe’s “invaders.” The choice of “an uninterrupted stream” to describe the visitors conjures images of salmon in a stream instinctually swimming without human consideration or reason. At the same time, the image of the “endless succession of visitors” more generally speaks to the conflicting nature of mid-Victorian spectatorship in a culture in which definitions of appropriate limitations of looking and class relations were at odds. 57 "London, Monday, August 14, 1848," The Times,14 August, 1848, 4. 40 For example, before Queen Victoria attended the second Shilling Day of the Great Exhibition, there was fear that she would be physically attacked by her working class subjects, 58 but at the same time, there was also an uneasy tension as to how comfortable the Queen would be surrounded by the gazes of the working classes. On May 31, 1851, The Economist proudly reported that “At the close of the first week of shilling days, we can say that no more orderly people ever existed than the multitude of London. The English have redeemed their character in this respect, and may henceforth be held up as a pattern to other nations.” 59 Of course, in order for the English people to be celebrated for their "redemption," they had to stray from the status quo. The unspoken source of mid- Victorian defined anxiety is the Chartist Rebellion. Similarly, Fraser’s Magazine for 58 Queen Victoria later writes to Lord John Russell on July 10, 1851 of her apprehension that a crowd gathered to witness the Queen and other members of the royal family enter and exit the ball held in commemoration of the Exhibition on July 9. She writes, “The Queen hastens to tell Lord John Russell how admirably everything went off last [night], and how enthusiastically we were received by an almost fearful mass of people in the streets; the greatest order prevailed, and the greatest and most gratifying enthusiasm. [. . .] our high gratification at the hearty, kind, and enthusiastic reception we met with during our progress through the City, both going and returning. Our only anxiety is lest any accident should have occurred from the great pressure of the dense crowds” (Letters II: 386). But just as the above articles praised those attending the Great Exhibition Shilling Days for their orderly behavior, the Queen’s praise of England’s working-class crowd comes more from personal relief at surviving what she italicizes as “fearful”: “the great pressure of the dense crowds.” After all, “dense crowds” had proven dangerous in the past for Queen Victoria. On May 31, 1842, she wrote to her uncle, “On returning from the chapel on Sunday, Albert was observing how civil the people were, and then suddenly turned to me and said it appeared to him as though a man had held out a pistol to the carriage, and that it had hung fire [. . .]. [. . .] he saw a man in the crowd as we came home from church, present a pistol to the carriage [. . .] the man then vanished” (Letters I: 398). In Lord John Russell’s letter to Prince Albert on April 19, 1851, he writes of the preparations for the Queen’s visit on a Shilling day, “I feel assured there will be no undue and inconvenient pressure of the crowd in the part of the building in which Her Majesty may be” (Letters II: 382). 59 “The Multitude at the Exhibition,” Economist 9 (31 May 1851), 586. 41 Town and Country in 1852 applauded the behavior of England’s working-classes, while also emphasizing the potential dangers of their “feverish curiosity”: [. . .] no circumstance connected with the ‘getting up’ and management of the affair is more remarkable than the conduct of the people. It is not to be disguised, that a feeling of alarm existed to a considerable extent while the preparations for the Exhibition were in progress. No man could clearly see his way out of the difficulties that surrounded the undertaking, and that seemed to increase the more he examined it. Regarded in the most favourable aspect, it was at best a leap in the dark. [. . .] The novelty and vastness of the place, and the feverish curiosity it excited, naturally enough produced an uneasiness which nothing could allay but the practical test of the adequacy of the safeguards adopted. London was to be overrun, sacked, and pillaged. How were the hordes of invaders to be lodged and fed? [. . .] The political disturbers, the heroes of barricades, and inventors of new constitutions, did not even show; and for all that the tens of thousands of visitors knew to the contrary by any outward manifestation, the metropolis did not house an individual malcontent, native or foreign. We escaped, too, all the horrors of other kinds that had been predicted for us. London was not eaten up; the Thames was not set on fire; and, except that the streets were full of people, there was no particular symptoms abroad from which so small an inconvenience as a drunken fray could be apprehended. 60 From the historical vantage point of a year later, Fraser’s Magazine is able to poke fun at some of the apocalyptic predictions associated with the Great Exhibition visitors. At the same time, the text speaks to the disturbing prospect of allowing foreign and domestic “invaders” to “overrun” London. The images of sight impairment (even blindness) demonstrate just how frightening the Great Exhibition was to some. Phrases such as “no man could clearly see” and “it was at best a leap in the dark” demonstrate the risks associated with planning the Exhibition. Without (fore)sight and the advantage of hindsight, the Crystal Palace could have become a dangerous place. 60 “Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-One,” Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, Vol. XLV, No. CCLXC, (London: John W. Parker and Son, January 1852), 22-23. 42 According to Fraser’s Magazine, there was something in the Crystal Palace itself that “excited” “feverish curiosity” in viewers. Interestingly, the Crystal Palace, in contrast to the images of darkness, even blindness, about the venture itself, was designed with light in mind. The building was similar to a greenhouse (The Times called landscape artist Joseph Paxton’s design for the Crystal Palace a “‘monstrous greenhouse’” 61 ) which meant that light from the sun would illuminate the objects and people within. While most contemporary writers of the Great Exhibition do not mention the connection, a greenhouse-like structure traps light along with heat. 62 Perhaps it is this physical association that allows for the building to create a “feverish curiosity” in its viewers. The coupling of “feverish” with “curiosity” is a bit puzzling especially since “curiosity” implies a “desire” or “interest” to learn, if not the careful study of an object, a trait that would seemingly be a positive quality in Great Exhibition viewers. But in linking the two 61 Auerbach, 50. 62 The Industry of Nations as Exemplified in the Great Exhibition of 1851, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1852, explains the varying temperatures within the Crystal Palace. The author accentuates how hot the Crystal Palace could get, stressing the days in particular that were too hot, usually Shilling Days due to the increase in the number of visitors. On the hottest day, the temperature inside was 97 degrees and “the air was not only hot, but vitiated” (253). The word “vitiated,” according to the OED, carries with it connotations of corruption and impurity. To vitriate the air means “to render” it “impure” and “injurous to life,” while it also implies the spread and lowering of morals with the definition, “to deprave in respect of principles or conduct; to lower the moral standard of (persons)” and the crippling of the senses with “To pervert (the eye, taste, etc.), so as to lead to false judgements or preferences.” In early July, the glass ends of the Crystal Palace were removed at the entrances to allow for more airflow. “Still, a difficulty of breathing was felt in the galleries,” the author writes (253). If the air was perceived as different within the Crystal Palace, the interior could affect the actions of the crowd within. And the air “below” in the transept was four degrees higher than that above, allowing for those who look down on the crowd below to be more comfortable (253). The fact that the air could be perceived as different and creating an effect on one’s actions within the Crystal Palace allows for another contributing factor to the mythical qualities of the interior of the Crystal Palace explored by Thomas Richards in The Commodity Culture of Victorian England. 43 words, Fraser’s Magazine connects a level of physicality with the curiosity. 63 A “feverish curiosity” is not just of the mind, but of the body as well, which enhances its dangerous potential in a crowd. In regards to the Queen, The Economist reporter, in a celebratory and patriotic tone, wrote, Her Majesty, anticipating no evil from mingling with her people, again visited the Palace with her guests, and was no more annoyed by the intrusion of too-curious gazers than on any other day. On Wednesday it is supposed that not less than 40,000 persons visited the Palace, and went through and departed, gratifying their curiosity without the slightest interruption or annoyance. 64 But even as the article celebrates the lack of “interruption or annoyance” created by the influx of working-class visitors, the fact that the article emphasizes how surprising it was that no one (particularly the Queen) was annoyed by their gazes, underscores the contemporary belief that the working-classes could cause damage with their “too- curious” gazes. Interestingly, the article stresses that the Queen was not any more annoyed by the working-class gazes than the gazes of those who regularly visited the Exhibition, perhaps emphasizing that as the Queen, the “too-curious” gazes of any subject below her is equally violating. Nonetheless, the image of a “stream” of visitors cannot be dismissed. This very same image was used to describe working-class Great Exhibition visitors on Shilling Days as the Great Exhibition itself was dubbed the “Crystal Hive” by contemporary 63 According to the OED, “feverish, a.” has associations with infestation (if a country is “feverish,” for example), restlessness, and through the early nineteenth century, “the impurity in the blood that was supposed to give rise to fever.” 64 “The Multitude at the Exhibition,” Economist 9 (31 May 1851), 586. 44 writers. Horace Greeley in his 1851 lecture The Crystal Palace and Its Lessons used the image to miniaturize the working-classes on the first Shilling Day: From our elevated and central position almost the entire length of this magnificent promenade is visible [. . .]. Far as the eye can reach, a sea of human heads is presented, denser toward the center just before us, but with scarcely an interruption any where. The individuals who make up this marching array are moving in opposite directions, or turning off to the right or to the left, and so lost to our view in ‘Austria,’ ‘Russia,’ ‘Switzerland,’ or ‘France;’ but the river flows on unchecked, undiminished, though the particular drops we gazed on a minute ago have passed from our view for ever. Still, mainly from the south, a steady stream of new comers, fifty to a hundred per minute, is pouring in to join the eager throng, but scarcely suffice to swell it. 65 Greeley positions himself high enough above the crowd so that the crowd's individual features are infinitesimal. While he grants the visitors heads, they are non-discriminating heads, ones that do not think but flow along with the river “unchecked.” In equating each individual to a drop of water “pouring” into the Exhibition, Greeley reinforces the idea that one working-class subject could be easily replaced for another. The phrase “far as the eye can reach,” was popularly used to describe the overwhelming sensory experience of viewing the Great Exhibition. The word "reach" is particularly significant, as it utilizes images of tactile touch perception, a trait that was usually associated with the working- classes who were chastised by writers for interacting physically with objects. In The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910, Chris Otter writes, “At the Great Exhibition, when the lower classes appeared in public on a mass scale, they were often represented as incapable of viewing objects from a distance: the Illustrated London News observed rather condescendingly that they were “more prone to 65 Dewitt and Davenport, 1851 ; P. 16-17 45 touch, feel, and finger the goods than they ought to have been.” 66 If we concede that the popular belief was that the working-classes were too physically engaging with objects, 67 Otter ignores how many Victorians believed that looking, even at a distance, could cause physical damage. Unlike on Shilling Days when the working-class faces are not mentioned or distinguished from anything more than drops of water in a stream, the writer separates the upper-class crowd by describing their faces. On October 13, 1851, a Times reporter writes, “In the main, however, the assemblage belonged to the middle and wealthier classes, and consisted of habitués of the Exhibition, or, at least, of people who had been there several times before. Faces that had not been seen in the interior since the first month after the opening were recognized among the crowd [. . .].” 68 Further, even when a 66 Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 56. 67 Significantly, it is an anonymous writer who identifies himself as a French “representant” to the Great Exhibition who corrects the Times assertion that the Exhibition has been without “a single known casualty to life or property” in his letter to the editor on October 8, 1851. He writes of a “poor countryman” whose greatest crime was “lifting a small earthenware object and breaking it unintentionally,” presumably one of the only physical consequences of the supposedly working-class tendency to “feel” and “finger” the objects on display. Perhaps inspired by what the Victorians would presume to be his French democratic tendencies, the representant writes, “What became of the poor English countryman I do not know, but although only myself a poor “representant,” I would most willingly have paid the damage if I could, the countryman looked so afraid.” But even in this representation, the “poor English countryman” (who is never referenced apart from this letter to the editor) is not depicted as one engaging in a class rebellion, but a “poor,” “afraid” oaf who made a mistake. Even the French “representant” who describes himself as having uncertain employment at the end of the Exhibition, groups the “poor English countryman” with the broken object once on display: “I saw with pain the policeman do his duty in taking both him and the broken article to the proper authorities” (5). While on October 7, the Times wrote, “in the Crystal Palace, as elsewhere, the people are their own best police,” the letter to the editor clearly states that it required a policeman, not the people themselves, to remove the offending man and object (4). 68 “The Great Exhibition,” The Times, 13 October, 1851, 5. 46 writer describes the middle and upper-class Exhibition crowd with images of water usually reserved for the working class crowd, he grants the upper and middle class viewers faces. He writes of “a great sea of upturned faces.” 69 Unlike the curiosity of the masses which is usually depicted as singular, the middle- and upper-classes have a “thousand different currents of curiosity.” Just as the force and flow of water can cut through mountains, the sheer number of viewers can cause damage to the Crystal Palace, especially if they are working-class visitors, according to the Great Exhibition writers. While Stowe’s visitors are chastised by the article’s writer for their insect-like behavior as they cover every floor of the ruined estate as pests with destructive tendencies would, interestingly, they do not carry away the treasures of the house, as ants would pieces of a carcass or take away bits of the collection as bees would with pollen from a garden. The visitors are just looking, even though in looking, they are causing destruction, according to the writer of the article. They are not looting or participating in the auction (which the writer is against on the basis that he believes that the collection should be kept intact due to its historical importance). Nonetheless, in looking, the visitors engage in a deviant form of behavior. As working-class individuals, they do not normally possess the right to invade an aristocratic residence, but the recent bankruptcy has allowed the house to fall to their level, thus further confusing the spatial positioning as to who belongs in the house. After 69 Ibid. 47 all, the bees do belong in the hive, which may be why the writer is uncomfortable with his own position. Distinguishing himself from the faceless individuals who buzz in and out of the house, the author refers to the crowd as “the tumultuous invasion of sight-seers” an image that he later reinforces with a description of the Greeks (also referred to as “furious assailants”) casting open Priam’s palace gates. 70 These “sight-seers” presumably causes damage with their gazes, but like the “sea of heads” in Horace Greeley’s lecture, not a single member of the group is described as possessing eyes or facial features of any sort apart from the phrase “sight-seer” 71 which implies that they have traveled to engage in the act of looking. Despite that at the mid-century, the practice of reading faces was both a scientific and literary pursuit, 72 the author of The Times article purposefully chooses not 70 He writes, “Every scholar must have thought of the scene related by Aeneas, when the Greeks had burst open the gates of Priam’s palace, and when the splendid halls, and the sacred haunts of an ancient dynasty were presented to the eyes of the furious assailants.” Interestingly, this image is not only coded with images of invasion, but with reference to the “scholarly” reader and the act of seeing more generally. But unlike the article writer’s tendency to equate Stowe’s visitors as ants or bees in a hive, in The Aeneid, Virgil positions the Trojan army as bees within the walls of a hive and reinforces this image with ant imagery as the Trojan army is later depicted as “opportunistic, inhospitable, [and] barbaric” 70 in its interaction with Carthage. But what can be perhaps most significantly drawn from the Times writer’s allusion to Virgil is the damage that “eyes” can cause. 71 The word “sight-seerer”, according to the OED, was first used in 1834 following the use of the verb “sight-see” in 1824. The term is therefore a nineteenth century construct which carries with it an individual’s and group’s intention as the verb to sight-see is defined as “to see the sights, visit objects or places of interest.” 72 In The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, Kate Flint engages with Victorian notions of visibility relating to the practice of reading faces. Flint says, “The idea was widespread, in the mid-century, that different social types, and different types of character, were physiognomically distinguishable. Not only faces in their entirety offered themselves up to be read, but facial expressions (pathognomy), lines on the forehead (metoposcopy), lines on the hand (chiromancy and chirognomy), and moles (neomancy) were all available for deciphering” (14). She writes of Mary Cowling’s 1989 The Artist as Anthropologist in which Cowling traces how writers “seized 48 to allow those who are visiting the house to be “seen” or read as individuals apart from the “to and fro” “human hive” imagery. But in his resistance to individual description, the author also relinquishes a form of control over the individual stories and members of the “human hive.” Kate Flint writes, “This pleasure [of deriving individual histories or tendencies from faces] is linked to a form of understanding and control—however illusory—derived from the belief that it is possible, through observation, to gain knowledge of the mass, to turn faceless anonymity into individuality and hence render it less disturbing and threatening.” 73 Instead, the author enhances the threatening nature of the crowd by describing in great detail objects of historical importance inside the house (a task that involves close scrutiny and attention to details such as colors, shapes and sizes) while he ignores the faces, sounds and interactions of the spectators. Perhaps another reason to focus in only on his own penchant for perception and to avoid individualizing the working class spectators with facial features such as eyes and the ability to use them come from the fact that the eye as a sense and organ was privileged above others by Victorians. The eye allowed for a “portal” to the soul for Ruskin, and it was the solitary organ to have its own dedicated royal doctor. 74 By not allowing the working class spectators to “see” on their own, the Times writer further on external appearance, particularly the faces of those in modern urban crowds, as providing a quick indication of the character of the individual. This pleasure is linked to a form of understanding and control—however illusory—derived from the belief that it is possible, through observation, to gain knowledge of the mass, to turn faceless anonymity into individuality and hence render it less disturbing and threatening” (15). 73 Kate Flint, Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, and Cape Town: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15. 74 Otter, 22. 49 emphasizes his own superiority. In 1874, William Whalley writes in A Popular Description of the Human Eye, with Remarks on Eyes of Inferior Animals that “the eye has been honoured by a more general study than any other organ of the senses” and It has been designated ‘the queen of the senses,’ ‘the index of the mind,’ ‘the window of the soul;’ nay, it has even been esteemed ‘in itself a soul;’ and ‘He who has spake as never man spake’ has declared that ‘the light of the body is the eye,’ at which we cannot marvel when we contemplate the inestimable pleasures and advantages it confers upon mankind. 75 The quotation, with its repeated use of the words "window," "light," and "marvel" and other images of illumination demonstrate how many Victorians favored the eye above the other senses. What makes this passage particularly curious is the idea that the eye (an obviously physical organ) can be linked with a “soul” (a spiritual entity normally independent from the body). In this passage, Whalley equates the physical eye with spiritual vision and the ability to interpret what one is seeing—something that brings “inestimable pleasures” that those in the animal kingdom supposedly cannot experience. Therefore, in emphasizing Stowe’s working-class spectators’ inability to “see” and therefore interpret, the Times author further emphasizes his own capacity for higher understanding and the working-class spectators’ powerlessness to generate independent thought. According to the OED, 76 through the late nineteenth century, a “soul” was a “disembodied spirit of a (deceased) person, regarded as a separate entity, and as invested with some amount of form and personality” and an “intellectual or spiritual power; high 75 William Whalley, A Popular Description of the Human Eye, with Remarks on Eyes of Inferior Animals (London: Churchill, 1874), 1. 76 "soul, n." The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50231471>. 50 development of the mental faculties. Also in somewhat weakened use, deep feeling, sensitivity.” In both definitions, the soul denotes power in that it is the entity apart from the body which allows for greater intellectual understanding or spiritual ascension. In equating the eye (a bodily and earthly organ) with a “soul,” Whalley emphasizes the importance of the organ and “invests” it “with some amount of form and personality.” Therefore, the eye, unlike the nose for example, is the most powerful sensory organ in that it allows for the personalization of the spectators, and in a sense, distinguishes the human (those with souls) from the animal or insect. In positioning the other visitors inside of a hive, the author clearly views his intellect (and a select few “scholars” to which he later makes reference) as significantly different from those inside the house. The writer occupies the traditional human-to-hive position as he is both outside and above Stowe’s visitors, but he breaks down the barriers of viewer and viewed as he quickly appears inside the “human hive.” He distances himself from what he believes to be the violation of the historical collection, but in order to relate it to his readership, he must physically occupy the same space and thus engage in similar physical behaviors similar to the people he despises. From his position aside the house, he writes, “The enormous edifice was a human hive. Every window showed the crowd within passing to and fro.” But at the beginning of the next sentence he is inside the house: “But once admitted—once standing under the Pantheon-like vault of the central saloon, and glancing right and left at the endless vistas of gorgeous apartments, then one indeed realized the sacrilege that was going on.” Suddenly back above and outside of Stowe again, the writer observes “an elaborate circuitous road conducted the 51 impatient visitors to the park front, before which, in the vast amphitheatre formed by its side colonnades, so often the scene of rural festivities, the enemy encamped. One might imagine a great country picnic had gathered at Stowe.” 77 Then, without an appropriate transition, the writer uses what can only be presumed to be his telescopic powers of observation to zoom in on “an advertisement on the front door” only to pull back out to a a view of "the distance" with "fallen trees, timber waggons, and extempore saw pits.” In order to justify his role as a potentially equally damaging viewer of Stowe’s ruins, the writer utilizes the hive metaphor to depict his fellow spectators. They are fellow spectators, after all, since despite his ability as a writer to contract and expand his view of the scene, he is still viewing a collection, albeit a collection of human bodies assembled to observe the ruins of another collection much like they are either drawn to the material ruin of the building or the other people assembled. Following his statement regarding the “human hive,” the author writes, “every window showed the crowd within passing to and fro.” The “to and fro” aspect of the spectators’ movement demonstrates their ability to alternate 78 movements, almost as if they are attempting to accomplish a collective goal like bees would within a hive. Placing his body outside of the house looking in, he clearly 77 The notion of the working-classes appropriating an area and eating in that particular space can be connected to the Punch cartoon “Dinner-Time at the Crystal Palace.” The Punch cartoon depicts twelve detailed working-class visitors caught drinking out of bottles (alcohol was not allowed in the Great Exhibition) and eating pieces of bread out of their picnic baskets as a mass of guards and blurry faces surround them. 78 The OED clearly emphasizes the “alternating” aspect of the phrase “to and fro” in the mid- Victorian definition of the phrase: “successively to and from some place, etc;: hence more vaguely: In opposite or different directions alternately; with alternating movement; from side to side; backwards and forwards; hither and thither; up and down.” 52 establishes his individuality apart from the hive or swarm of viewers and their intended goal within the house. While the writer does associate the crowd with minor physical destruction to the property (he writes of an “attempt to save the carpet from excessive trituration” presumably caused by the increased foot traffic in the estate and the symbolic or possibly literal “cartloads of gravel” dragged by the working-class visitors), it is not the physical destruction to the carpets that the writer is concerned with, but the act of seeing without consideration. “King Mob,” as he calls the visitors, does not think about the temporary nature of what he is viewing, perhaps a sign of his working class roots and his supposed animal instincts. The author differentiates himself from the crowd when he laments the fleeting nature of the collection: “On what treasures of art will the sun set this day never to rise again on a similar array within these walls!” 79 In establishing the socially acceptable way in which one should proceed through the house of “ruin,” 80 the author clearly distinguishes between those in the crowd who are 79 Despite the fact that the events at Stowe were before the popularization of the sun never setting on the British Empire, the article is rife with dread over the possibility of Britain's history, if not Britain herself, being ravaged by another. The author makes the connection between the dissolution of the Duke’s collection and the end of a nation when he writes, “But the heirlooms of many great families, the records of many great events, and the memorials of many great persons, all spontaneously collected into one great whole, constitute a singular and most significant fact, the obliteration of which we can only compare to the overthrow of a nation or throne.” But as determined earlier, even under the name “King Mob” a name that denotes a royal presence in some form or another, the crowd itself is not considered one of the “great persons” of “great families” and thus, not a part of the great nation which the collection later represents historically in terms of its 5,000 items. Instead, the author puts “King Mob” in the role of pillager. 80 The author uses the word “ruin” multiple times to refer to the family’s financial situation, but it also carries connotations of material decay and destruction and is reinforced by the author’s opening line in which he refers to the “spectacle” as being of “a painfully interesting and gravely historical import.” 53 “thoughtful spectator[s]” and those who are a part of the “masses” who “flow” “in an uninterrupted stream” and fill the room out of instinct without reason or the human processes of consideration for the historical importance of the artifacts as a collection. The nonhuman metaphor is furthered when the author says, “the enormous edifice [the house itself] was a human hive.” But the images of “excessive trituration” of the carpets and King Mob causing damage with his feet provide resounding images of empowerment for working-class subjects, perhaps reason enough for the Times writer not to dwell on the damage. Even as the Times author does not allow Stowe’s working-class spectators to have eyes (the organs that bring higher understanding and power, according to Whalley), in linking them to the physical destruction of the estate, he allows them to have a certain power, albeit power of physical strength in numbers. In “Democratic Songs to Popular Airs IV: The Song of the Future,” Ernest Jones writes, "We bear the wrong in silence,/We store it in our brain;/ They think us dull—they think us dead:/ But we shall rise again:/[. . .]/A heaving thro' the mass;/ A trampling thro' their palaces,/ Until they break like glass." 81 The phrase “A heaving thro’ the mass;/ A trampling thro’ their palaces,/ Until they break like glass” demonstrates the possibility of physical labor to turn dangerous, or for the “heaving,” a word usually associated with lifting and bearing weight, to cause revolutions. Significantly, this song with its image of the working classes breaking 81 Ernest Jones, Notes to the People, Vol. II (London: J. Pavey, 1852), 993. 54 through palaces of glass was published the same year as the Crystal Palace (or the “Glass Hive” as it was called) opened for the Great Exhibition of 1851. But while the working class people were praised publicly for their participation in the Great Exhibition, 82 the Exhibition did not occur without incident. While no one directly attempted to take a royal’s life or raze the Crystal Palace, a strange incident occurred when the aging Duke of Wellington visited the Great Exhibition on a Shilling Day. The crowd, at its “culminating point” and unable to see him from a distance, began to panic because they thought the shouts and exclamations (supposedly praise for the Duke) meant that the Crystal Palace’s glass walls and ceiling were breaking and collapsing, according to a Times article. While the Times does not directly describe the sound of the crowd apart from its “cheers burst forth, which were prolonged by immense energy,” 83 it is difficult to believe that the crowd’s cheers were as joyous as implied by the phrase “instantly public admiration arose.” Considering how easily those in the back interpreted the sound as resulting in impending disaster and the writer’s description of the crowd’s exclamations as “bursting forth” and of “immense energy,” it is difficult to completely accept the idea that the cries were solely joyous. But this idea alone does not contribute to the notion that the crowd reacted negatively to the Duke’s visit. The Duke of Wellington was involved in preventing the Chartist uprising and was one of the most 82 Lord Macaulay wrote after his visit to the Great Exhibition, “There is just as much chance of a revolution in England as of the falling of the moon” (Letters 551). An interesting connection especially since writers convey the incident in question with the Duke of Wellington as being the result of visitors thinking the ceilings and walls were collapsing—an apocalyptic vision not unlike the “falling of the moon.” 83 The Times, 7 October, 1851, 4. 55 outspoken critics of security at the Crystal Palace (which he believed was too lax). 84 Further, the image of the Crystal Palace's glass walls collapsing can be likened to glass and window breaking. In the 1830s, the Duke of Wellington witnessed many "mobs" break windows first hand. 85 Of window breaking during the Chartist rebellion, Isobel Armstrong writes, “The shock of window-breaking asserts a violent shattering of barriers that has both symbolic and literal meaning. The jouissance of window-breaking is associated with violent, traumatic sound and the insistence on being heard. To be heard 84 The Duke of Wellington was a “symbol of all that refused to countenance cross-class accord, the ‘monopoly’ of aristocratic ‘Old Corruption’” according to his critics during the 1830s (Armstrong 60). In 1848, the Duke of Wellington, then Commander in Chief of the army became known as the “Iron Duke,” a legendary figure in his steadfast defense of London from the Chartists (Goodway 147). In 1850, the Duke of Wellington said that he thought 15,000 men would be necessary for London to remain safe from the influx of working-class and foreign visitors (versus the extra 1,000 officers that the Police Commissioner requested) (Auerbach 147). The Duke conveyed the message of his friend Hugh McCorquodale to the Prime Minister. McCorquodale believed that the Great Exhibition would turn London into “‘a modern Babel,’” which would be reminiscent of “‘when the Chartist hubbub…drove our citizens to their wits’ end, and frightened London from its prosperity’” (quoted in Auerbach 182). In a letter to the Prime Minister, Wellington said, “‘I think we ought to be prepared for a campaign commencing on the 1 st of May and enduring till the end of August at least, possibly till the end of September!’ Wellington did not doubt that there would be an assembly ‘of all the mischievous spirits, and Hommes d’Actions as they are called, in Europe’” (Auerbach 182). The Duke of Wellington was not just any member of the British nobility, but a symbolic reason for the apparent failure of worker uprisings. 85 In 1831, his newly-designed windows of Apsely House were broken three times (Armstrong 63). He wrote of a “mob” breaking his windows after a march to St. James in 1831: “‘On their return from the Palace my windows and those of others were broken. [. . .] all this by daylight’” (quoted in Armstrong 64-65). As Isobel Armstrong points out, glass-breaking was an “end in itself” as demonstrated by the 1839 Bull Ring riots when Wellington apparently observed the crowd’s condemnation and refusal to engage in looting (67). But despite these uprisings and the breaking of his own windows throughout the 1830s, the Duke’s initial response to the rebellion was of “noblesse oblige” according to Armstrong, but later “he reacted more violently—indeed with increasing panic and paranoia” (65). Even as his paranoia about a possible British working- class revolution increased, he always held “the assumption of the crowd’s endemic irrationality” (65). Armstrong connects glass, “a crucial site of political conflict nationally, a visible target for violent demonstrations of fury and protest” with the “breaking of artisanal labour conspicuously exploited for profit” (57, 68). 56 in turn is to be redeemed from anonymity.” 86 Even if we only receive snippets of what could be interpreted as a working-class people’s crying out and an “insistence” to be “heard” from the Times article, the article does allow for more auditory and less visual imagery than any other depiction of the Crystal Palace. In the Times article which chronicles the event with the Duke, no images exist from above the Crystal Palace, but instead, language of battle and revolt pervade the text; the Duke of Wellington “beat a retreat,” only to be “followed as he went with the most vigorous demonstrations.” 87 Before the Times describes the Duke of Wellington incident, the author includes a disclaimer: “So, however, it is, and we leave to revolutionary and discontented minds the study of facts which place in so clear and unquestionable a light the love of order and the genuine kindliness of spirit which pervade all classes of our population.” But even this statement is followed by, “Yet, while we dwell with a natural complacency on those evidences of a happy and prosperous people, circumstances are constantly occurring to warn us of possible disaster. Such an event took place yesterday.” As established earlier, those in the working-classes were believed to be incapable of seeing at a distance (a skill easily employed by reporters who distinguish themselves from those about which they write). According to the Times writer, it is this very “inability” to see at a distance and interpret that is to blame for the Duke of Wellington incident: “Those who were at a distance, surprised by an unwonted agitation which they 86 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 67. 87 “The Great Exhibition,” The Times, 07 October, 1851, 4. 57 could not understand, fancied that there was something wrong, and rushed towards the doors. The Duke felt the awkwardness of his position, and beat a retreat.” 88 Therefore, even as the article implies a possible disruptive intent behind the outcries and near- trampling of the Duke, it quickly rejects any purpose behind the crowd’s actions and instead dismisses the people’s actions as being the result of ignorance. They are unable to “understand.” They “fancy that there was something wrong.” And they are described as “timid,” child-like figures with “fears” that need to be quelled by the police (ignoring the earlier statement that "the people are their own best police.” 89 ) But even as they rush to the door of the Crystal Palace and force the Duke to “retreat,” the writer intentionally does not give the crowd any sound, apart from their initial “loud cheers.” Even in a scene of possible rebellion, the writer does not allow the crowd to be heard or individually depicted. 90 Despite the fact that writers ignore the sound of the working-class Exhibition crowd, in early 1850s London, sound, particularly noise from the working-classes invading upper and middle-class spaces, was a contentious subject. In 1853, Thomas Carlyle wrote, “‘All summer I have been more or less annoyed with noises, even 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 In his letter to the editor, an anonymous French worker of the Exhibition writes of individuals in the crowd, specifically a “lady” who was “thrown down with violence inside” and who crashed into and broke a porcelain vase. His letter also describes the Duke as being more panicked: “The crush on his Grace’s passage was truly terrific. The Duke looked anxious, and was evidently afraid that his presence might be the cause of some misfortune. [. . .] The police certainly did all they could, and it was with difficulty they could keep the Duke from being crushed to death” (The Times, 08 October, 1851, 5). 58 accidental ones, which get free access thro’ my open windows. . . henceforth I hope to be independent of all men and all dogs, cocks and household or street noises.’” 91 John M. Picker connects Jacques Attali’s theory on music and sound as a type of “violence” to Victorian street sounds. He quotes Attali: “Noise, then, [. . .] ‘is violence: it disturbs. To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill. It is a simulacrum of murder.’” 92 Picker writes that the “frequency of [noise] reports rose significantly in the 1840s” and that other scholars “have noted that ‘the decibel count seemed to have increased from mid-century on’ in the London streets” 93 which he connects to increased rates of immigration, but not to the influence of fears of those on the streets spurred from the Chartist march on London and the increasing crowds of foreigners and working- classes from outside of London encouraged by the Great Exhibition later in 1851. Nonetheless, if sound from the streets pervaded houses and noise complaints were so common in London, the absence of any mention of noise in the Crystal Palace in Shilling Day descriptions represents a purposeful omission. Perhaps it is the image of the author floating over the working-class crowd that enables authors to silence the scene, but even the image of the glass hive (especially coupled with the image of the stream pouring in and out of the Crystal Palace) implies a steady sound, a hum 94 or a rushing of water. Yet, there is nothing mentioned. Instead, silence pervades these visual images. 91 Quoted in John M. Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes, 43. 92 Picker, 44. 93 Ibid., 45. 94 When a writer describes the primarily upper and middle-class crowd on the last day of the Exhibition, he writes “Nothing was to be heard by that strange and mysterious hum of voices 59 Thomas Richards emphasizes that while the Crystal Palace looked potentially permeable, it was clearly a closed-off structure: “Like glass skyscrapers today, the Crystal Palace reflected its surroundings, and unless you got very close to it, you could not see in and catch a glimpse of the thousands of commodities it contained. At a distance the building closed itself off to outside scrutiny; it seemed to say that you had to enter it in order to be initiated into its mysteries.” 95 But this description does not match the image of the “Crystal Hive” as an object a writer can view at a distance and interpret the actions of the public inside as a whole. If anything, the images associated with the interior “crowd” extended to the exterior of the building and the park itself. Queen Victoria writes, “The Park presented a wonderful spectacle, crowds streaming through it,— carriages and troops passing, quite like the Coronation, and for me, the same anxiety. [. . .] The Green Park and Hyde Park were one mass of densely crowded human beings [. . .].” 96 Instead, the image of the Crystal Palace as “closed off” applies more to the sound inside (and even outside) of the building from the writer’s position above the building and park. In fact, the only noteworthy mentions of sound of the Crystal Palace spectators happen to coincide with the last day of the Great Exhibition, coincidentally a non-Shilling Day. As the writer portrays the primarily middle and upper-class crowd, he allows which, rising from all large assemblages, is imposing, but which in the Crystal Palace, swelling upwards from more than 50,000 people, leaves an impression upon the mind not soon to be forgotten” (The Times, 13 October, 1851, 5). 95 Richards, 23. 96 From “The Queen’s Exhibition Journal” reprinted in C.R. Fay, Palace of Industry, 1851: A Study of the Great Exhibition and Its Fruits, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 47. 60 himself to float between the upper transept gallery and the transept itself, becoming one with the crowd. He describes them as occupying the spectator position usually employed by the writers, looking down on the crowd. Illustrating the crowd’s actions during the last hours of the Exhibition, he writes: The people seemed to be taking up their position there, and the galleries, as far as the eye could reach, were occupied by spectators, who as they gazed on the vast assemblage beneath, [. . .]. [. . .] and those who witnessed this act of loyalty from an advantageous position will long remember the effect which it produced upon their minds. 97 The act of loyalty to which the writer refers comes in the form of the National Anthem, “God Save the Queen,” followed by “cheers as Englishmen alone know how to give.” This ovation, combined with “thousands of feet stamping their loyalty upon the boarded floors” created “an effect truly sublime, a trembling rolling sound, like that of thunder” which moved across the building, west to east. “Under this demonstration every part of the edifice trembled,” the writer concludes. It's true: the words “demonstration” and “protest” (used later in the article regarding the public outcry regarding the disassembly of the Crystal Palace) conjure images of rebellion. Yet, the description of the scene in allowing the crowd to act rationally and out of loyalty emphasizes respect. While once again the Crystal Palace did not crash to the ground, in a sense, the upper and middle classes realized what Ernest Jones wanted the working-classes to achieve when he published the piece in 1851: “A heaving thro' the mass;/ A trampling thro' their palaces,/ Until they break like glass.” The upper and middle-classes can make the Crystal Palace tremble with their feet and even tear it down (the fact that the two events occurred 97 The Times, 13 October, 1851, 5. 61 sequentially cannot be ignored), but the working-classes cannot be depicted as individuals with the capability of making any single voice heard—even the collective voice is nothing but a hum or a roar. If not strictly voiceless, the working-classes are left inarticulate. In Chapter Two, I turn to another working-class crowd rendered inarticulate and a transitive space that helps express and confront class-related confusion and inequality. While nonfiction representations of the Crystal Palace in articles from 1850 through 1852 fictionalized the confusing nature of the Great Exhibition with metaphors which controlled the crowd and any possibility for social change or disruption, the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills is a location constructed in Elizabeth Gaskell's fiction. And yet, within North and South, Gaskell creates the transitive space rooted in apprehensions of Manchester, a town closely associated with the Chartist Rebellion just a few years prior. In combining images of the home (a spot many Victorians reserved as an oasis from the outside social pressures of the world) with that of the factory, Gaskell creates a space, unlike the Great Exhibition constructed in the articles I discussed in this chapter. Instead of brushing off the possibility of social change with metaphors that reinforce class lines, Gaskell creates a space in which characters can experience confusion and learn how to accept and enact social change. 62 Chapter Two "A Din of Angry Voices" at Home: England's Class Conflict within the Transitive Space of the Thornton House Nearly every study of Britain in the 1850s includes a mention of the Great Exhibition and the space of the Crystal Palace. In contrast, the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills rarely comes up in conversations on North and South let alone in discussions of how space is negotiated in the nineteenth-century. In fact, previous scholars have all but ignored the Thornton House when they write about North and South. It’s true: the house does not have an official name, perhaps enhancing its ability to be ignored by nineteenth-century literature scholars accustomed to houses (and their names) being central to the plot, if not overtly the titles of novels. The Thornton House at Marlborough Mills is neither Bleak House nor Mansfield Park. It's not even Thornfield Hall, since when characters refer to the house, they do not call it by any one name consistently. 98 In this chapter, I have chosen to dub the space the “Thornton House at 98 On one of her many visits, Margaret refers to a trip to the house as a “walk to Marlborough Street” (Gaskell 171). Before Margaret sees the house for the first time, Gaskell calls it “Mrs. Thornton’s habitation” and Bessy calls the residence “Thornton’s at Marlborough Mills” specifically associating the house with her master, Mr. Thornton and their shared place of employment (111, 148). Upon Margaret seeing the house, Gaskell’s narrator describes it as “a handsome stone-coped house” (111). When Mr. Thornton nearly loses his business, he and others group the house in with the mill. Henry tells Margaret, “‘He came about this sub-letting the property—Marlborough Mills, and the house and premises adjoining, I mean’” (429). It could be argued that characters do not consistently refer to the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills by a name such as “the Thornton House” because it is not owned by the Thornton family; thus, justifying a name for the house that could be more fluid and based upon who occupied it. But Gaskell repeatedly refers to Bessy and Nicholas Higgins’ house (a place they obviously rent) as “the Higgins’s House” and while the Hales clearly rent their dwellings, they are given a name (218). 63 Marlborough Mills” a slight variation on millworker Bessy’s name for the house ("Thornton's at Marlborough Mills"). This name particularly fits the home in question because it emphasizes that the house is a private residence which shares its location with the industrial space of the mill. 99 While the family does not own the space, I find it important to use their last name when I refer to the house because I agree with John Tosh's assessment that in Victorian culture, “at a symbolic level the family became indistinguishable from the domestic space in which it occupied.” 100 In including the “Thornton” in the title and not just calling it “the mill-house,” I emphasize the family and its desired privacy apart from the mill. But even if the house is a private residence, the sights and sounds of the mill pervade the house itself, making the public private space of the drawing room capable of creating a “dazzling” effect on visitors’ senses. Unlike the sensory experiences artificially constructed by writers chronicling the working-classes 99 I particularly like this name for the Thornton residence since most references associate the house with either the son or the mother and no single reference to the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills dominates the text apart from “the house.” If I were to choose Bessy’s name for the dwelling and just refer to the space as “Thornton’s at Marlborough Mills,” the name would not indicate the fact that the space is a house and would lose the connotations with the domestic realm that are important to how characters view the house. Margaret Hale, whose interactions with the family specifically revolve around calling on Mr. Thornton’s mother and sister at their home clearly views the process of home visiting as important and refuses to visit the mill but will visit the Thornton dwelling sharing the same space as the mill. In titling the space the “Thornton House at Marlborough Mills,” I am still keeping with the essence of “the house” (the most popular reference to the space in the novel) without creating confusion for my readers as to which house to which I am specifically referring. Further, the name clearly connotes the house’s proximity to Marlborough Mills and Marlborough Street, without losing the important fact that the house is not an extension of the mill, but a technically private place of rest for the Thornton family. 100 John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 4. 64 within the Crystal Palace, within the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, all who enter experience visual as well as auditory confusion. 101 In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell’s heroine, Margaret Hale visits the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills during the pivotal scene of the novel: the workers’ rebellion and riot. Curiously, as the danger increases within the scene, Gaskell creates visual and auditory confusion by contradicting herself. For example, Gaskell writes that the sound from the crowd is not only a “din of angry voices” but that these voices increase in volume, only to follow in the next paragraph with the idea that the crowd is speechless. While it might be easy to argue that Gaskell simply made mistakes regarding the sound descriptions of the riot, the fact that the scene remains the same in the heavily- edited first and second two-volume editions published in 1855 and the original, serialized version published in Household Words from September 1854 to January 1855, indicate that Gaskell intended these auditory contradictions to express confusion in the face of anticipated social change. Yet, while these distortions dominate the scene of the workers' riot, they exist throughout the novel within the transitive space of the Thornton House which indicate that the novel as a whole contains pervasive class conflict. Even before the climactic 101 The closest to an auditory description of the Crystal Palace comes from Henry Mayhew's narrator in 1851, or, The Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Sandboys. He says, "Then to stand in the centre of the huge crystal pile, and cast the eye thence in any direction, was indeed to behold a sight that had no parallel in excellence. The exquisite lightness and tone of colour that pervaded the entire structure was a visual feast, and a rare delight of air, colour, and space. [. . .] It seemed more like one harmonious tone—a concert of mellifluous tints—than mere painting." But even as he uses words such as "feast" and "concert," his description is still dominated by visual images, not the actual sounds or other senses stimulated or overwhelmed by the experience of visiting the Great Exhibition (Mayhew 134). That said, Mayhew wrote the majority of the novel before the Great Exhibition opened, long before the first Shilling Day. 65 scene, the Thornton House exists within the novel as a location lacking clear class boundaries, a space teeming with contradiction and discord, and therefore overwhelming to Victorian visitors who were accustomed to houses and other areas being coded according to class. Yet significantly, the idea that the traditionally-viewed, and usually clearly-labeled as feminine, area of the house is a transitive space directly contradicts what critics have said of the novel, specifically that “class conflict is part of the masculine world, with working-resistance represented by male characters.” 102 In this view, Margaret and other women in the novel do not participate in the novel's class conflict. This misinterpretation helps contribute to the idea that the novel is the “least controversial” 103 of industrial and condition of England novels published in the 1840s and 1850s. In Culture and Society: 1780-1950, Raymond Williams writes that "North and South is less interesting [than other industrial novels like Mary Barton], because the tension is less." 104 On the contrary, the Thornton House with its shared space with Marlborough Mills allows for the house itself to become a site of class conflict as the sounds and sights of the factory pervade the traditionally private space of the house. In doing so, Gaskell brings the unresolved issues from the Chartist Rebellion and workers' rights to the realm of the home, a space her contemporary Victorian writers saw as "the 102 Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 155. 103 Ibid.,153. 104 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, rptd.1983), 91. 66 crystal of society—the nucleus of national character." Critics of North and South 105 complain about the novel’s ending (and therefore tend to discount the book as a political novel) because of its concentration on the marriage plot. Yet, the transitive space of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills allows for the ending to be more complicated and revolutionary than previously suggested by scholars, such as Catherine Gallagher in The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832-1867. Gallagher argues that Gaskell establishes a “disconnection between the family under consideration and the society needing reformation” and in spite of Gaskell’s “attempts to make social relations personal, to advocate that relations between classes become like the cooperative 105 Comparing North and South to Mary Barton, Louis Cazamian writes, "In North and South the industrial question is no longer the whole of the novel" (226). Cazamian sees the marriage as the resolution of the novel's "main plot" and the "industrial drama" as a subplot to the romance (228- 229). To that end, A. B. Hopkins writes, "North and South is Mrs. Gaskell's second novel on an industrial theme, but unlike Mary Barton, the problems of industry are here made to take second place. The author's interest is primarily in moulding her characters. It is emphatically a story of growth, of the gradual alteration in views and attitudes that takes place in the minds of two central persons. It could, in fact, be described as a Victorian Pride and Prejudice" (139). Also equating North and South with Jane Austen's novels, Arnold Kettle argues that while at times the novel goes outside the realm of an Austen novel when it raises questions customary to a social problem novel, for the most part, North and South's "tone and sensibility belong to Jane Austen's world" (176). Kettle places Gaskell as an author in a gray area "between Austen and George Eliot" (176). Gerald DeWitt Sanders does not place Gaskell as a writer on a spectrum between Austen and Eliot, but he does argue that North and South "is Mrs. Gaskell's transition novel. It is her 'last novel with a purpose'; her last effort to set straight a world which seemed to her out of joint" (71). And yet, Sanders clearly states that even though North and South might be Gaskell's "last effort" to create reform, "the love story of Margaret Hale tends to absorb most of the attention of the reader" (74). More recently, Rosemarie Bodenheimer argues that North and South is not "exactly a 'social-problem novel,' for it does not identify a clear version of industrial crisis and cry for a solution" (282). In "The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Gaskell's North and South," Dorice Williams Elliott argues that "Gaskell's novel offers love and marriage instead of revolution, socialism, or feminism" (47). Yet in line with my argument, she contends that Gaskell "uses marriage, the conventional novelistic ending, as a statement of her proposed social agenda. The very conventionality of the 'happy ending' serves as a mask that naturalizes what is unconventional in her vision of women's role" (47). While I agree with the notion that Gaskell utilizes the marriage of Mr. Thornton and Margaret as a means of advancing her own social agenda, I disagree with the notion that the ending "serves as a mask." 67 associations of family life,” North and South “ultimately propose[s] the isolation of families from the larger society.” 106 In my reading of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, I take the opposite contention. While Gallagher writes that North and South “emphasize[s] thematically the very thing [it] cannot achieve structurally: the integration of public and private life,” 107 I argue that the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills achieves the consolidation of the public and the private. It serves as a space of social confusion which allows it also to be the perfect location for revolutionary thought regarding class and gender relations. After all, according to the end of the novel which leaves Margaret as the heiress to the fortune of Mr. Thornton’s landlord, Margaret will be mistress of the house and mill (now that Mr. Thornton, her future husband, is her tenant) which adds another revolutionary gender dimension to the already transitive space of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills. 108 By complicating the issues of gender and ownership of the mill and its products, Gaskell does not allow the characters simply to retreat into the private 106 Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction: Social Discourse and Narrative Form 1832-1867 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 148. 107 Ibid., 149. 108 Of course, the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 and the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 were not passed during the publication of North and South from 1854-1855. Nonetheless, at the end of the novel, Henry Lennox (the voice of the law in North and South) calls Mr. Thornton “‘Miss Hale’s tenant’” (434). Further emphasizing Margaret’s ownership of the mill, before she accepts Thornton’s advances, Margaret discusses a proposal she has drawn up with her lawyer’s help to invest in the managing of Marlborough Mills (435). One could argue that Margaret, in presumably marrying Thornton after the end of the novel, technically loses control over her property to her husband. At the same time, their engagement began only after the financial aspects of their relationship were agreed upon. In other words, Mr. Thornton’s position as “tenant” to Margaret’s landlord has been established and even as the property were to pass to Mr. Thornton, their power dynamic has been established in certain economic terms. 68 realm, as scholars, such as Gallagher, argue. In choosing marriage, Mr. Thornton and Margaret do not move away from class-related unrest and the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, but they will inhabit this space together. This significant fact underlies that North and South is not a novel about public issues refashioned at the end into a story of traditional marriage. Instead, of focusing on the Thornton House, a space invaded by the outside sights and sounds of the street and the mill, the ending further emphasizes how Margaret’s life after marriage will continue to be one in which class issues will be ever-present in her daily life. In fact, if we are to accept Hilary Schor’s assessment that Margaret "serves as translator for the Babel that is industrialization," 109 then it is essential for the future of Milton’s working-classes that Margaret live in the house together so that she can serve as a listener to and speaker for the views and wants of the working-class men and women who work in Marlborough Mills and convey the desires of the middle-class mill owners and masters to the working-class people. When critics do address the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, they tend to focus on the decorations in the home and not on how the mill affects the home space in terms of altering sense perception within the house itself. In his article, "Outside Looking In: Material Culture in Gaskell's Industrial Novels," Christopher Lindner concentrates on the drawing room of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills. He calls the room designed to receive visitors "alienating" and writes, "its static, soulless qualities and its cold atmosphere of suspended animation—give it the impression of belonging to a 109 Hilary Schor, Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 121. 69 museum exhibit." 110 He says that the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills gives the message to visitors "look, but don't touch" 111 and its "sterile, hostile, unapproachable— even unknowable—objects" are "dead objects intended for display." 112 I do not completely disagree with Lindner's analysis of the drawing room as a museum, in that the very nature of the room itself requires the display of commodities to visitors. At the same time, in associating issues of death with the space of a museum, Linder ignores the nature of the Victorian museum as a vibrant place teeming with contradiction. 113 In deeming the room "dead" and unstimulating, Linder ignores the auditory and visual effects created by Marlborough Mills. A "dead" drawing room implies silence and darkness, and the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills is anything but silent or dark. The colors of the drawing room are not static or dreary. For the first description of the drawing room, Gaskell writes, "The walls were pink and gold; the pattern on the carpet represented bunches of flowers on a light 110 Christopher Linder, "Outside Looking In: Material Culture in Gaskell's Industrial Novels," Orbis Litterarum, 55, no. 5 (2000), 385. 111 Ibid., 385. 112 Ibid., 386. 113 As Barbara J. Black writes, "The museum served to legitimate Britain's power at home and across the globe," while at the same time, as demonstrated from my first chapter, it also allowed for the clear demarcation of British citizens into socio-economic groups (11). In connecting the anxiety-provoking space of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills to the space of the Victorian museum, Linder also implies that the Thornton drawing room is designed to legitimate power of some sort. As I later discuss, Mrs. Thornton may try to exert control over those she can see below her from the vantage point of the drawing room, but the house's location in the shadow of the mill allows for an unconventional class struggle. 70 ground [. . .]." 114 In the middle of the "white and pure" room, "smartly-bound books arranged at regular intervals round the circumference" of a table look "like gaily-coloured spokes of a wheel. Everything reflected light, nothing absorbed it." 115 The fact that everything in the room reflects light makes the experience of seeing in the room very uncomfortable, not from darkness, as Linder’s analysis implies, but from too much reflected light. In Sight and Hearing; How Preserved, and How Lost, published in 1859, James Henry Clark writes of the "evils" of colors, such as white, reflecting light and damaging the eyes: There are many illustrations of the evil effects of concentrated light. Light reflected from white walls, within or without the room, or from the pavements where the windows open to the floor, or from white glazed furniture, is undesirable. The windows should be protected by blue or green curtains; the room should be painted blue or green; the carpet should be green, for nature has universally painted the world this color. 116 The drawing room reflects too much light which can create just as much damage as too little light, according to Clark. He writes, "Too little light debilitates the eye, and compels overaction; too much dazzles and confuses, and causes morbid sensibility of the organ." 117 The drawing room creates visual issues for its visitors not because it is dead and dark, but because it has too much life and light. This idea, in a sense, speaks to what makes the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills a unique space in the book. The house 114 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 112. 115 Ibid. 116 James Henry Clark, Sight and Hearing; How Preserved, and How Lost (New York: Charles Scribner, 1859), 158. 117 Ibid., 157. 71 has "too much" of both visual and auditory stimuli to make it a comfortable place. Because it is both industrial and private, it cannot be decorated or lit according to Victorian aesthetic principles. Mrs. Thornton must over-light the drawing room to make up for the literal and figurative shadow 118 the factory casts on the house. After all, the Thornton House is artificially constructed. It does not make the attempt to appear “natural” as the green carpeting and blue walls would imply. Instead, it serves in the text as a stark reminder of other artificial societal constructions. Drawing support for Linder's theory that the room reads as dead and dark, before the passage recounting the pink walls and reflection of light, Gaskell's narrator describes the house: "It seemed as though no one had been in it since the day when the furniture was bagged up with as much care as if the house was to be overwhelmed with lava, and discovered a thousand years hence." 119 But even as Gaskell's narrator depicts the house as potentially becoming overwhelmed with lava, the drawing room does not create a lack of sensation (as death would imply), but an excess of commotion. Time collapses in the room. In one sentence, we progress from lava potentially suffocating everything to the discovery of the room one thousand years in the future. Past, present, and future history collapse within the space, further indicating that the Thornton House possesses too much stimulation for visitors, not too little, as death would imply. 118 Not only does the mill cast a shadow across the front windows of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, but also, it changes the color of the building. Gaskell writes that the “handsome stone-coped house” was “blackened, to be sure, by the smoke” of the mill (111). 119 Gaskell, 112. 72 The Thornton House exists in the middle of a neighborhood clearly designated for factories and mills, yet even this seemingly-clearly coded space is class-related confusion. Friedrich Engels describes Manchester, the basis for Gaskell's fictional town, Milton, as a city geographically segregated based on separating middle class dwellings and working-class quarters: The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working- people's quarter or even with workers, that is, so long as he confines himself to his business or pleasure walks. This arises chiefly from the fact, that by unconscious determination, the working-people's quarters are sharply separated from sections of the city reserved for the middle class. 120 But the Thornton House does not exist in the middle class or the working-class sections of the city. Instead, Gaskell places the house at the dead center of the city, "at its heart" as Engels describes, in "a rather extended commercial district, perhaps half a mile long and about as broad." 121 In the area of the Thornton House, "nearly the whole district is abandoned by dwellers, and is lonely and deserted at night; only watchmen and policemen traverse its narrow lanes with their dark lanterns." 122 In other words, the physical location of the house at the center of the town is excessively populated (and very loud) during the day. At night, it is abandoned (and very quiet). It achieves being on the outskirts of civilization and being in the center of the city at the same time. 120 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 57. 121 Ibid., 57. 122 Ibid., 58. 73 While the Thornton House exists as a private space, in being so close to the mill and located in the city’s industrial and decidedly un-residential district, it cannot be clearly coded as either middle or working-class. The Hale family residence is in the suburbs, while the Higgins’s house is in the working-class district. The Thornton House exists not with either group; instead, it is in the very space that allows for sensory stimulation: the center of the town, the same space that also feels stifling to characters. Interestingly, historians, such as Lewis Mumford have referred to cities such as Manchester as “insensate industrial towns,” 123 a label that my reading of the city resists. Instead of lacking in sensation, the center of the city as represented by the Thornton House draws together aural sensations from the city’s outskirts. As evidenced by the way sound travels before the workers' uprising at Marlborough Mills, sound funnels in from the residential districts of the city into Milton's industrial center. Gaskell's narrator explains, “From every narrow lane opening out on Marlborough Street came up a low distant roar, as of myriads of fierce indignant voices.” 124 Sound converges on the space of the Thornton House even when the mills are out of production during the riot. Gaskell writes, “There was no near sound,—no steam-engine at work with beat and pant,—no clank of machinery, or mingling and clashing of many sharp voices; but far away, the ominous gathering roar, deep-clamouring.” 125 Much like the dashes which hold Gaskell’s 123 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 143. 124 Gaskell, 172. 125 Ibid., 173. 74 unusually choppy yet lyrical sentence together, the space of the mill serves as a place for sound and ideas to meet. As Margaret and her family approach Milton for the first time, they notice that the air becomes thicker (a “lead-coloured cloud” 126 hangs over the center of the city) and “the air had a faint taste and smell of smoke” 127 the farther inside the city they venture. The heavier, polluted air at the center of the town contributes to why the mills’ sights and sounds cling to the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills. In Wonders of Acoustics; or, The Phenomena of Sound, Rodolphe Randau writes that air, as a “light and elastic fluid,” acts as “an invisible bridge” that allows for sound to move. 128 In a different environment, such as the space at the center of the town, sound and light, both of which “radiate freely” in the air in “concentric spheres” cannot move and dissipate with ease. 129 The thicker air of the center of the city creates a restricted space. This constrained space is full of the “masses of human beings which have been accumulated round the mills,” and that one “cannot contemplate these ‘crowded hives’ without feelings of anxiety and apprehension almost amounting to dismay.” 130 This issue of bodies crowding in a small space contributes to the sensation that there is limited air within the space of the mill and mill- 126 Ibid., 59. 127 Ibid. 128 Rodolphe Randau (trans. by Robert Ball), Wonders of Acoustics; Or the Phenomena of Sound (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1872), 42. 129 Ibid., 54. 130 William Cooke Taylor, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire (London: Duncan and Malcom, 1842), 6. 75 yard. According to William Cooke Taylor’s 1842 Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire, “It would be absurd to speak of Factories as mere abstractions, and consider them apart from the manufacturing population [. . .].” 131 In other words, the space of the mill and its adjoining house should not be thought about without the fact that the space is normally restricting masses of working-class people. According to Randau, “in a confined space sound is exaggerated.” 132 It’s true: a small portion of the “discomfort” experienced in the “uncomfortable” and confusing drawing room does have to do with the family's decorating tastes; but, the startling nature of the drawing room has to do with the house’s location within a space that is unclearly labeled and filled with industrial air unusually heavy for a residential space. Concentrating on the discomfort visitors feel in the Thornton House and associating this distress with the room's decorations, Mary Ann O’Farrell ignores the house’s physical location in Milton’s industrial center. O’Farrell comes close to addressing the transitive space of the house when she calls “The ‘painfully spotted, spangled, speckled look’ about the room and its unleisured ‘evidence of care and labour,’” a “misdirected” “aesthetic marker of class.” 133 But she misses the mark when she writes that “Mrs. Thornton’s drawing room enforces good behavior.” 134 On the 131 Ibid. 132 Randau, 49. 133 Mary Ann O’Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), 62. 134 Ibid. 76 contrary, the house itself does not serve as a space where social boundaries are to be reinforced, but a place where they can be torn down. Before the potentially-deadly workers’ uprising and the near-destruction of the Thornton House and Marlborough Mills, Margaret cannot “imagine” why the Thornton family would choose to live so close to Mr. Thornton’s mill with its “continual clank of machinery” and the steam engine’s “long groaning roar” 135 if they obviously have the financial means to live elsewhere. Gaskell writes, “Margaret only wondered why people who could afford to live in so good a house, and keep it in such perfect order, did not prefer a much smaller dwelling in the country, or even some suburb; not in the continual whirl and din of the factory.” 136 Significantly, it is “the continual whirl and din of the factory” that creates a physical—and potentially moral—effect on Margaret. The Thornton House’s shared space with Marlborough Mills creates a moral as well as physical effect on those who inhabit it. According to popular nineteenth-century thought, the space one occupies influences one’s mental and physical state. 137 In Self-Help, Samuel Smiles writes, “The home in the crystal of society—the nucleus of national character; and from that source, be it pure or tainted, issue the habits, principles, and 135 Gaskell, 111. 136 Ibid. 137 Interestingly, Gaskell writes that not only the space of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills could have a moral and physical effect on those who occupy the home, but specifically, the noise from the working-class people on Marlborough Street can have an effect on Margaret. Before the riot, “there was a restless, oppressive sense of irritation abroad among the people; a thunderous atmosphere, morally as well as physically, around her. From every narrow lane opening out on Marlborough Street came up a low distant roar, as of myriads of fierce indignant voices” (172). 77 maxims which govern public as well as private life.” 138 Similar in theme, yet specifically referring to a different socio-economic class, Engels writes of the working-class housing area in Manchester as a “whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds them [the working- class people].” 139 Every moment they spend in these surroundings, according to Engels, they are “sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to resist the demoralizing influence of want, filth and evil surroundings.” 140 While Engels writes of those who live in the working-class area, the same idea can be applied to those who visit sites of labor, like Margaret. As she stands on the steps of the Thornton residence, her “unaccustomed ears” cannot hear her father’s voice. Even before the workers’ uprising, the sounds of the factory indicate a certain aural space for rebellion that transcends the walls and mill-yard space which separate the house and the factory. In muting her father’s voice, the factory noise serves as a potential catalyst for Margaret to break free from her father’s control, however briefly, and no longer obey his instructions. Supporting this notion, Jo Pryke argues that Gaskell employs the "conversation method" to allow Margaret to learn and grow as a character. 141 The conversation method emphasizes that Margaret learns by listening to men such as her father. According to Pryke, Margaret gathers knowledge from what she hears in conversations, not from the 138 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance (London: John Murray, rptd. 1866, originally published 1859), 361. 139 Engels, 40. 140 Ibid. 141 Jo Pryke, "The Treatment of Political Economy in North and South," The Gaskell Society Journal 4 (1990), 29. 78 sights she sees in Milton. The fact that Margaret learns best from listening to others, demonstrates that she has the capability to think differently from those who came before her. 142 In an effort to emphasize the important didactic function of the home and the significance of parents setting a good example for children, Samuel Smiles in Self-Help writes: All persons are more or less apt to learn through the eye rather than the ear; and whatever is seen in fact makes a far deeper impression than anything that is merely read or heard. This is especially the case in early youth, when the eye is the chief inlet of knowledge. Whatever children see they unconsciously imitate. They insensibly come to resemble those who are about them—as insects take the color of the leaves they feed on. 143 According to Smiles’s assessment of the eye versus the ear debate, the eye is the more fundamental and basic way that children and adults process information, so that in using her ears as her primary source of knowledge, Margaret does not “unconsciously imitate” but uses logic to process the information around her. Further, if we accept Margaret as an auditory learner, then we do not need to limit her capacity to learn from conversations, but we can include her ability to gain knowledge from sounds such as labor's resonances emanating from Marlborough Mills. In fact, in learning from non-traditional sounds and not her father's voice, Margaret, even in engaging in the traditionally feminine pursuit of house visiting, can be influenced by other "voices." The idea that the “whirl and din” of the factory allows for rebellion is particularly of interest since the sound is a by-product 142 Other older adult characters in North and South only see and listen to certain people. Mrs. Thornton, for example, is not a good listener to anyone but her son. When he comes home, though, "her eyes and ears were keen to see and to listen to all the details he could give [. . .]" (188). Both of Margaret's parents are either too infirm or too depressed to truly engage with listening to others apart from their intimate social circle. 143 Smiles, 360-61. 79 of traditional class structures which accompany industrialization. But these sounds are not only from production, they serve in the text as a means of allowing for the “voice” of the oppressed masses to be heard. A “din,” according to the OED, is “a loud noise, particularly a continued confused or resonant sound, which stuns and distresses the ear.” 144 Coupled together, the verb definitions of “din” “to utter continuously so as to deafen or weary, to repeat ad nauseam” and “to assail with din or wearying vociferation” signify a perpetual assault that creates deafness out of repetition. In a way, a din interrupts the status quo and creates a stunning distress that allows for new sensations to be established different from conventional norms. A whirl, on the other hand, in its associations with a wheel and the perpetual turning connected to the word “continual” (repeated a few times in the scene), has figurative associations with a “dizzying,” or “confused” effect on the mind and senses which can even be associated with a “tumult” or a “violent movement.” 145 Gaskell explicitly makes the association of the “din of the factory” and the revolutionary sound of the workers’ voices during the riot when she uses the word “din” to describe the sound of the workers' riot from the vantage point of the Thornton drawing room. She writes, “an increasing din of angry voices raged behind the wooden barrier, which shook as if the unseen maddened crowd made battering-rams out of their bodies 144 “din, n. 1 .” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 October 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ 50064334>. 145 “whirl, n.” and “whirl, v.” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 October 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50284640> and <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ 50284641>. 80 [. . .] till their great beats made the strong gates quiver, like reeds before the wind.” 146 But even as Gaskell’s narrator emphasizes the “increasing din of angry voices” which “raged behind the wooden barrier,” in the next paragraph, she stresses that the rebelling workers were speechless until Mr. Thornton spoke to them, an apparent contradiction to the previous idea that their angry voices created the continual, wearying sound. And yet, as with the crowd at the Great Exhibition, even though the crowd has been "voiceless," it has not been silent. Recalling the din of the factory that served as an educating force for Margaret, the "din of angry voices" while not articulate speech, does have the power to change Milton's minds and landscape. Gaskell's narrator explains, Hitherto they had been voiceless, wordless, needing all their breath for their hard-labouring efforts to breakdown the gates. But now, hearing him speak inside, they set up such a fierce unearthly groan, that even Mrs. Thornton was white with fear as she preceded him into the room. 147 The "fierce unearthly groan" combined with the notion that individuals "made battering- rams out of their bodies" dehumanizes the crowd. Instead of individuals fighting for their right to a fair wage, the people in the crowd become a supernatural force that slowly will break down the figurative and metaphoric "strong gates" through perpetual assault and individual sacrifice. Disturbingly, the people have become like the factory, their source of oppression. Yet, in taking on the factory's ability to penetrate the walls of the Thornton House, the workers can be heard by the Thornton family. Even the seemingly 146 Gaskell, 174. 147 Ibid. 81 impenetrable Mrs. Thornton becomes "white with fear." 148 What used to be a safe and comforting "din" for Mrs. Thornton has now become alarming. Since the Thornton House allows for revolutionary ideas to penetrate its walls, it is far from the ideal mid-Victorian home. A decade after the serial publication of North and South, John Ruskin, in Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864, writes that a house can only be defined as a home, if it does not allow the outside world to come inside: This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it is then only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. 149 "Anxieties of outer life" freely abound in the Thornton home. It is anything but a shelter “from all terror, doubt, and division.” But the house is clearly a “home” to the characters, not just “a part of that outer world.” After all, Margaret will not enter the factory space itself, but she will repeatedly visit the Thornton family at their home. She also prides herself on her charity work visiting families such as the Higgins family at their home. 150 148 We are once again reminded of the color white. See discussion of the evils of the color white and the dangerous effects of reflected light. 149 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1865; Second Edition, with Preface), 147-48. 150 As Dorice Williams Elliott demonstrates in her article "The Female Visitor and the Marriage of Classes in Gaskell's North and South," mid-nineteenth century thought was divided on the issue of middle- and upper-class women engaging in charitable visiting. Elliott writes, "The position of the female visitor [. . .] is one of double danger: it would be 'dangerous' to 'check' their dealings with the poor, but those very dealings are fraught with 'other dangers.' However well- intentioned, visitors may antagonize the poor who will 'come to regard themselves as the 82 According to how other characters interact with and socially refer to the space, in the world of North and South, the Thornton House is a home despite the “hostile society of the outer world” within its walls. But at the same time, it is also an industrial site of production. While visitors, such as Margaret, are disturbed by the “continual din of the factory,” Mrs. Thornton finds the sound reassuring. Perhaps, her ears and eyes have adjusted to the dizzying effect of living so close to the mill (similar to the effect physician James Henry Clark discusses in 1859 of the eye and ear becoming “accustomed to the shock” 151 of bright light and loud sound). In fact, Mrs. Thornton equates the sounds of Marlborough Mills which invade her home with the sound of bees producing honey when she says: ‘I have heard noise that was called music far more deafening. [. . .] as for the continual murmur of the work-people, it disturbs me no more than the humming of a hive of bees. If I think of it at all, I connect it with my son, and feel how all belongs to him, and that he is the head that directs it.’ 152 The regular sound of the factory does not create a confused, even deafening, effect on Mrs. Thornton’s senses, as it does on Margaret’s. Instead, she finds the “continual murmur of the work-people” to be a comforting, reinforcing sound. She interprets the “humming” not as the “murmuring” of rebellion or dissatisfaction, but as the fortifying inspected' and who may pretend to be worse off than they are in order to receive charitable donations. Proper visitors, on the other hand, can foster much goodwill between classes [. . .]" (21-22). Further, Elliott demonstrates how contemporary writers of North and South praised the novel for providing in Margaret Hale a example for readers of a "good" visitor, one who can mediate between the mill masters of Milton and the working-classes. 151 Clark, 287. 152 Gaskell, 161. 83 sound of the workers’ labor and her son’s amassing wealth. For Mrs. Thornton, the factory is her “hive of bees.” She does not need a lady’s hive to tend to in her garden, as women were told they needed from household management guides. Instead, she has one in her own backyard with living, human workers. And unlike an actual hive with the queen as its female head, the factory appears on the surface to reinforce gender roles for Mrs. Thornton with its sound emphasizing her son’s power over his workers and the Thornton household. Even away from the home, Mr. Thornton is the “head” that “directs” the household’s actions. At the same time, in positioning her son inside the hive, Mrs. Thornton allows herself power over her son’s business and the household despite labeling him the “head” and master. In The Apiary; or, Bees, Bee-Hives, and Bee-Culture, Alfred Neighbour suggests to women who wish to keep bees in their gardens to always keep the beehive within a spatial proximity to one’s person. He writes, “Much watchfulness is needed to prevent the loss of swarms” and that there exists “a necessity of having hives so located as to be constantly within view, either from the dining-room, or of those whose duties oblige them to be near the apiary. [. . .] Many swarms and colonies are lost simply because the departure takes place without anyone witnessing it.” 153 Mrs. Thornton’s position in her house is one especially designed for “witnessing” and controlling from the windows of the Thornton House. In fact, the narrator’s physical 153 Alfred Neighbour, The Apiary; or, Bees, Bee-hives, and Bee Culture: Being a Familiar Account of the Habits of Bees, and the Most Improved Methods of Management, with Full Directions, Adapted for the Cottager, Farmer, or Scientific Apiarian, (London: Kent and Co., Paternoster Row; Geo: Neighbour and Sons, 1865), 227-28. 84 description of Mrs. Thornton as “tall, massive, handsomely dressed” sets her up to be a figure that dominates the house and the mill structure. The narrator, with insight into Margaret’s thoughts, observes “the street did not look as if it could contain any house large enough for Mrs. Thornton’s habitation. Her son’s presence never gave any impression as to the kind of house he lived in; but, unconsciously, Margaret had imagined that tall, massive, handsomely dressed Mrs. Thornton must live in a house of the same character as herself.” 154 Based on Margaret’s perceptions of Mrs. Thornton, the mother is capable of physically dominating the son and defining their home space. Along these lines, according to Ruskin’s definition of a home, Mrs. Thornton is the reason for the house not feeling like a “home.” In enjoying her house’s proximity to the mill space and the sense perceptions that go along with it, Mrs. Thornton “seeks” the “danger,” “temptation” and “cause of error or offense” that no home naturally has within its walls “unless she [the woman of the house] herself has sought it.” 155 But the unrest permeating the Thornton House cannot be blamed on Mrs. Thornton. Instead, its proximity to the mill and the “offensive” sounds of labor speak more to the cultural issues surrounding the separation of labor and the enjoyment of the products of that very industry. Regarding cultural conflict reflected within the home, Thad Logan argues that "In the domestic interior, powerful (and contested) oppositions of male and female, public and private, self and other were being symbolically negotiated. The decorative complexity of the Victorian home mirrored the intensity of the issues being articulated 154 Gaskell, 111. 155 Ruskin, 147. 85 around it." 156 In other words, no matter how Mrs. Thornton decorates the drawing room, the issues of class would be present in the house because of its shared space with the mill and its location in the center of a city of class conflict. One could argue that even further away from the mill, the Thornton House still would be a place where one was reminded of the working-classes with the products of their labor on display in its drawing room. As Engels writes of “the great towns” such as Manchester, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together. 157 With social warfare “everywhere” pervading “every” corner of the town, then perhaps the Thornton House as a transitive space is more obvious and upfront as a location of social confusion, but that all houses in the town exhibit similar issues, however veiled. 158 More camouflaged and less obvious than the sights and sounds of the mill invading the space of the house, other spaces (including Margaret’s own home) create physical reactions in 156 Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xiii. 157 Engels, 37. 158 Along with the house's shifting social status, the Thornton family experienced significant shifts in wealth before the novel's beginning and Margaret's arrival. Mr. Thornton's father "speculated wildly, failed, and then killed himself, because he could not bear the disgrace" (87). The family left Milton without any money, and the young Mr. Thornton began to work in a draper's shop in order to support his family. When he had saved enough money, Mr. Thornton returned to Milton and paid his father's debts, and began his work at Marlborough Mills. The family's decision to live so close to the site of their wealth does allow Mrs. Thornton to monitor her son's progress, as one would a bee-hive. At the same time, the constant din of the factory within the home allows for the family to be aware of the source of their wealth both in a humbling and comforting manner. 86 Margaret making her have repeated “headaches” or other physical reactions throughout the novel when she becomes overstimulated by the sights and sounds around her. Victorian nonfiction writers, such as James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, 159 tend to focus on the visual sights when visiting working-class dwellings, a practice that Gaskell does not employ when she has her narrator describe Margaret's visit to the Higgins's house. 160 Margaret learns through what she hears, which would make a solely visual description an inaccurate description of Margaret’s experience and perceptions. When Margaret enters the Higgins's house for the first time (during the chapter aptly titled "First Impressions"), Gaskell's narrator records the sounds more than the sights of Margaret's experience. While visits to houses in Victorian novels traditionally involve detailed descriptions of furnishings, a physical description of the house itself (the number of rooms, how they connect to one another), or perhaps even a vignette of the people inside the house, Margaret's visit to the Higgins' house does not include any of these details. 161 Instead, it is the sound of Mary's labor that is the focus of Margaret's visit. 159 James Phillips Kay-Shuttleworth, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester (London: Ridgway, 1832). 160 Kay-Shuttleworth also happens to have been a friend of Gaskell's. (According to R.J.W. Selleck’s biography James Kay-Shuttleworth: Journey of an Outsider, Kay-Shuttleworth was significant in Gaskell obtaining biographical material for her book on Charlotte Brontë (300). In his own book, Kay-Shuttleworth writes, "“The houses, in such situations, are uncleanly, ill provided with furniture; an air of discomfort if not of squalid and loathsome wretchedness pervades them, they are often dilapidated, badly drained, damp: and the habits of tenants are gross—they are ill-fed, ill-clothed, and uneconomical—at once spendthrifts and destitute— denying themselves the comforts of life, in order that they may wallow in the unrestrained licence of animal appetite” (28-29). 161 Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life clearly outlines two ways of describing homes: the "map" and the "tour." The tour, according to de Certeau, shows the reader "'how to enter each room'" (119). Specifically, the tour "is a speech-act (an act of enunciation) that 87 Bessy's sister "was busy at the wash-tub, knocking about the furniture in a rough capable way, but altogether making so much noise that Margaret shrunk [. . .]." 162 The loud sounds of Mary's work create a physical reaction in Margaret's body literally causing her to "shrink," contract, or become reduced in size. The sounds of labor in such close proximity to Margaret's person may also allow her to create distance between the Higgins family and herself, as the act of "shrinking" 163 implies that one is moving away from something or someone, a fact that seemingly contradicts Margaret’s role in the text as “translator.” Despite Margaret's reaction, she is not a stranger to the sounds of doing one's own laundry, which is odd considering her physical reaction to the sound of Mary's work. Without the proper means to hire another servant, Margaret has taken it upon herself to do some of the household chores. She even makes a joke to her family (one that is ill- received by her mother) that she has become two women: "Peggy the laundry-maid" and "Margaret Hale the lady." 164 When her mother points out that Margaret should not be doing such tasks, she replies "'Oh, mamma!' [. . .] lifting herself up, '[. . .] I don't mind ironing, or any kind of work, for you and papa. I am myself a born and bred lady through 'furnishes a minimal series of units that have the form of vectors that are either 'static' [. . .] or 'mobile'" (119). In her dissertation Domestic Topographies, Elizabeth Palm Callaghan connects "the ways in which spaces gets narrativized and gender identities through descriptions of the house" in Victorian literature specifically (4). 162 Gaskell, 90. 163 "shrink, v." The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 October 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ 50223813>. 164 Gaskell, 76. 88 it all, even though it comes to scouring a floor, or washing dishes.'" 165 Unlike the sounds of Mary's labor that cause Margaret to shrink, when she calls herself "a born and bred lady through it all," Margaret "lifts herself up," an extending of the body instead of a contracting. Part of Margaret’s physical reaction to the sounds of labor in both the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills and the Higgins’s house stems from the houses’ lack of specialization. Daphne Spain in Gendered Spaces writes that British “dwellings reflect cultural values as well as the technological and geographic characteristics of the societies in which they are built.” 166 She continues, “In Victorian British country houses, separate wings for the servants were created to enable the gentry to minimize family contact with the lower classes. The larger the estate, the greater specialization of rooms and the more telling of social customs of the day [. . .].” 167 Margaret’s headaches do come from what the narrator describes as “weariness” and they are something that Margaret experiences more frequently since she moved to Milton. 168 If brought on by weariness, Margaret’s headaches can be stimulated from anything that has repetitive sound or sight, but most specifically, they occur when she encounters repetitive sounds or sights related to labor. But as the text progresses, her headaches lessen. Perhaps she too begins to get used to the sights and sounds of Milton (like Mrs. Thornton, who Gaskell’s narrator 165 Ibid. 166 Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 111. 167 Ibid. 168 Gaskell, 76. 89 clearly labels as not a “talkative companion” nor a “good listener” 169 ) or more likely, she has learned from what she has heard and she is ready to serve as a key member of the Milton community. Margaret, for lack of a more appropriate word, is a “sensitive” person in terms of how she reacts to others' actions and specifically how her body and mind react to the sense stimulation surrounding her in Milton. As Victorian physician Edmund Gurney argues in The Power of Sound, “doubtless the sensations of higher senses may often be to the sensitive persons a source of acute distress.” 170 While some who are not “sensitive” (as the Victorians called those who were connected with their senses) find that “over- stimulation” “deadens,” others, such as Margaret find that it “excites and annoys a sense organ” 171 “by cultivating the sensibilities.” 172 John M. Picker writes that George Eliot “invoked a motif of acute hearing to suggest the perceptive capacity a truly sympathetic character might possess.” 173 Unlike Mrs. Thornton, who has seemingly become used to the sounds of the mill, Margaret will remain sensitive to the sounds of labor and the plight of those who are producing that labor. In fact, according to Gurney’s experience and Victorian popular medical thought, those who are sensitive to sight and sound, as Margaret is, will continue to experience “increased wakefulness with continually growing 169 Ibid., 188. 170 Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1880), 2-3. 171 Ibid., 4. 172 Ibid., 2. 173 John M. Pickler, Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6. 90 discomfort” 174 as long as the stimulation continues. In other words, when Margaret becomes the mistress of the Thornton House and even after she has lived in the house for many years, she will still be sensitive to the sounds she hears and the discomfort might even increase. At the same time, Gurney argues that “there are possibilities of great variation in the same individual at different times” 175 and equates changes in food tastes to changes in an individual’s ability to adapt to light and sound. But as indicated by Mr. Hale's playful pinch of his daughter's ear, 176 Margaret always has been sensitive to what she hears and this trait will most likely not change. The sounds of Mary's work muddy Margaret's visual and auditory perceptions and allow for Nicholas Higgins to enter the house and approach her without Margaret detecting him: "she was startled by hearing Nicholas speak behind her; he had come in without her noticing him." 177 The space of the Higgins's house is not a transitive space in that it is clearly coded as private and working-class; but, the sounds of labor (which Margaret is accustomed to hearing at a distance, or the very least away from the living room) confuse her. Significantly, Margaret becomes aware of Nicholas’s presence from the sound of his voice, therefore reinforcing the idea that Margaret privileges her ears over her eyes. Also, this fact emphasizes that the sounds of Mary’s labor are less intrusive than those of Marlborough Mills in the Thornton House. Margaret's approach is 174 Gurney, 5. 175 Ibid., 2. 176 Gaskell, 309. 177 Ibid., 90. 91 the opposite of the working-class Higgins' outlook on life. He says, "'I believe what I see, and no more. That's what I believe, young woman. I don't believe all I hear—no! not by a big deal.'" 178 In this case, Nicholas is referring specifically to what other people have told him (including thoughts regarding religion), but even following a direct confrontation with Margaret’s established system of learning, she leaves the Higgins’s house “thoughtful.” 179 In learning through what she hears supplemented by what she sees, Margaret becomes aware that all that she hears is not necessarily the truth. But it takes the riot for Margaret to truly learn the importance of combining what she hears with what she sees. She learns that speaking and listening alone will not solve the world's problems when she witnesses the crowd violence in the face of Mr. Thornton's speech. Before her realization, she thought "if Mr. Thornton would but say something to them—let them hear his voice only—it seemed as if it would be better [. . .]." 180 During the riot, she proves to herself that she will not be a coward in the face of social revolution, "but now, in this real great time of reasonable fear and nearness of terror, she forgot herself, and felt only an intense sympathy—intense to painfulness—in the interests of the moment." 181 Margaret loses visual and auditory control in this scene as her body is overcome with passion and compassion, but what she sees is more than just a "glance" since she is able to process and learn from the information. Gaskell's 178 Gaskell, 91. 179 Ibid., 92. 180 Ibid., 178. 181 Ibid., 175. 92 contradictions in terms of the auditory and visual realms make it so that Margaret has to fight to discover the "truth" of the situation. As the gates of Marlborough Mills fall during the workers’ rebellion, Margaret finds herself either unable to speak or unable to be heard by Mr. Thornton. She cannot rely solely on auditory communication, but she must learn from what she sees as well. The riot has broken down all forms of communication between those inside and outside the house: Margaret’s lips formed a ‘No!’—but he [Mr. Thornton] could not hear her speak, for the tramp of innumerable steps right under the very wall of the house, and the fierce growl of low deep angry voices that had a ferocious murmur of satisfaction in them, more dreadful than their baffled cries not many minutes before. 182 We do not know if Margaret is unable to speak in the first place or if Mr. Thornton is unable to hear her, but the distinction does not really matter since the only sound that can be heard is the “low deep angry voices” of the workers. Quoting F. Marin Mersenne’s Treatise on Universal Harmony published in 1636, Rodolphe Radau in 1872 emphasizes how different vowel sounds carry with them certain physiological characteristics. He writes that o, “‘signifies what is grand and full [. . .]. O is expressive of strong passions: O patria! O tempora! O mores! and to represent rotundity, because the mouth must form a circle while uttering it.’” 183 All in all, the motion of Margaret’s lips indicate passion, a strong emotion which even apart from its auditory indicators has visual clues which can be interpreted. Interestingly, Gaskell's narrator uses the word "passion" to describe the 182 Gaskell, 176. 183 Radau, 231-32. 93 workers's motivations. 184 Even as Margaret strives "to make her words distinct," 185 she is physically able to translate for the workers even if she does not utilize her normal auditory medium. The transitive space of the Thornton House aids in Margaret's increasing ability to convey the needs of the working-classes. Traditionally, mid-Victorian novels, such as this one, are fraught with narrative confusion because they focus on urban spaces which "frustrate narrative." 186 Unlike the novels of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century, mid-Victorian novels concentrate on urban “decentered” spaces different from the country houses of Jane Austen where the plot hinged on “getting the right inhabitants into possession of the right rooms.” 187 As Robert L. Patten writes, “If lives, now, are often more circular than telic, and if houses are temporarily inhabited decentered spaces rather than centers of economies and texts, then journeys are more difficult to narrate because they are so uncertain.” 188 But the Thornton House serves a different function than the average “temporarily inhabited decentered spaces” typical of Patten’s assessment of space in mid- Victorian novels. It is true that its geographical location meets the qualifications of Patten’s evaluation of the city in the mid-Victorian novel with its ability to “frustrate 184 Gaskell, 179. 185 Ibid. 186 Robert L. Patten, “From House to Square to Street: Narrative Traversals” in Nineteenth- Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century edited by Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas (New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 197. 187 Ibid., 193. 188 Ibid., 196. 94 narrative” by “overwhelming the senses,” 189 but the location of the house within the center of the city allows for the house to be a space not displaced from the economic and narrative center of the text as other homes, such as the Hale house, are in North and South. Instead, the Thornton House with its continuous reminder of production allows for an access point for Margaret (and the reader) to learn about the plight of the mill workers. After all, without the space of the house which enabled Margaret to experience the riot, she would not have faced the importance of utilizing both what she sees and what she hears. 190 It may seem counterintuitive that a home space decorated with the spoils of the mill worker’s labor could speak to the ills of mismanaged industrialization, but the pervasive mid-Victorian ideal that the home should be a place of comfort significantly appeared after the industrial revolution. Therefore, a link between the home and industrialization is not reductive. John Tosh examines the shift from pre-Victorian living spaces which served both domestic and business purposes concurrently to the mid- Victorian ideal domestic space which emphasized comfort as a refuge from the outside world. 191 Tosh writes, “Taking the middle class as a whole, the pace of change was particularly pronounced during the first half of the nineteenth century—the period of 189 Ibid., 197. 190 During the workers' riot, Margaret, who usually depends on her sense of hearing in order to learn, must employ her eyes to distinguish individuals in the crowd. As "the fierce growl of low deep angry voices" becomes stronger within the house, Margaret must look out the window and individualize the workers: "'Oh, God!' cried Margaret, suddenly; 'there is Boucher. I know his face, though he is livid with rage [. . .]'" (176). 191 Tosh, 14. 95 most intensive industrialization in Britain.” 192 Is the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, then, a throw-back to pre-Victorian notions of home life? Instead of a reversion to an older way of life, the space of the house attached to the mill was one of the last remnants of a changing era, a space that if Margaret was not emotionally invested in the plight of the mill workers she as owner could easily demolish for profit. After all, as Tosh explains, mill houses were popular with “first-generation manufacturing entrepreneurs” who wished to supervise the mill from home (like Mrs. Thornton). Yet, these spaces were few and far between because the owners of the mills preferred to demolish the houses and sell their lots because the price of land at the center of town continued to rise in value. 193 In allowing Margaret to inherit the space of the Thornton House, Gaskell secures that the transitive space will not be torn down and sold, but that it will be continued to be lived in. The Thornton family will not move to a decentered space outside of town where it will become harder for Margaret to enact her narrative function as translator between the classes and as one who will witness to social change, furthering North and South's place among mid-Victorian Industrial novels. In Chapter Three, we will turn our eyes and ears away from the transitive space of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills to the unconventional female body in Wilkie Collins's three-volume novel Hide and Seek. Much like the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, Mary/Madonna's presence creates narrative confusion because of her place in the text as a figure without class origins. Mary, a person without social class, 192 Ibid., 16. 193 Ibid. 96 serves as a site of anxiety for those in Collins's novel. Before the end of the novel, her social class must be resolved and her family origins must be established. 97 Chapter Three "Destroying the General Uniformity": Transitive Spaces as Contagious Locations in Wilkie Collins's Hide and Seek Within this chapter, the stakes regarding how a transitive space confronts, creates, and illuminates the mid-Victorian apprehension regarding the possibility of future change will be heightened as we turn away from the image of an inanimate building to that of a person who represents potential social change for other characters. Mary, a deaf and mute foundling, acts within the novel as a moving transitive space not unlike the Crystal Palace or the Thornton House in that she creates physical anxiety for those who come face to face with her physical presence. And yet, despite the fact that Mary is deaf and mute, unlike in North and South in which Margaret must learn to interpret the transitive space in order for the novel to successfully conclude, translation and deciphering Mary's wants and desires is of little consequence to the plot. Instead, she creates anxiety-related sensory distortion not because she is deaf and mute, but because she reminds characters of the precarious situation of their future social standing. To begin, Hide and Seek's central plot revolves around the discovery and restoration of the deaf and mute Mary's enigmatic class origins. Before her adoption into the quasi middle-class Blyth family, Mary (or Madonna as she is also called) was raised by circus performers and spent her early youth performing for working-class crowds. While Mary does not intend to overwhelm people with her presence, she does so until the moment her heredity and class are discovered. Until the last few pages of the novel, Mary 98 spreads sensory distortion like a diseased person unaware of her illness, yet one who nonetheless infects those close to her. While at first one could see Mary's ability to affect others as the result of her physical disability, Mary's power really comes from her mysterious class origins. Until the last chapter when Mary is restored to place among the middle class, characters who are near her are "overcome" 194 with her bodily presence, a fact which escapes Mary due to her disability, but one that the reader is privy to as characters lose control over their own bodies in her presence. 195 Rarely have scholars explored the 1854 longer, three-volume version of Hide and Seek; instead, Collins's shorter, one volume, more controlled edition from 1861 is the only version currently in print, and therefore, currently being read and discussed. When 194 The word "overcome" is used by Jubber, the sleazy circus barker to explain Mary's effect on people who see her. Jubber cries to the crowd, "'I implore you to be seated [. . .]. The talent of The Mysterious Foundling has overcome people in that way in every town in England (cheers)'" (I: 136). While Jubber speaks with "a finely modulated tremor in his voice" which emphasizes his fake emotion and shady character, as indicated by the "cheers" of the audience backing up Jubber's claim, Mary does possess an ability to "overcome" people that cannot be denied in Hide and Seek. 195 When Valentine first sees Mary exhibited in the circus, he becomes all bodily reaction and loses his previous ability to logically remain stoic during the other circus performances. Words "pour" from his lips, words that he himself might not understand. Much like The Mysterious Foundling who is all mystery and mysticism according to the circus's constructed narrative of her "powers," Valentine loses his past history and becomes "the florid stranger" instead of Valentine Blyth, artist and husband. Despite that he has neither seen nor heard of Mary before that day, Valentine immediately feels a strong bodily reaction to seeing the deaf and mute child from his seat in the crowd. While it might be easy to assume that Mary's body would no longer affect characters when she was taken out of the space of the circus, that is simply not the case. In actuality, even in the privacy of the Blyth home, Mary overwhelms those who are close to her, including her then-to-be discovered uncle, Mat. The sound of Mary's body "smote so painfully on his heart, [. . .] that the sweat broke out on his face, the coldness of sharp mental suffering seized on his limbs, the fever of unutterable expectations parched up his throat and mouth and lips [. . .]" (III: 168-169). In this scene, the sound Mary emits transfers to Mat and temporarily disables him. He is unable to move, and much like Mr. Blyth at the circus, Mary's presence physically affects his heart and limbs. The only way to stop Mary's effect on others is to discover Mary's class origins. 99 critics do write on Hide and Seek, they tend to focus on Mary's disability, not her status as a foundling or how her lack of a clear social class is affected by and affects the class- coded suburb she resides in. Yet it is within the 1854 edition that Mary's body as a transitive space is front and center which allows for a direct confrontation with how class functioned in the anxious world of the mid-Victorian novel. Even if the 1861 edition shares similar themes with the 1854 edition, the later edition was revised and published during a time when popular thought on class and contagion were rapidly changing away from the notion of infectious, working-class locations to contagious bodies. 196 While Mary's disability does play a vital role in the 1854 edition, her to be determined, and then resolved, class origins alone demonstrate how a body with unknown class origins can create anxiety and a palpable contagious disturbance in an idyllic model community and function as a transitive space in its own right. Mary's body, just like the transitive space of the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills and the Blyth house within Hide and Seek, 197 creates class-related confusion and sensory distortion and must be controlled for the novel to conclude. 196 Specifically, from the 1820s through the 1850s, popular thought dictated that environmental factors, such as the space one occupied was the main cause of mental and physical disease. In the early 1860s through the 1870s, cellular pathology and germ theory, with the spread of disease on a person to person level without regard to the space one occupied, became the more accepted theory (Blair 145-47). Kirstie Blair in "Contagious Sympathies: George Eliot and Rudolf Virchow" explains how the debate at the beginning of the 1860s influenced Eliot's worldview, which later influenced her presentation of people and moral and physical disease in Middlemarch at the end of the 1860s. 197 This is, of course, not to say that Mary's body is identical to a building. Since she is a living being, she cannot be traversed in the same way as the Great Exhibition building could, for example. Yet, within the novel, Mary functions as a transitive space and a traveling environment of future-anticipated anxiety. Anyone who is in proximity to her or focuses on her body even from what appears to be a safe distance experiences sensory distortion. Unlike a traditional 100 To begin a discussion of the novel, the space of the suburb and Mary's body, we must turn back to the Crystal Palace and popular ideas of contagion in the 1850s. While writers touted the Great Exhibition as displaying the industrial achievements of all nations, the Exhibition also served as a means of displaying potential solutions to British problems which had yet to be solved, specifically how to design cities and communities so that physical and moral diseases and conditions did not spread within and outward from working-class dwellings. Across from the Crystal Palace in the Hyde Park Barracks, the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes displayed model houses for public view. Even though these houses were not actually within the glass and iron walls of the Crystal Palace, publications, such as The Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, include the exhibition among the descriptions of exhibits. 198 The models on display boasted unique uses of external and internal walls and partitions, not to mention the ability to remain durable, warm, and soundproof over time. 199 Additionally, the innovative hollow bricks used in the walls allowed for "an effective system" of ventilation which meant that unlike many mid- Victorian, working-class homes, air could be filtered in through the living room and out transitive space (such as a building), Mary can travel throughout the novel, but whenever a character crosses into her proximity, he or she becomes affected by Mary's physical presence and becomes anxious. Mary's body functions as a transitive space in the novel because it lacks clear definition and represents and creates anxiety for other characters as she is in the process of changing social classes. Unlike the Crystal Palace, for instance, Mary cannot be visited or occupied, but her environment and the area surrounding her can be, along with the transitive space of the Blyth house and painting room with which Mary is closely aligned. 198 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue in Three Volumes (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), 2: 774. 199 Ibid. 101 through the chimney flue. 200 Within these new structures, the interior could be contained and the air admitted and expelled could be controlled. According to the official book published by The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, his Royal Highness has had this building raised on his own account with a desire of conveying practical information calculated to promote the much needed improvement of the dwellings of the Working Classes, and also of stimulating Visitors to the Exhibition, whose position and circumstances may enable them to carry out similar undertakings, and thus without pecuniary sacrifice, permanently to benefit those who are greatly dependent on others for their home and family comforts. 201 The houses on display were "to facilitate the adoption of plans which combine in their arrangement every point essential to health, comfort, and moral habits of the labourer and his family" 202 while taking into account the potential financial burden of such costs on the wealthy exhibition visitor who might be inspired to create more sanitary lodgings on his own property. Even as these plans claimed to make the quality of life better for working- class residents, the houses themselves always are referred to clearly as ameliorating the physical and moral conditions of working-class inhabitants, not British citizens in general. The soundproofing was not to prevent exterior sound from entering the home, for instance, but to prevent the "loud" habits of the working-classes from invading the area outside of the home. The hollow bricks employed in these houses were "peculiarly 200 Plans and Suggestions for Dwellings Adapted to the Working Classes, including the Model Houses for Families Built by Command of His Royal Highness the Prince Albert, K.G., in Connexion [sic] with The Exposition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851. (London: The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, 1851), 5 201 Ibid., 4 202 Ibid., 8 102 adapted for agricultural buildings, and for enclosure, park, or fence walls, as well as ordinary dwellings of the labouring classes" 203 which meant that the working-classes, much like livestock housed in agricultural buildings, were believed to have needs unlike other people. These model homes were not alone at the Great Exhibition. In addition to the model homes and solutions for London and other urban and rural locations presented at the Great Exhibition, many other city planners continued to attack the perceived problem of contagious working-class locations by creating more isolated middle and upper class regions in London's suburbs. As the urban setting of London transitioned from the once apparent center of culture to a mishmash of districts without clear class boundaries, middle class residents began to move outside of the city center to the suburbs. 204 At first glance, the new suburb in Wilkie Collins's 1854 three volume Hide and Seek appears to be unusual in that it contains not only middle class and upper class areas, but also working-class dwellings. Written and set during the "first boom" 205 of the London suburbs, Hide and Seek presents a community not slowly created or tacked on to another already developed locale, but a unified neighborhood with clearly defined spots 203 On Hollow Brickwork and Its Various Applications (London: The Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, 1851), 2. 204 In her 2010 book Class, Culture and Suburban Anxieties in the Victorian Era, Lara Baker Whelan writes of the middle class move away from London's urban center following the mid- eighteenth century, "a shift in perceptions about space had happened: urban space in London ceased to be considered ordered, safe, and civilized—it was, instead, disordered by the masses of people pouring into it from the country, unsafe in terms of both property and bodily health, and uncivilized. Instead, the green spaces outside of London were seen to provide the literal breathing room that would allow order, safety, and, most of all, control of one's personal space" (14). 205 Whelan, (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 3. 103 for upper, middle and working-class inhabitants. Most suburbs at the time were "constantly shifting, economically unstable, socially heterogeneous" 206 locations. Even in the most well-planned of Victorian suburbs, as time passed and population grew, upper and middle class residents, who could afford the potential commute to the city, continued to move further away from the city center leaving in their wake transitive spaces which were once clearly defined as middle or upper class residential areas. These communities, once desirable, now deteriorated, could include an upper-class family living next to a multi-family working-class residence which prompted fear of moral and physical contagion spreading from the working-class occupied dwellings to the middle class ones. But within Hide and Seek, Collins creates a suburb that does not need to be run-down or undesirable in order to include working-class dwellings. Nonetheless, we cannot confuse this suburb with class equality or the planned comingling of different social classes. In fact, the design of the suburb added onto Baregrove Square allows for little interaction between even those inside the upper working-class. In fact, rarely has any location been as carefully demarcated according to class lines as the new neighborhood added onto the London suburb of Baregrove Square in Hide and Seek. Located significantly on the once-natural border of a northwestern London suburb, the neighborhood clearly moves from upper-class dwellings to working- class ones without any possibility of a working-class residence bordering an upper-class house. Collins's narrator explains in detail that "Rents and premises were adapted, in a 206 Ibid., 2. 104 steeply descending scale" 207 which means that even as the plan keeps the middle-classes from the working-classes, within the middle class area, for instance, the houses are clearly marked according to social standing and wealth, decreasing in value as the houses begin to border the upper working-class dwellings. Even within the area designed for the middle-classes, the houses descended from the upper-class mansions to the homes of "the middle classes with large incomes" to those of "the middle classes with moderate incomes" to those of "the middle classes with small incomes." 208 This descending scale of wealth allows for the new suburb "to keep the numerous habitations for the moderate incomes exclusively in their proper places; jammed in, locally as well as socially, between the lofty and the lowly extremes of life around them." 209 This is a world where individual families live "exclusively in their proper places" according to income and social standing limits social confusion and regulates its residents. Additionally, the social limitations normally not physically exhibited become easy to view from the outside. No one who saw the new suburb could possibly be confused as to the social standing of any of its residents. In North and South and Little Dorrit (which I will discuss in Chapter Four), the already-constructed city setting allows for growing neighborhoods (such as in Manchester or London) to allow places of residence to mix with sites of commerce. Once-wealthy neighborhoods degenerate and then become reclaimed by working-class characters as districts become areas without a single dominating class. Not so in Hide and 207 Wilkie Collins, Hide and Seek (London: Richard Bentley, 1851), 1: 39. 208 Ibid., 1: 39. 209 Ibid., 1: 40-41. 105 Seek. Unlike in North and South, the main community in Hide and Seek does not function as a site of production. Apart from the Blyth residence, which I will later discuss in detail, the suburb added onto Baregrove Square remains residential and clearly marked according to social standing. Within Hide and Seek's new suburb, physical barriers, such as "ornamental gates" and parks which kept "the abodes for the large incomes called 'mansions [. . .] fortified strongly against the rest of the suburb" separate the suburb. Unlike the location of the Thornton House where sights and sounds from the mills pervade the interior of the middle-class house, within Hide and Seek's new colony, the ornamental gates not only obscure vistas of the working-class dwellings, but also the sounds of labor. Collins's narrator explains, "Irreverent street noises fainted dead away on the threshold of the ornamental gates" 210 and "the cry of the costermonger, and the screech of the vagabond London boy were banished from hearing" 211 within the upper-class area. Inside the ornamental gates, the upper-class houses exist in what Collins describes as a "spick-and- span stillness" of "Paradise of the large incomes" 212 which implies that without the sound of "the vagabond London boy" invading the idyllic atmosphere of the upper-class dwellings, the spot remains clean, or "spick-and-span" from exterior influences. While Mary's disability is not the focal point of this chapter, it is of note that Mary, like the upper-class dwellings of the suburb she occupies for the majority of the novel, cannot 210 Ibid., 1: 39. 211 Ibid., 1: 40. 212 Ibid. 106 hear and internally acquires the "spick-and-span stillness" 213 of the upper-class dwellings within the working-class circus. When she performs for the working-class crowds, they scream and shout at her, something that "might have frightened a grown actress," Collins narrator points out, but to Mary "not a note from those cheering voices, not a breath of sound from those loudly clapping hands could reach her." 214 At the same time, like the working-class residences featured in the new suburb and at the Great Exhibition, Mary's body remains silent. No sound can be emitted from her body apart from sighs and light moans, undefined and indistinguishable, much like the sound from the controlled environments which planned to mute the sounds of the working-class residences. Even within the well-planned neighborhood, the upper-class and working-class dwellings are linked: "As the rich neighbourhood was shut in from the general suburb, so the poor neighbourhood was shut out from it." 215 While the upper-class dwellings contain, they share an affinity with the working-class dwellings which emit everything from sounds to physical bodies pouring out of the "boxes": "Every hole drilled in these boxes, whether door-hole or window-hole, was always overflowing with children. [. . .] 213 Collins uses the word "stillness" to describe Mary when describing her demeanor after the circus accident that rendered her deaf and mute: "The tender and touching stillness which her affliction had cast over her face [. . .]" (I: 162). Later Collins writes, "The affliction which separated her from the worlds of hearing and speech—which set her apart among her fellow- creatures, a solitary living being in a sphere of death-silence that others might approach, but might never enter—gave a touching significance to the deep, meditative stillness that often passed over her suddenly, even in the society of her adopted parents, and of friends who were all talking around her" (II: 61-62, emphasis mine). Interestingly, when Mat thinks that Mary's father dies from shock, Collins describes the character's presumed death as "a great stillness pass[ed] over [his] face" (III: 296). 214 Ibid., 1: 129. 215 Ibid., 1: 40. 107 In the world of the small incomes, young life flowed out turbulently into the street, like an exhaustless kennel-deluge, in all weathers." 216 In the poorest division of the new colony, sound not only functions as a general irritant, but it also threatens the upper- classes. Collins writes of an upper-class fear "from exposure to such volatile particles of noise and nuisance as floated free of the densely-vulgar atmosphere generated in the poor quarter." 217 Collins's image of the "volatile particles of noise and nuisance" along with Collins's narrator's notion that there exists "a certain bond of union" 218 between the upper and lower classes connect to mid-Victorian fear of contamination from working-class dwellings. Sound and "particles" from working-class bodies could travel even where the working-class bodies could not and effectively "pollute" the upper-class area, no matter how much division was attempted. Within the suburb, between these two extremes exist the middle-class dwellings, an interesting and more flexible set of possibilities. While the Blyth residence belongs in this category, it exists partly (if not completely) outside of conventional middle-class behaviors and norms (a fact which highlights the territory with Mary's body which also does not belong). Interestingly, the Blyth family live "on the outskirts of that part of the new suburb appropriated to the middle classes with moderate incomes." 219 While living "on the outskirts" of a city is a fairly vague description in a volatile suburb, Collins later 216 Ibid., 1: 41. 217 Ibid., 1: 43. 218 Ibid., 1: 40. 219 Ibid., 1: 47. 108 clarifies that the Blyth house "stands on the extreme limit of the new suburb" which further emphasizes the family's isolation and the possibility of the home not just functioning within the framework established by the neighborhood. If the Blyth house exists "on the extreme limit" of one neighborhood, it could become the "extreme limit" of another, less regulated colony, perhaps one that embraces a more fluid social structure. In terms of economic prosperity, the Blyth family exists in the middle of the new suburb. They are neither wealthy nor poor. Within the middle-class, they do not have the lowest income nor do they possess the greatest; they are indeed average. Yet, even within the clearly marked middle-ground, the Blyth family's house exists outside of normative boundaries: they purposefully choose to distance themselves from their social class, exposing them to "volatile particles" of other classes. Nonetheless, even those who occupy the normative middle-class area remain surrounded by the signals of the very disparate social standings of their neighbors, and thus, become exposed to the "volatile particles" from the working-class houses and the "'park' stillness as exuded through the ornamental gates." Collins implies that these forces affected the middle-class dwellings differently depending on one's individual family wealth. In some places, the 'park' influences vindicated their existence superbly [. . .]. In other places, the obtrusive spirit of the brick boxes rode about, thinly disguised [. . .]. Generally, however, the hostile influences of the large incomes and the small, mingled together on the neutral ground of the moderate incomes; turning it into the dullest, the dreariest, the most oppressively conventional, and most intensely (because negatively) depressing division of the whole suburb. 220 220 Ibid., 1: 43-44. 109 Despite the fact that most moderate middle-class income dwellings exist in the "dullest" and "dreariest" "most oppressively conventional" area of the suburb, the Blyth family house announces its difference with its unique structure. Even as Mr. Blyth is a middle- class character who does not seem to care for politics or the working-class struggles of the day, 221 he nonetheless creates an open place in the novel that allows for "particles" to float freely as they do in the working-class quarter. By choosing to build "a large and quaintly-designed painting-room at the side of the house, and so destroying the general uniformity of appearance in the very uniform row of buildings amid which he had chosen his dwelling-place," 222 Valentine Blyth disrupts the physical look of the middle class with moderate income district. Collins repeatedly uses the word "uniform" in contrast to the Blyth residence in this passage, calling attention to the fact that the Blyth residence disrupts the flow from middle class with large incomes to middle class with small incomes, causing a blip in the homogeneity of the houses within the moderate income middle class home area. Significantly, it is the site of his painting-room that allows for Valentine and his family to be different from their standard inhabitants of the middle class with moderate income. 221 Valentine Blyth "is decidedly unpopular among that large class of Englishmen, whose only topics of conversation are public nuisances and political abuses; for he resolutely looks at everything on the bright side, and cannot be made to understand the difference between a Liberal Conservative and a Moderate Whig! Men of business habits think him a fool: intellectual women with independent views cite him triumphantly as a capital specimen of the inferior male sex" (64). Significantly, Valentine is not respected in society. He chooses to opt out of politics, which makes people assume that he is ignorant, while in reality, he sees no need to participate. His lack of interest in and knowledge of political affairs makes him the "sort of man whom everybody shakes hands with, and nobody bows to, on a first introduction" (64). 222 Collins, 1: 47. 110 The notion that the single Blyth residence could "destroy" the carefully constructed social fortresses built by middle-class uniformity speaks to how Collins associates the building of natural land with guerilla warfare. Collins's narrator writes, "Alexander's armies were great makers of conquests; [. . .] but the modern Guerilla regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln, are the greatest conquerors of all [. . .]." 223 As in Little Dorrit (the subject of my fourth chapter), industrial progress and the need to accommodate a burgeoning city population threatens the spaces of the novel. Interestingly, Collins's narrator does not consider the workers who make up the "Guerilla regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln," a phrase he uses again on the next page in regards to the "gritty-natured Guerilla regiments of the hod, the trowel, and the brick-kiln." 224 Nonetheless, during the 1850s, according to the OED, "guerilla" meant "an irregular war carried on by small bodies of men acting independently." 225 In this case, Mary acts like a guerilla warrior in that she is laying siege to the neighborhood on an individual level. The Blyth family is a part of the community, but the Blyths live on the "extreme limit" of the suburb which means that the family exists as far apart from the community as they possibly can while still existing within it. Unlike in Little Dorrit where every new space the narrator explored became the novel's (and London's) center, 223 Ibid., 1: 23. 224 Ibid., 1: 36-37. 225 "guerilla." The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50099960>. 111 in Hide and Seek, the main house of the novel is clearly askew and as far from the center of the town as possible. In breaking from a uniform pattern, the Blyth residence becomes a dangerous place that "destroys" what the rest of the suburb has worked so hard to create. Collins's narrator explains, "From that moment, people began, as the phrase went, to talk about him." 226 The addition of the painting room instigates the social stigma attached to the Blyth house. Because he built his house to conform to his own artistic and money making needs, Blyth's neighbors label him "a very eccentric person." 227 They are quick to focus their attention on "some impenetrable mystery" 228 which they suspected "lurked hidden in the privacy of the painter's fireside." 229 After all, if he is not conforming to his social class's standardized definition of what a house should look like, there must be a dangerous secret lurking within the privacy of the house to justify or illuminate Mr. Blyth's aberrant behavior. The focus of the "impenetrable mystery" is "The Mysterious Foundling," Mary. While the Blyth house's disregard for social order made it the focus of attention, and therefore, allowed the residence to lose some of the privacy afforded the upper and middle-class dwellings of the neighborhood's model abodes, Mary's origins remain the "impenetrable mystery" which spectators from the outside cannot uncover. According to 226 Ibid., 1: 47-48. 227 Ibid., 1: 48. 228 Ibid. 229 Ibid., 1: 49. 112 Lara Baker Whelan, a sought-for advantage of living in the suburbs was privacy for the middle classes, and the more privacy a mid-Victorian suburban home could afford, the higher its inhabitants' social standing. 230 Mary's presence "really made a deeper impression on all inquisitive minds than every one of his eccentricities put together." 231 Without Mary in the house, the inhabitants "would probably have thought little more about the new-comer," apart from the fact that they do not consider Mr. Blyth a gentleman. 232 Instead, the neighbors begin to speculate about the family and the house in general based on Mary's appearance. The girl "wore her veil down whenever she went abroad" 233 to acquire a level of privacy, but at the same time, in hiding her physical appearance, the family called attention to Mary's mysterious potential beauty all the more. Collins' narrator writes, "She was reported to be a most ravishingly beautiful creature—and yet, no one could ever be met with who had seen her face plainly." 234 Her hidden face, and supposed beauty, inspires the gossip of everyone in the suburb, including the working-class "servants and tradespeople" who "soon got wonderfully and mischievously busy with her character." 235 Interestingly, much like the unity shared by the upper-class houses designed to keep the "volatile particles" out, and the working-class 230 Whelan, 18 231 Collins, 1: 48. 232 Ibid. 233 Ibid., 1: 49. 234 Ibid. 235 Ibid., 1: 50. 113 structures designed to keep them in, Mary unifies everyone in the town with speculation as to her character. Everyone knows that she represents "something more scandalously improper," 236 but the fact that she exists within the Blyth house helps isolate the house and prevent anyone from actually "approach[ing] the gates of discovery" and "cross[ing] the mysterious threshold of Mr. Valentine Blyth's new painting-room." 237 While her presence invites isolation from society, it also bestows upon the family metaphorical gates, reminiscent of the barriers which surround the suburb's upper-class houses. While looking in on the Blyth house, "people shook their heads, and sighed, and murmured, 'Poor thing!' [. . .] and said, 'Sad case, isn't it?' whenever they spoke of Mary in the general society of the suburb." 238 The phrases "Poor thing!" and "Sad case" both highlight how the residents of the suburban area objectify Mary and attempt to control her body by labeling her as a "thing" or a "case," echoing her earlier status as The Mysterious Foundling, a subject of gaze that also inspired exclamations of "Poor little thing!" 239 from those who viewed her. Justifying the idea that Mary's body should be on display, the residents persist on spreading a rumor that Mary is "a resident female model" 240 for Valentine Blyth's paintings and sculptures, which further cements the 236 Ibid. 237 Ibid., 1: 51. 238 Ibid., 1: 50. 239 Ibid., 1: 145. 240 Ibid., 1: 50. 114 notion that Mary's aberrant body belongs within the Blyth painting room, a den of deviance. Oddly, Mary's body as spectacle within the suburb is reminiscent of her body as spectacle in the circus. The constructed narrative presented at the circus dominates over Mary's performance. As Susan Stewart says of the spectacle "the façade of the pitch or patter makes it of little significance whether the freak is authentic or not. It is the possibility of his or her existence that titillates; it is the imaginary relation, not the lived one, that we seek in the spectacle." 241 The same can be said of Mary's role in the suburb. No one actually seeks to know the "truth" in the novel's first volume; but the characters are content to hide behind the illusion that Mary occupies a role in the text that is both clandestine and licentious. Interestingly, Mary's exposure to the circus audience and the members of the suburb both occur in a manner that creates distance. When Mary performs her slight-of-hand as The Mysterious Foundling in the circus, her eyes are "bandaged," 242 a fact that connects to the veiling of Mary 243 within the suburb: "the object is blinded; only the audience sees." 244 241 On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 111. 242 Collins, 1: 129. 243 It is true that veiling a character would normally not blind them. And yet, within this passage, Mary's perspective is not told at all. Everyone is looking at her, but she appears to be walking through the world without seeing anyone or anything. While her veil may function as a more transparent blindfold, in the novel, when veiled, Mary does not see anything (similar to scenes in which Mary finds herself in a dark room and wonders if because she cannot see she is now both blind and deaf.) 244 Stewart, 108. 115 Later eliminated from the 1861 edition, Collins introduces a figure in the 1854 edition which shares traits with Mary and the transitive space of her body. Like Mary, who the residents presume to be a model, a "mannikin" within the Blyth painting room startles and makes characters who see it uncomfortable due to its uncanny resemblance to a female adult body of dubious origins. Interestingly, Patty the housemaid refers to the mannequin as "the thing," 245 an odd parallel to the suburban neighbors referring to Mary as a "thing" just five pages earlier. While Mr. Blyth is partial to the mannequin, "she was disliked instinctively by cook and housemaid, and will always be found to exhibit herself in the light of permanent bad character through the course of the present narrative." 246 Much like Mary, the mannequin is revealed to the reader under a veil of mystery, yet she is also "disliked instinctively" and mistrusted by people of all classes who see her. For the first few pages of its description, Collins's narrator calls the mannequin, "the lady," a name it clearly shares with Mary who is called "Madonna" which Valentine translates to his friends and family as "my lady." Also, like Mary, the mannequin's body is peculiarly both miniature and gigantic. Patty the housemaid calls the mannequin a "great beastly doll," a phrase that both implies smallness with the notion of a doll and invokes images of monstrosity and the grotesque. Much like Mary, whose body is fragmented into a series of parts (the characters who get to see her face comment that Mary's "eyes might be pronounced too large, her mouth too small, her nose not Grecian enough for some 245 Collins, 1: 55. 246 Ibid. 116 people's tastes" 247 ), the mannequin becomes "plump and shapely legs" and exposed genitals. 248 Susan Stewart, in examining the grotesque, explains that the grotesque body is "a body of parts," 249 and along with Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque body as a "body in the act of becoming," 250 both Mary and the mannequin share a similar place in the text that makes others uncomfortable. Bakhtin makes clear that the grotesque body "dominates all else" and "it is never finished, never completed." 251 Yet, within this novel, the way to control the grotesque female body is to assign it a single social class so that it will no longer "outgrow" its own self. Instead, it will become contained by social expectation. Much as Collins guides the reader to Mary's origins over three volumes, on a smaller scale, he allows the reader to proceed for a few pages before revealing that the subject described is, in fact, an inanimate object, not an indecent adult woman and model who has let her dress fall "open in front, so as to render her lower extremities visible in a very improper manner." 252 While Collins's narrator pokes fun at the scene by informing "all English women" to "be comforted as they read" that the mannequin is, in fact, "a foreigner," not a sign of a future trend in England's young women, he nonetheless clearly 247 Ibid., 1: 109. 248 Ibid., 1: 54. 249 Stewart, 105. 250 Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 317. 251 Ibid. 252 Collins, 1: 54. 117 states her "origin" as French and her family line as the "ignoble family of Mannikins" who "bore the barbarous name of Lay Figure" 253 before he finishes describing her character. This gesture at play regarding the mannequin's "origins" demonstrate that Collins is aware of the need to clearly delineate a mysterious character's origins. The small mystery combined with future-related anxiety which is resolved with clear, class and family origins imply that in order to resolve the novel, he will label Mary's origins which will rectify the effect she has on others. Like Mary, once the mannequin is labeled as belonging to a family, she disappears from the novel. Part of the mannequin's appeal as a narrative subject comes from the riddle of "who" she is and once Collins's narrator allows the reader to solve that mystery, there is no need to progress further with the mannequin's story. Unlike the mannequin, whose place of origin is clearly written on her body, Mary's roots are more difficult to trace. Collins wrote Hide and Seek during a time when it was popular to believe that one could be physically and morally influenced by the locations one occupied, yet it is not only the area of the working-class dwellings or the deviant site of the Blyth house which allow for the transference of "volatile particles," 254 but Mary's body as well. Even though the contagion/anti-contagion debate in which questions of how disease was transferred does not become fully developed until the 1860s, Hide and Seek written during the years before the debate began, presents Mary's body as a mobile transitive space which can infect and be infected by others' bodies. In 253 Ibid., 1: 55. 254 Collins, 1: 43. 118 fact, while the Blyth house and the painting room do have the possibility to morally and physically affect characters, Mary's body functions in the novel as a space outside of class structure, much like the Blyth House painting room, which spreads distortion within the novel. While characters' bodies do become defined by the sites they occupy both in society and in their physical residences (since within the suburb they are one and the same), Mary's body, as that of a foundling, does not "belong" to any one class or living environment. Instead, her body takes on the characteristics of different class's dwellings depending on who she is with and in what social situation she is in. In other words, much like the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, Mary's body is a transitive space in the novel that needs to be clearly labeled and controlled by the novel's last chapter. In order to restrain Mary's body and potentially deviant sexuality as a transitive space, Mary's body must be reunited with her original name and class heritage, at which point, she blends into the background of the novel, no longer a site of class conflict, but a conventional female character who without mysterious origins can no longer "overcome" others with her close proximity. In Hide and Seek, the key to Mary’s identity lies in the fact that her father assumed a “false name” 255 when Mary was conceived. This lie prevents other characters from immediately discovering Mary’s origins, and therefore, allows her to continue to function as a transitive space within the novel. While Mary’s last name obviously is of dubious origins, since the known name of her father “Arthur Carr” leads to dead ends, the 255 Ibid., 3: 301 119 fact that her first name continues to shift within the novel further proves that Mary’s body cannot be tied to family origins or constructed identity. 256 Much like the transitive space of Thornton House at Marlborough Mills which was never given an official name in the novel, but instead called everything from "Marlborough Mills" to "the house" to "Thornton's" by various characters, Mary's body is attached to multiple shifting names. Unlike her father Mr. Thorpe, who chooses to change his name so that he can concentrate on collecting specimens in Mary's mother's town, Mary has no control over her name changes. In fact, much like the Blyth family cat, Mary's name changes at the will of not only the Blyth family, but the Blyth family circle of acquaintance. Much like Mary, Snooks the cat cannot be separated from anyone's description of the Blyth family house: "no account of that gentleman's household could possibly pretend to be complete, if it did not include the cat. She was literally a member of the family [. . .] and was on perfectly friendly acquaintance with the whole circle of his acquaintance." 257 Mary occupies a similar place within the Blyth family. Much like the cat, Mary has dubious origins and cannot clearly communicate her desires. The fact that Mary shares an affinity with a cat clearly indicates that her role within the house is more like that of a pet or curiosity than a person or equal household member. Snooks, whose original name was Zerlina, came to be called Snooks when "the 256 Mary was both the name given to the foundling by her mother and her mother's first name. As other characters refer to Mary with other names, they attempt to erase all traces of Mary's past and her maternal origins. For most of the novel, she lives with the Blyth family members who call her Madonna, but I prefer to refer to her as Mary within this chapter because Mary links her to her mother, and Mary's body cannot be separated from her maternal circumstances, a fact I will discuss in greater detail later in the chapter. 257 Ibid., 1: 101. 120 whole circle of Mr. Blyth's acquaintance" 258 voted on the name, much as the way "the hosts of friends" at the Blyth house "unanimously asserted" that Mary should be called Madonna instead of Mary. 259 Like Snooks, whose "designation had been immediately adopted," 260 Mary becomes Madonna not on her own accord, but based on the "unanimous" assertions of the Blyth family social circle. In fact, she loses her own name (as she did in the circus when she became The Mysterious Foundling): "the young lady was accordingly much better known in the painter's house as 'Madonna' than as 'Mary'" Collins's narrator says at the end of the paragraph on Mary's name change, clearly suggesting that Mary, like Snooks, cannot control her own moniker. Interestingly, while Snooks's new name takes her from the romantic Zerlina to the overly familiar Snooks, as Valentine points out, Mary's new name of Madonna means "simply and literally, 'my lady'" in Italian. 261 While Snooks becomes increasingly English with her "short, familiar English name, for a small, familiar English animal," 262 Mary becomes more exotic and elevated in stature with the new name of Madonna. Much like her circus title The Mysterious Foundling, Mary's new name of Madonna lends her an air of mystery and power. While the title The Mysterious Foundling emphasizes Mary's dubious origins, the name Madonna seems to place her in the upper class. Unlike Snooks who cannot "leave 258 Ibid. 259 Ibid., 1: 109. 260 Ibid.,1: 101. 261 Ibid., 1: 110. 262 Ibid.,1: 101. 121 off kittening," 263 Mary as "Madonna" (a further association with Jesus's mother) is not sexually promiscuous, but angelic, pure and sexually unavailable. At the same time, Mary’s body within the painting room is as open as the cat’s physically. It is no coincidence that just two pages after Mary "feels" sound for the first time, she finds herself crying out in the middle of the night for fear of an intruder penetrating her body. While this time the fear of penetration is of a sexual nature, when Mary moves from being the one who affects others to the one who is affected in the painting room, she not only learns that her disability leaves her open to attack, but also she is faced with the potential threat of her own desires, however incestuous. While the novel does not allow for Valentine, the adopted father, to have his way with her, the novel does address incest specifically in that Mary's first sexual desires toward a man are for her long-lost brother, Zack, a Blyth family neighbor and friend. While Mary never expresses her desires for Zack, which helps keep the novel safely within the realm of normative societal relationships, the fact that Mary is open to the vibrations of Valentine Blyth's mahl-stick speaks to the fact that Mary's body is open to sexual as well as sense- related penetration. Before Valentine attempts to rub "his mahl-stick gently against the floor," which allows Mary to "feel sound" for the first and only time in the novel, he uses the same implement to interact with another character in the book, Snooks the cat who is, of course, sexually promiscuous and as Valentine explains, "'would have been the mother of 263 Ibid., 1: 100. 122 a family of forty children, by this time, if we hadn't taken to drowning them!'" 264 The mahl-stick allows Valentine to steady his hand and canvas while he paints, and is therefore an instrument of precision. In utilizing it to poke Snooks significantly "gently behind the ear," as he tells her "'Why you little wretch! when are you going to leave off kittening?'" 265 he is pointing not only to the site of Mary's disability, but also to the fact that both female characters share a tendency for sexual promiscuity. Additionally, like Mary who is a spectacle in the circus and the Blyth family household, Snooks "follows them [the Blyth family] about the house like a dog" and "performed all sorts of tricks under Mr. Blyth's direction," 266 a telling comparison to Mary, who even away from Jubber's "soiling and shameful contact!" 267 is still under another man's "direction." Even though Mary is of age during the majority of the novel, she remains small and unlike an adult physically, much like Snooks who is a "little wretch" according to Mr. Blyth, and "a small black cat" according to Collins's narrator. Yet even as Collins's narrator describes Mary as a "little child," someone whose body is both small and undeveloped, Mary’s body is boundless in nontraditional ways. Mary's body should be a closed off system (especially considering that her disability renders her more closed off from the world and a more interior being who cannot communicate her own thoughts or hear others's ideas); instead, her disability makes her more fluid than the average 264 Ibid. 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid., 1: 101. 267 Ibid., 1: 129. 123 character, reinforcing her role as a transitive space in the novel. Since Victorians saw the senses as a border between the interior of the body and the exterior world, 268 Mary with her disabled sense perception functions as a leaky bottle of emotions. Much like the working-class houses within the new suburb which spill out onto the streets noises, bodies, and smells, Mary's body with its inability to hear and speak coupled with its lack of clear definition, perhaps ironically, cannot contain her emotions and therefore creates reactions in others that no other character can effectively accomplish. Mary's disability creates the tendency for Collins's narrator and other characters to refer to her as a "little child" despite her adulthood (for the majority of the novel, she is 23). Mid-Victorian childrearing manuals often saw infants’ power of perception as flawed because they were more open to "influence," like Mary, and because she never regains her power to speak or hear in the novel, she remains in a child-like state. In T. H. Tanner’s A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, Tanner, a physician, instructs new mothers to watch carefully what their infants are exposed to in terms of moral and physical “influences”: “The infant at birth possesses very little power of perception, many of its senses are imperfect, and its system is only, as it were, a rich soil waiting for cultivation." 269 According to Tanner, The organs of the external senses are all present at birth, and the nerves distributed to them are large. The eye seems fully developed, although for the first few days the child gives but little indication of visual sensation; 268 William A. Cohen, Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3-6. 269 Thomas Hawkes Tanner, A Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood (London: Henry Renshaw, 3rd edition, 1879), 35. 124 the ear is imperfect, the new-born infant being apparently deaf; the nose is small, and the nasal fossae are wanting: the sense of touch is very imperfect. The larynx is very small, but increases in size as the infant begins to articulate at from six to twelve months old: most children speak plainly when from two to three years of age. 270 While Mary is obviously not an infant, her disability and inability to hear and speak do render her more vulnerable, like a newborn within the context of the novel. As a child open to moral and physical "influences" 271 from the adults in her life, Mary, who was nursed both by her fallen mother and a working-class circus performer, has the potential to be morally and physically harmed in her development and therefore, a dangerous space in her own right. In The London Lancet: A Journal for British and Foreign Medical, Surgical, and Chemical Science, Criticism, Literature and News, an article by C.H.F. Routh, M.D. demonstrates that popular thought on the influences of breast milk did not change from the late eighteenth century through the mid-to-late Victorian period. Writing in 1859, Routh quotes Dr. Samuel Ferris's 1785 Dissertation on Milk, "‘[. . .] for they [infants] often derive from the breast the seeds of the worst disorders [. . .] and carry with them through life the direful effects of the depraved and vicious habits of those who nursed them.'" 272 Of infants who were nursed by a stranger of a different class, such as 270 Ibid., 14. 271 In The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel, Laura Berry writes of the mid-Victorian emphasis on women spreading moral and physical disease to their infants in what fiction and non- fiction writers referred to as "influences" (66). 272 C. H. F. Routh, "On the Selection of Wet Nurses from Fallen Women” The London Lancet A Journal of British and Foreign Medical, Surgical, and Chemical Science, Criticism, Literature and News. Half Yearly Volumes, Volume II—1859, Edited by Thomas Wakley, Surgeon. J. Henry Bennett, M.D., and T. Wakley, Ja., M.R.S.C.E. (New York: 1859, Vol. II, No. 2 August 1859), 102. 125 Mary, Routh continues to support Ferris's idea that "'infants nourished at the breast of a stranger are for the most part degenerate; that they are naturalized to the nature of the nurse; that they derive their constitution from the nourishment which they take from her breast; and, through that medium, their disposition from her temper of mind, &c. &c’" 273 with two supporting examples from his own practice involving how social and sexual dysfunction transferred through breast milk from nurse to child. Yet, even though Mrs. Peckover, the working-class circus performer nursed Mary, Mary's body would be deficient as well because without her parents's "influence," particularly her mother's, she will lack the ability to fully grow up. Charles West in 1849 declares, "'But the infant is to be trained to become a man: its moral as well as its physical nature is to be cultivated; parental influence is to be the means of doing this [. . .].’” 274 Without proper "cultivation," Mary's body remains unrefined and uncultured by mid-Victorian standards. At the end of the novel, once Mary’s paternity is resolved and her body can take up its place among the upper-middle class, she barely appears in the novel. Once a major character, if not arguably the main character, Mary becomes an afterthought in the final scene of the novel. Her presence no longer “overcomes” anyone as it once did. Additionally, the narrator does not consider her disability when he describes “Zack’s hearty laugh” as being “heard outside” 275 by all characters, which includes Mary (who 273 Ibid. 274 "Review of Lectures on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood by Charles West, M.D" Monthly journal of medical science, (Vol. 9, pp. 639-1310, August 1849), 995. 275 Collins, 3: 331. 126 obviously cannot hear) as well. While Mary used to affect others’ bodies, at the end of the novel, Mary’s body remains inactive and on par with her recently discovered social equal and stepmother, Mrs. Thorpe. The narrator emphasizes how her half-brother Zack treats Mary and his mother equally: “His [Zack’s] first embrace is for his mother, his second for Madonna; and, after he has greeted everyone else cordially, he goes back to those two, and Mr. Blyth is glad to see that he sits down between them and takes their hands gently and affectionately in his.” 276 Mrs. Thorpe is upper-middle class, and Mary, who conveniently ends the novel with the name Madonna, now occupies an equivalent social and physical location to Mrs. Thorpe. She becomes a mirror-image of her stepmother, one of two bookends on either side of Zack. Her half-brother’s equal affection between his mother and his half-sister demonstrate that he has publicly accepted Mary as his sibling and that she no longer exists as a transitive space traveling throughout the novel, but an upper-middle class woman. Mary has found her “place” in the novel, which renders her no longer interesting to the narrator. Now that all the mysteries have been solved regarding her class origins, Mary loses her power over others. She is now readable, and even as others such as Mr. Blyth view the public display of family unity between Mrs. Thorpe, Zack and Mary, he does not have any bodily reactions. Instead, the narrator writes “Mr. Blyth is glad to see” Mary reunited with her genetic relatives and class equals. While Mary’s presence on display used to evoke heart palpitations and unnatural exclamations from Mr. Blyth, now he is only “glad to see” her in her inherited class role. 276 Ibid., 3: 331-332. 127 While the final display of class and family unity at the end of the novel demonstrates to the suburban viewership that Mary's class has been firmly established, Mary loses all narrative control. Still deaf and mute, Mary's hands are her means of communication, and they are "taken" and contained by her new brother. Furthering the notion of Mary's impending entrapment comes the scene from the first few pages of the novel in which characters respond to the Thorpe family class status and parlor. Now, the parlour of Mr. Thorpe's house was neat, clean, comfortably and sensibly furnished. It was of the average size. It had the usual side-board, dining-table, looking-glass, scroll fender, marble chimney piece with a clock on it, carpet with a drugget over it, and wire window-blinds to keep people from looking in, characteristic of all respectable London parlours of the middle class. And yet, it was an inveterately severe-looking room— a room that seemed as if it had never been convivial, never uproarious, never anything but sternly comfortable and serenely dull; a room that appeared to be as unconscious of acts of mercy, and easy, unreasoning, over affectionate forgiveness to offenders of any kind—juvenile or otherwise—as if it had been a cell in Newgate, or a private torturing chamber in the Inquisition. 277 Unlike the painting room at the Blyth house, which overflows with disorder and revolution, 278 the Thorpe parlor exudes middle-class respectability to an extreme that 277 Ibid., 1: 7-8. 278 Not only does the painting room in existing create a revolutionary space within the middle- class space, but the objects on display within the painting room (including the mannequin) present a chain of objects which are looked at and can also look at others. On the painting room shelves, "all sorts of objects great and small were crowded in compact masses, without the slightest attempt at order or arrangement. Plaster casts mustered strong in all varieties on these shelves; and were set together anyhow, with the most whimsical disregard of the persons, positions, and periods which they represented" (1: 56). Not only does social class become confused within this space when its very existence makes the house break from moderate middle- class convention, but also Valentine demonstrates his lack of regard for historicity and for authority in general when he does not arrange his plaster casts according to artist. Even the casts of famous works of art and historical figures are placed so that they disrupt normal definitions of proper display and become lewdly intertwined with one another: "in one corner, Doctor Johnson appeared to be gazing down, stedfastly libertine, upon the bosom of the Venus de' Medici; who, 128 pushes the room beyond the "sternly comfortable and serenely dull" of the middle-classes into the realm of the tortuous and "unreasoning." It is true that Collins does not reiterate this image at the end of the novel. Nonetheless, this haunting description of middle class oppression allows the reader to believe that Mary's fate within the Thorpe household may not be as idyllic as other possible endings. In a novel that delights in the sheer pleasure of Mary's effect on other characters' bodies, the notion that Mary's body must be controlled and imprisoned in a Newgate cell or a torture chamber of the Inquisition does not at first make sense. Yet, the only way the novel could end would be to contain Mary's seemingly boundless body and prevent her from reproduction like her mother (the fallen woman) and Snooks (the cat who reproduces at such a multiplying rate that the Blyth family can barely keep track 279 ). Oddly, Valentine Blyth, who desperately tries to keep Mary's identity secret so that she will not leave his household, is mentioned as being "glad to see" the display of family and class unity between Mary, Zack, and Mrs. Thorpe. Yet, one would think that Valentine constructs his identity to counter that of the middle-classes (he rejected his own in her turn, looked boldly across the lexicographer's nose at Napoleon Buonaparte. In another corner, the Fighting Gladiator straddled over Eve at the Fountain to assault the good-humoured features of Sir Walter Scott" (1: 57). All the while, this overtly sexual display exists surrounded by and intertwined with "dusty little phials of oil and varnish, gallipots, bundles of old brushes, bits of painting-rag, lumps of whiting, dry knobs of sponge, tattered books, tangled balls of string, hard putty, an old hour-glass, broken hyacinth bottles, filled up, with dozens of similar items." If one was to remove "any one thing that was wanted from the shelves," everything would tumble. 279 Blyth says to Snooks, "'Let me see: you're not a very old cat yet; you've had six litters of four at a time, (four times six are twenty-four) and five litters of three at a time. Three times five's fifteen, and ten's twenty-five, and four—no, and ten—or, stop, two tens, twenty; and four—no, fifteen—well, at any rate, it must be forty; of course it must be forty, though I can't exactly make it out! Oh Snooks! Snooks! you would have been the mother of a family of forty children, by this time, if we hadn't taken to drowning them!'" (Collins 1: 100). 129 middle-class family's view of what was proper when he chose to become a painter) should make him reject the display or at the very least, remain unmentioned in the scene, silent like Mary, whose hands and ability to communicate are tied under the boundaries of her new "place" in society. The only reason for Valentine's happiness at the sight of the new family could come from a notion, however artificial, that the Thorpe family Mary was joining would be different than the one at the beginning of the novel, now that Mr. Thorpe has been conveniently edited out of the Thorpe family picture. Yet, this view is optimistic, and without any concrete changes to the Thorpe family house, Mary would be returning to middle-class oppressive dullness in the best case scenario and a Newgate prison of torture at the worst. Throughout the novel, Mary's body needs to be controlled, yet it is telling that the novel does not end in marriage, a seemingly easy way for her to be established as a member of the dull middle classes. Susan Stewart and others have claimed that "of all bourgeois rituals, it [marriage] is the most significant, the most emblematic of class relations." 280 The absence of marriage for any of the characters in the novel (Mary, Mary's half-brother Zack, Mary's uncle Mat, Mary's newly widowed stepmother Mrs. Thorpe) and the general lack of fruitful marriages (for example, the only married couple featured prominently in the story, Mr. and Mrs. Blyth, cannot have children due to Mrs. Blyth's status as an invalid) indicate a change from the usual mid-Victorian novel, which is dominated by the marriage plot. As Helena Michie points out, most novels from this period end in marriage: 280 Stewart, 117. 130 The marriage plot is obviously a narrative structure that works to shape real-life experience; in other words, it is a cultural as well as a purely literary plot. I am speaking here of the stories men and women told themselves about what was proper and desirable to imagine as a life story; certainly in the Victorian period (and to a large extent today) marriage was central to culturally sanctioned life stories. 281 Hence, there is no "happy marriage" which means that even in the novel's end which displays class and family unity between Mary, Zack, and Mrs. Thorpe, the ending does not correlate with what Michie calls the "master-narrative for middle-class women": marriage. 282 Any departure from this ending for a Victorian middle-class heroine would be "marked, however subtly, as a failure calibrated by the distance from this ideal." 283 Yet within this novel, the only viable sexual partner for Mary is her half-brother Zack. Just as marriage is the "culturally sanctioned" end to a life story, Mary and Zack's lack of an incestuous relationship also can be seen as continuing to abide by social and cultural laws. Other scholars, such as Martha Stoddard Holmes, associate Mary's disability with the novel's absence of marriage. For example, Holmes writes that Collins shifts his focus to incest to avoid the possibility that a deaf woman could find love. 284 Yet, no character's story ends in a successful marriage. Instead of a wedding ceremony or the possibility of matrimony, the novel concludes with another public display of harmony: a display of middle-class unity and the creation of a new family by restoring Mary as a member of the 281 Michie, Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 53-54. 282 Ibid., 54. 283 Ibid., 55. 284 Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007), 83. 131 middle class. While one could argue that perhaps Mary could find a marriage partner in the future, her story finds closure not in a marriage that could potentially create future generations, but in returning to her paternal home, however stifling and imprisoning. As Anthony S. Wohl explains, Victorian writers and reformers wished to change working- class vicinities partly because they were afraid of the proliferation of incest. They did not directly addressed the topic in the form of a law outlawing incest in the 1850s, but instead, they danced around the subject with vague references to family-linked sexual "perversion" reinforcing the popular belief which linked working-class homes with incest. 285 Therefore, the overcrowding of the single room with brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers could create degenerate perversion. 286 Mary, in discovering her origins, avoids the possibility of permanently falling into the working-class category and therefore, also avoids all potential for incest. In his "Note to Chapter VIII" at the end of the first volume, Collins compares his portrayal of Mary to another type of family: "the whole family of dumb people on the stage." 287 Even as the novel grants Mary power over those who surround her, Collins, at the end of the first volume, silences this power. Instead, he emphasizes that he wishes "also to note what elements of kindness and gentleness the spectacle of these afflictions [Mary's disability] constantly developes in the person of the little circle by which the 285 Wohl points out that the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, while it does not outlaw incest, does site incestuous adultery as grounds for divorce, a vast difference from Scottish law through 1887 which punished incest with death (208). 286 "Sex and the Single Room: Incest Among the Victorian Working Classes," The Victorian Family, ed. Anthony S. Wohl (London: Biddles Ltd, 1978), 203. 287 Collins, 1: 296. 132 sufferer is surrounded." 288 Adding to this sentiment, Collins concludes the end note with the notion that it is "a fit object for any writer who desires to address himself to the best and readiest sympathies of his readers" to portray the kindness of those surrounding the sufferer "as truly, as worthily, and as tenderly as in him lies." 289 Here, he posits himself, as writer entrusted with the readers' sympathies. His language directly emphasizes that he must present the "kindness and gentleness" created by the effects of Mary's body, something that is not actually seen in the first volume that his idealized footnote follows. While "the little circle" of the Blyth family does welcome Mary into their group, she remains a foreigner until she can be established as belonging to a specific class. While her disability might grant her more kindness than, say, the foreigner exhibited in the insentient form of the mannequin, it does not erase her body's effects on other bodies. Just like the Thornton House at Marlborough Mills, Mary's body as a transitive space with overlapping interior and exterior influences of the working-, middle-, and upper- classes, Mary's body sparks narrative as it spreads sensory distortion throughout the hefty nearly 1,000 pages of Collins's three-volume novel. Moving from the suburbs back into the city, in Chapter Four, I examine London as a transitive space in the mid-Victorian period. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of visitors yet also not wanting London to continue to grow in size and number of suburbs, the Parliament considers adding a girdle around London to contain the city's growth and alleviate the city's traffic problem. Combining my examination of London in the 1850s 288 Ibid., 1: 297. 289 Ibid. 133 and its shrinking and growing place in the world with my analysis of Little Dorrit and the depictions of London and other international cities within the text, I argue that London occupies a unique place within the 1850s as both a site of commercial development and industry, yet also a city collapsing in on itself, desiring not to change. 134 Chapter Four "Narrowed to these Dimensions": Progress, Decline, and Stagnation in Mid-Victorian London and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit As evidenced by the expanding suburbs in Hide and Seek and the desire to create suburbs for the suburbs of London, when Dickens wrote the early chapters of Little Dorrit in 1855, London's city center was expanding both in population and physical space. Visitors, for commerce and entertainment alike, flooded London's streets and stretched the city's resources. As the nineteenth century continued, more people flocked to the city until the streets really were too small to accommodate the crowds. In 1855, a Parliamentary Select Committee investigating solutions to London's growing population and traffic problems raised concerns that the population within the metropolitan district of London doubled in 40 years from 1,138,000 in 1811 to 2,362,000 in 1851. 290 In the committee's estimation, an additional 800,000 people visited London a year from the English countryside. 291 Not counting those who entered London by ship, cab, cart, carriage or railway, 200,000 people crossed into London on foot each day. 292 In the four years between 1850 and 1854, the number of individuals arriving at and departing from 290 Report from the Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications; Together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix Ordered, by The House of Commons, to be Printed, 23 July 1855, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online (ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2005), iii. 291 Ibid., 92-93. 292 Ibid., iii. 135 the London Bridge group of railway termini had nearly doubled from 5,558,000 passengers to 10,845,000. 293 The committee argued that the sheer number of visitors threatened to smother London. Further, the physical space of the city itself was getting out of hand; the number of districts surrounding the city center continued to increase as did the districts' permanent residents. Something had to be done to change London's situation, and many believed that Sir Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace, was just the man for the job. In 1855, Paxton presented his solution to London's traffic problem: "The Great Victorian Way," or a glass and iron-cased road which would surround London like a "girdle"—a word Paxton repeatedly used to describe the thoroughfare, playing off of the popular, mid-nineteenth century metaphor which equated London to an obese, female body badly in need of control. 294 Throughout his presentation to the Parliamentary Select Committee, Paxton repeatedly refers to the success of the Crystal Palace to help establish 293 Ibid. 294 In "The Wants of London," published in the Illustrated London News on September 30, 1854, the author imagines England as the "body" and London as the "belly" (qtd. in Victorian Babylon 17). Paxton repeatedly refers to "The Great Victorian Way" as "the girdle," thus reinforcing the notion that the city needed to be contained and reigned in for it to retain its current status and attain the title of "most magnificent metropolis." Since London is referred to as female, the notion that London's body must be contained speaks to perceptions of a female body in general and cultural ideas of how a "magnificent" female body needs to be controlled. In "Echoes of the Week" published on November 28, 1863 in the Illustrated London News, for example, the author writes, "The overgrowth of London may be compared with that of the occasional human body. Walk round, and you see how it has spread. The active piece of humanity of some few years since has become puffy, bloated: coated with a light, swollen matter which has doubled the size of his waist and cheeks. So London has got puffy with 'new neighbourhoods' all around her. From Greenwich and the Tower Hamlets to Bayswater and Battersea, she is every day being told that she is becoming corpulent. [. . .] The fact is, it is not always possible to become fat without becoming fat within; and London is a case in point. Whilst the suburbs are increasing Londoners are actually embanking the Thames—choking up the main artery itself with landed degeneration" (550). 136 his legitimacy, or, at the least, to emphasize his ability to create structures which were almost-universally considered cultural landmarks and beacons of progress. Like the Crystal Palace, the girdle was to be encased in iron and glass to allow for an appropriate amount of light to the shops and connected housing along the road. In order to remedy the increasingly polluted air, the thoroughfare, like the Crystal Palace, would be climate controlled (or as “climate controlled” as any structure in the nineteenth century could be). The glass, in particular, would prevent dirt from raining down on the thoroughfare, as was common in London's streets. Just like the Crystal Palace, The Great Victorian Way was a heterotopic space; even though it would have been located within London, it would not technically have been within the city's borders. Further, according to Paxton, one could visit the girdle and feel as if one were in another climate and place without ever leaving the metropolis. Paxton bragged to the committee that his girdle's artificially controlled climate "would prevent many infirm persons being obliged to go into foreign countries in the winter; [. . .] and it would be almost equal to going to a foreign climate from the manner in which the temperature could be regulated," 295 a fact that captivated the press, who also seemed magnetized by the advantages of leaving London without departing from the city. The girdle was to be 180 feet tall and 72 feet wide or "precisely the same breadth as the transept in the old Crystal Palace" 296 which made it eerily similar to the Great Exhibition building, apart from the fact that it would not serve as a site for exhibition, but a place of transportation 295 Report from the Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications, 81. 296 Ibid., 80. 137 and consumerism. 297 Designed to accommodate not only foot traffic, the girdle could contain all forms of normal street traffic including cabs, carts, and carriages toting both people and goods into the city. With its shops and accommodations, not to mention its ability to go over water in three places connecting London's railway termini, the girdle was to be both thoroughfare and destination. It was to make London "the most magnificent city in the world" and "would, doubtless, render the metropolis the most extraordinary of either ancient or modern cities." 298 While Paxton's proposal was never realized due to its proposed budget, the fact that Parliament considered it and the press devoted significant time to questioning both its costs and its feasibility speaks volumes regarding mid-Victorian perceptions of the city center and the desire to reign in London's growth and progress with technological innovation. Today, Paxton's proposal for the Crystal Palace-like structure designed to “contain” London feels like the makings of a science fiction story, "suspended half-way between shopping mall and Fritz Lang's Metropolis," 299 but during the 1850s, building a girdle to contain the bloated capital did not seem overly unreasonable or excessive. As The North Wales Chronicle pointed out, "This is clearly the age of marvels; every day, almost there is some scheme or other set forth, which by our forefathers would have been 297 See Thomas Richards's The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914 for an interpretation of the Crystal Palace as the "first department store, the first shopping mall" (17). If we read the Crystal Palace as a consumerist enterprise, it shares even more in common with the Great Victorian Way. 298 "Sir Joseph Paxton's Extraordinary Scheme for the Improvement of the Metropolis," North Wales Chronicle (Bangor, Wales), 16 June, 1855, 6. 299 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 29. 138 set down as the offspring of hallucinations of a madman" 300 —a scheme, yes, but one that nonetheless made sense within the bounds of mid-Victorian progress. For the most part, publications extolled Paxton's wisdom and agreed that the proposed girdle would contain the city's expanding waistline and render her superior to all others. Interestingly, the planned thoroughfare was to connect London's many districts, defeating the threatened fragmentation and decentralization. At the same time, the "girdle" would not be uniform throughout all of the districts it encompassed. In fact, depending on the socio-economic position of a district's inhabitants, the thoroughfare would be decorated differently and would adjust to various economic and cultural registers mixing shops and private residences or containing only shops. 301 In other words, the project to unite all of London with one neatly-atmospherically controlled passageway, if it ever were to be built, would maintain the city's stratified districts even within its climate controlled bubble. Even as “progress” would be made to prevent city and population growth, while allowing for increased trade and foot traffic, the city's inhabitants' living conditions would remain essentially the same. Further, the girdle, or The Great Victorian Way (a significantly more nationalistic and progress-centered name for a structure than the Crystal Palace) was to make London superior to other European cities, such as Paris, which had recently expanded its 300 "Sir Joseph Paxton's Extraordinary Scheme for the Improvement of the Metropolis," 6. 301 Report from the Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications, 81. 139 boulevards to accommodate traffic increases. 302 As evidenced by Paxton's assertion that the climate-controlled interior would allow ill people to stay within the city instead of traveling to other countries for better air and weather, The Great Victorian Way could, along with everything else, bring the whole world to London by transforming the outskirts of the city into another climate, 303 allowing people to travel without leaving the city. As the need to venture outside of London would decrease, money would stay where it belonged, at home. While Paxton's dream to make London "the most extraordinary city" at the center of the world never came to fruition, 304 the idea that mid-Victorian London was in the midst of "the age of marvels" and progress pervaded popular thought in the 1850s. In Charles Dickens’ article published in Household Words entitled “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” he juxtaposes the Great Exhibition with a smaller exhibition of Chinese industry outside of the Crystal Palace. In this article, he associates the Great Exhibition, despite its international contributors, with England, and the “little one” with China. He clearly states his belief that England has “the greatest degree of progress” and 302 Paxton to the Select Committee said, "'You have seen the effect of the various improvements which have from time to time been made in the city of Paris; do you consider that this boulevard would be as attractive to people generally as the improvements have been in Paris?—I think this would make London the grandest city in the world. [. . .] this alone would be the greatest novelty in the world.'" (90) 303 Arguably, London was already the center of commerce. In "Dickens, London, & The Invention of Modern Urban Life," Murray Baumgarten argues that London was "the central railroad station of the Nineteenth century: everything in the world passed through it" (195). 304 According to some, because of the Great Exhibition, London was at the center of the world with or without the Great Victorian Way. On May 17, 1851, a writer for the Illustrated London News wrote that London was not just "the capital of a great nation, but the metropolis of the world" (423). 140 that China has “the least.” 305 Defining each country's individual progress on a sliding scale of international trade, Dickens goes as far as to equate China’s development with “stoppage.” 306 In his opinion, England continues to try to improve its “commercial intercourse with the world” which he posits is the opposite of what he sees as China’s desire to “shut itself up, as far as possible, within itself.” 307 He continues, “It is very curious to have the Exhibition of a people who came to a dead stop, Heaven knows how many hundred years ago, side by side with the Exhibition of the moving world.” 308 But the London presented in Little Dorrit, Dickens’s serial novel published between 1855- 1857, is not a “moving world” in the way Dickens describes London in his 1851 article. Even as characters do converge and intersect in each others' lives within the city center, Dickens appears to present a world closer to that of his idea of China, one that desires to “shut itself up, as far as possible, within itself.” The London of Little Dorrit, as he describes it, is “gloomy, close, and stale” 309 not the bustling site of international trade Dickens declares it is in 1851. While there appears to be a disconnect between Little Dorrit's "stale" London set in the late 1820s and the contemporary depictions of London as an active city of progress described by contemporary writers in the 1850s, in reality, the city center Dickens's narrator describes 305 Dickens, “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,” Household Words, 5 July 1851, Vol 3, 357. 306 Ibid., 360. 307 Ibid., 357. 308 Ibid. 309 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (1855-57; New York & London: Penguin Books, 1985), 67. 141 in Little Dorrit shares many traits with Dickens's contemporary London of 1855 and his far more gloomy perception of it. 310 Little Dorrit, despite its nominal historical setting, is a product of a Post-Great Exhibition world, one that is concerned with an expanding city in terms of borders, influence, and technological advancement. 311 Little Dorrit's insistent narrator describes the stagnation of London and the increasingly homogenized world brought on by trade, but in doing so, he highlights the troubled nature of mid-Victorian progress. While an emphasis on technological advancement did make the world more accessible, unrest over the potential results of these changes, and the desire to remedy their effects on London, allowed for unease in the face of development. On the surface, London's influence and scope within the novel appear to be decreasing, not increasing in the way one would expect of the capital of “progress” as defined by writers in the 1850s. Mrs. Clennam, whose business involves international trade (the very type of business Dickens extols in "The Great Exhibition and the Little 310 Others, such as Emily Heady, argue that Dickens's 1853 novel Bleak House also shows a lack of progress in London. She writes in her 2006 article "The Polis's Different Voices: Narrating England's Progress in Dickens's Bleak House" that "London's streets, Dickens's justly famous opening description tells us, render progress impossible, and dogs and horses are caught in the mud as in the paragraph's grammar" (312). Robert Tracy, on the other hand, connects Bleak House to the Crystal Palace in his 2003 article "Lighthousekeeping: Bleak House and the Crystal Palace." Tracy argues that in Bleak House, Dickens tells his readers of the need for social progress, in addition to technological and industrial innovation present at the Crystal Palace. Along with the notion that Bleak House connects to the Crystal Palace, Katherine Williams, in her 2003 article "Glass Windows: The View from Bleak House," emphasizes that while Dickens does not explicitly mention the Great Exhibition in Bleak House, the windows in the novel provide a link to the glass of the Crystal Palace. 311 As evidenced by advertisements for books relating to the Great Exhibition (particularly the intricate Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Industrial Exhibition of 1851) in the second part of Little Dorrit published in January 1856, the Victorian reading public in the mid-1850s was thought to be still interested in the Crystal Palace and the effects of the Exhibition even though the Crystal Palace had since moved to Sydenham. 142 One"), looks at the four walls of her house and tells her son, “‘The world has narrowed to these dimensions, Arthur.’” 312 While in this quotation, Mrs. Clennam refers to her inability or unwillingness to leave her house and the literal and figurative limiting effects of this decision, she is also utilizing the walls of her house as a means of measuring her shrinking influence. The House of Clennam, both the name of her place of business and her residence, 313 becomes a literal representation of the shrinking scope of her power, and consequently, her resistance to and attempt to deny any change. The Clennam house was built and maintained to isolate only: it is "an old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square courtyard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were as rusty; behind it, a jumble of roots." 314 Both the business and the physical home of the House of Clennam are closed off from the rest of the world. Despite its supposed business relations in international trade, it appears as if the House of 312 Dickens, 73. 313 Interestingly, the Clennam family and the House of Clennam share physical affinity with one another. When Arthur returns to his room, he finds it unchanged in décor, but the newly twisted and lopsided nature of the house, immediately throws his body off balance. Inside the room, "his head was awry, and he had a one-sided, crab-like way with him, as if his foundations had yielded at about the same time as those of the house, and he ought to have been propped up in a similar manner" (72). Presumably the foundations of the house shifted and were poorly propped up during Arthur's time away, but as this quotation demonstrates, even if Arthur was geographically as far away as China for twenty years, he still shares an affinity with his childhood home. Victorian writers from Engels to Ruskin touch on how a person's home can create moral influences. For more on this, see Kristina Deffenbacher's "The Psychic Architecture of Urban Domestic Heroines: North and South and Little Dorrit" in which Deffenbacher argues that "from the late 1830s through the 1850s, numerous private housing-reform associations formed in response to the sense of urgency [. . .]; many middle- and upper-class reformers feared that overcrowding in working-class housing spread not only disease, but also political unrest" (124). 314 Dickens, 71. 143 Clennam has no contact with other people, let alone other countries. Instead, it holds the street and its inhabitants at a distance. It is clearly defined as a space of the past, one that is experiencing change in terms of rust and deterioration, but a location that is not engaging in positive forms of Victorian-defined progress. There is no innovation or desire to look to the future. The House of Clennam only knows decay and rot. Mrs. Clennam's declaration that "the world has narrowed to these dimensions" easily applies to the city center in Little Dorrit. Within the novel, the streets wind in upon one another; everything is close and tight. While the narrowing effect allows for images of the city almost collapsing in on itself (or creating a "vortex" 315 which will suck in everything surrounding it, eventually consuming the whole world), at the time when Dickens wrote the novel, it was a popular notion that technology was making the world more accessible and “smaller.” Just five years before Dickens wrote Little Dorrit, Prince Albert labeled the opening of the Great Exhibition a sign that the mid-Victorian period was a time of “transition,” one that involved the narrowing of the space between countries. In a speech preceding the Great Exhibition, he said: ‘Nobody who has paid any attention to the particular features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living in a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end—to which indeed all history points—the realisation of the unity of mankind. [. . .] The distances of the globe are gradually vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible speed; the languages of all nations are known, and their 315 Young John Chivery, in addition to other characters, describes his existence as "going round and round in a vortex" (794). 144 acquirements placed within reach of everybody; thought is communicated with rapidity, and even by the power of lightning.’ 316 Prince Albert’s speech, ringing with triumph at technological advancements, contrasts with Mrs. Clennam’s sadness and helplessness in the face of this change and her desire to resist and deny it. Both quotations illustrate different ways in which a narrowing world could be interpreted—with uneasiness or with celebration. At the same time, they demonstrate that despite the novel’s portrayal of London as a place of stagnation, it is clearly a product of a post-Great Exhibition world. Even as Mrs. Clennam attempts to isolate herself and her family business from change, the House of Clennam collapses at the end of the novel when the once isolated house becomes one with the street. 317 Its collapse becomes a site which unites the people by demonstrating to all how inevitable change can be. 316 " Short Cuts Across the Globe,” Household Words, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Saturday, April 13, 1850), 68. 317 While a building collapsing might feel like a symptom of deterioration, instead of a sign of social progress, it is important to keep in mind Ernest Jones's Chartist song from Notes to the People: “A heaving thro' the mass;/ A trampling thro' their palaces,/ Until they break like glass” (II: 993). In Little Dorrit, Miss Wade expresses a similar sentiment when she discusses her desire to destroy any site of her personal oppression. She declares, “‘If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I know no more’” (61). While Miss Wade and the working-class characters do not get the opportunity to raze the Marshalsea Prison or the House of Clennam, when the house falls down under the weight of its own decay, the moment is symbolic of the tearing down of other sites of oppression. Before it fell, the House of Clennam "preserved its heavy dulness through all these transactions, and the invalid within it turned the same unvarying round of life. Morning, noon, and night, morning, noon, and night, each recurring with its accompanying monotony, always the same reluctant return of the same sequences of machinery, like a dragging piece of clockwork" (387-388). In its collapse, the monotony is over, and London begins to feel "calm" for the first time in the novel (863). Mrs. Clennam, though, becomes a representation of immovable change, "the rigid silence she had so long held was evermore enforced upon her, and except that she could move her eyes and faintly express a negative and affirmative with her head, she lived and died a statue" (863). 145 Even though the characters in Little Dorrit spend the majority of their time in actual prisons or in figurative prisons of their own making within the narrowing London city center, the novel has international settings and is arguably international in scope, which reinforces Prince Albert's notion that "the distances of the globe are gradually vanishing." Unlike Dickens's previous works, such as Oliver Twist, Old Curiosity Shop, and Bleak House, which are set on the London city streets and the surrounding areas, inevitable. At the same time, this force allows for Miss Wade to make sense of "this labyrinth of a world" 318 and bring order to seemingly random events. 319 Miss Wade prophesizes, “‘In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads [. . .] and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done.’” 320 To the startled Meagles daughter, she says: ‘you may be sure that there are men and women already on their road, who have their business to do with you, and who will do it. Of certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now; they may be coming, for anything you know or anything you can do to prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.’ 321 318 Dickens, 57. 319 In "Labyrinths and Prisons: Little Dorrit," a chapter of his book Rereading the City Rereading Dickens: Representation, The Novel, and Urban Realism, Efraim Sicher equates Arthur Clennam's journey to and through London to "an allegorical quest for truth" (283). I disagree with this idea; a quest for truth implies individual character agency, and as evidenced by Miss Wade's quotation, no one, including Arthur, possesses control over his/her journey in Little Dorrit. 320 Dickens, 63. 321 Ibid., 64. 146 Figure 2: Cruikshank's "All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition” (1851). 147 Miss Wade’s fatalistic statement in the novel’s second chapter sets the scene for the novel as characters from across the world (Arthur from China, Monsieur Rigaud from France, John Baptiste from Italy) converge in London and cross into one another’s lives. 322 Her theory removes responsibility from these character intersections and instead, places the reason that these characters’ lives intertwine on a greater unnamed force that draws people “hundreds, thousands, of miles over the sea” to do harm or create pleasure for one another. Miss Wade uses the word “road” twice to describe the journeys people take toward their point of convergence, which is an interesting choice of words especially considering the word’s origins. According to the OED, a “road,” has its roots in communication and speech; it is “an ordinary line of communication used by persons passing between different places” and from the late seventeenth century, “a string of words; a limited range of thought or discourse.” 323 Importantly, roads have an end, and like the string of words, they are limited. Much like Miss Wade’s belief in a force guiding 322 Amanda Anderson, in her 2001 book The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment, associates Miss Wade with two other "negatively drawn characters": Gowan and Rigaud (78). Anderson says that these three characters "are portrayed as afflicted in various ways by paranoia, sadism, fantasies of persecution, and unearned claims to entitlement," but that their comments are "closest to the narrator's own perspective on the social world" (77). In examining Miss Wade's role as storyteller, Anderson examines how the narrator repeats a similar notion to Miss Wade's sentiment above when he ends the chapter. While Anderson argues that the narrator's tone at the end of the chapter intends to point out Miss Wade's bitterness, I argue the opposite. The narrator ends the chapter with "all dispersed, and went their appointed ways. And thus ever, by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travelers through the pilgrimage of life" (67). While the tone is arguably less paranoid than Miss Wade's in the quotation above, it nonetheless implies that individuals lack the ability to control their "appointed ways" and how they will "act and react on one another." 323 “road, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50207551>. 148 people to one another, roads, if followed, do lead to new spatial destinations, 324 or as is the case with Paxton's proposed girdle, the thoroughfares can be destinations in of themselves. After all, one of the obsolete definitions of "progress" is "a region or distance traversed" and to this day, it is still used as a means of describing "the action or an act of journeying or moving onward in space." 325 In many ways, Miss Wade's force is a form of mid-Victorian progress, one that eliminates individual will, but allows for advancement and movement toward a desired conclusion. Despite what individuals desire, progress continues as the world contracts with London as its industrial center. Prince Albert’s use of the word “transition” in the phrase “we are living in a period of most wonderful transition” can connect to not only changes in time, but also changes in spatial perceptions. Until the late nineteenth century, the word “transition” meant “a passing or passage from one condition, action, or (rarely) place; to another; change.” 326 The mid- Victorian notion of progress and a transition both involve spatial as well as cultural and mental changes, linking the notion of progress to thoroughfares and connection routes between places. 324 Along with the notion of a road as a string of words, in taking a road created by someone else, one is giving oneself up to another person’s created narrative. Much like a story, a road takes a person from point A to point B and ideally conveys a seemingly consistent journey. Interestingly, the word "communication" was used during the 1850s to describe both a road or thoroughfare (as exemplified by the Parliamentary Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications which discussed Paxton's girdle) and the exchange or transmission of ideas. 325 "progress, n." The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50189648>. 326 “transition, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50256294>. 149 Marseilles, one of the main international hubs in the book, is a roadblock on the way to London: "Hindoos, Russians, Chinese, Spaniards, Portugese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Genoese, Neapolitans, Venetians, Greeks, Turks, descendants from all the builders of Babel” must be quarantined in Marseilles before continuing to London to prevent the spread of the plague from the East. 327 Undeniably, the intermingling of visitors is reminiscent of the Great Exhibition: many novels and texts revolving around the Great Exhibition used the word "Babel" to describe the Great Exhibition, both positively in terms of an improved version that promoted peace and the unity of mankind, 328 and negatively as a space of miscommunication and failure. 329 The Crystal Palace was “this new Tower of Babel,” 330 "a Babel of confusion," 331 and a "a Babel of 327 Dickens, 39. 328 Reverend J.C. Whish in The Great Exhibition Prize Essay even connects the Crystal Palace with making up for the damage caused by the biblical Tower of Babel: “[. . .] this marvelous edifice shall prove to our race, a kind of compensation for the Tower of Babel, and become the means of promoting the brotherly union, the peace and prosperity of mankind!” (8). 329 In Routledge’s Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park at Sydenham: With Descriptions of the Principal Works of Science and Art, and the Terraces, Fountains, Geological Formations, and Restoration of Extinct Animals, Therein Exhibited, a dialogue on the opposition to the 1851 Great Exhibition immediately turns into a discussion on the "Tower of Babel" metaphor used by those opposed to the project. The author writes, "Sacred and profane history were ransacked for precedents which would apply to this unique undertaking, and learned commentators at length fell back upon the ‘Tower of Babel:’ its failure was significantly alluded to, and ‘the confusion of tongues’ [. . .]" (8). 330 “Scenes from the Life of an (Ex) Unprotected Female: The Friends of the (Ex) Unprotected Female Favour Her with Their View of the Great Exhibition of Industry, and its Consequences, by which She is Brought to the Verge of Despair and Emigration.” Punch. Vol XX. (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1851), 177. 331 Lectures on the Results of the Exhibition, Delivered Before the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at the Suggestion of H. R. H. Prince Albert, President of the Society. London: David Bogue; Philadelphia: Rptd. A. Hart, 1852), 424. 150 tongues [. . .] with faulty pronunciation on one side, and imperfect comprehension on the other." 332 Yet despite tendencies in the 1850s to equate London with Babel, unlike Great Exhibition writers, Dickens uses the word "Babel" to describe Marseilles, not London. This distinction might seem like a significant point except for the fact that Marseilles and London share similar traits in the novel, and that the time spent in the first two chapters quarantined in Marseilles sets up the stagnation characters experience in London. 333 Duplicating the "staleness" of London, Marseilles is the center of inaction. Throughout the narrator's description of "the stare" in Marseilles, the words "glare" and "stare" become intertwined which enhances the stagnation in the scene because it is impossible to tell the difference between how people and things look at one another and the degree of intention behind these looks. 334 Instead, everything from the trees to the 332 The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist. Ed. by W. Harrison Ainsworth, Esq. Vol. XCII, No. CCCLXV. May, 1851. “All the World and His Wife; Or, What Brought Everybody to London in 1851.” (London: Chapman and Hall, 1851, 21. 333 Susan K. Gillman and Robert L. Patten point to a shift in Dickens's writing after 1851, which illuminates this doubling in Little Dorrit. Gillman and Patten argue that the 1850s were a period in which Dickens began to incorporate more doubles into his writing (444-445). They specifically point to the shift from doubling people through novels such as Bleak House to Dickens's doubling of places in Little Dorrit: "The world itself seems twinned: broiling Marseilles is like the frozen Great Saint Bernard; Venice is reflected in its own canals" (446). 334 Nicholas H. Morgan argues that the time in Marseilles sets up the "claustrophobic view of the world as a jumble of solipsistic prisons" in Little Dorrit and that this world-view "motivates the reader to discover what prison he may have locked himself into and set about searching for escape" (79). Morgan continues that the novel entraps its readers and that this scene in Marseilles cues the reader that "we have entered the prison house of fiction; our activities are circumscribed by the text" (81). 151 people in the streets emits and is oppressed by the same glare/stare. 335 Trees "drooped beneath the stare of the earth and sky" while "everything that lived or grew, was oppressed by the glare." 336 While the words sound similar, they clearly have different meanings. In fact, in confusing the two words, Dickens is making a statement about the stifling nature of viewing others in a culturally diverse setting, such as Marseilles, and since everyone in Marseilles is awaiting travel to London, this idea extends into London's city center as well. He writes of Marseilles, "Blinds, shutters, curtains, awnings, were all closed and drawn to keep out the stare," playing off of the idea that the act of looking could be repelled away from the privacy of one's home like the glare of the sun in a shaded nook. 337 According to the OED, a "glare" is a "dazzling brilliance (of light, fire, sun, etc.); a strong fierce light" or "dazzling or oppressive sunshine esp. when falling upon 335 Interestingly, many literary critics ignore the fact that the novel begins with a description of the diverse group awaiting transportation to London from Marseilles. Instead, critics, such as Amanda Anderson, assert that the "opening scene" of Little Dorrit takes place in the prison of Marseilles (66). While many critics focus on the opening lines of Dickens's other novels (A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House immediately come to mind), I argue that this omission in regards to the opening lines of Little Dorrit speaks to the fact that the language of the scene (much like the excessive brightness it describes) makes it so that the reader cannot focus on any one character or thing. The next scene in the prison with Rigaud and Cavelletto, shrouded in the darkness of the prison, allows for more characterization, and is perhaps why it is the focus of literary criticism. 336 Dickens, 40. 337 In Little Dorrit's Shadows: Character and Contradiction in Dickens, Brian Rosenberg counts the number of times Dickens uses the word "stare" in this part of the novel: 20 times in the opening chapter alone (44). Rosenberg does not consider the meaning of the word "stare" or its relation to "glare" in this chapter, but in pointing to the more than 70 allusions to seeing and sight in this chapter, he says "Characters are continually staring at others and being stared at in return, sometimes becoming trapped in complex networks of seeing and being seen" (44-45). 152 reflecting surfaces and not relieved by shadow or verdue." 338 Figuratively, a "glare" can have decorative implications in that it represents "gaudy" decorations which are "dazzling" and "showy" in appearance. The OED connects the etymology of the word "glare" with that of the word "glass" a significant connection especially relevant to the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace. 339 A "glare" is also a "fierce, piercing look," 340 which appears to be stronger in intensity than a "stare." While a "glare" penetrates, a "stare" in the nineteenth century, could just refer to the ability to see, a definition that is obsolete today. Further, while a person or body of light clearly intends to emit a "glare," a "stare" also was "a condition of amazement, horror, admiration, etc." 341 In other words, a glare is something one does, while a stare could be a reaction to an external force, something that may not be intentional and may draw others' attention. The more modern definition of a stare shares more in common with a glare in that it is a "fixed gaze with eyes wide open," 342 yet at the same time, a "fixed gaze" is not as hostile or potentially violent as a "fierce, piercing look." 338 "glare, n 1 ." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50095199>. 339 "glare, v." The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50095202>. 340 "glare, n 1 ." The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50095199>. 341 "stare, n 2 ." The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50236231>. 342 Ibid. 153 In his first chapter aptly titled "Sun and Shadow," the "universal stare" and "glare" allow the reader to see everything and nothing at the same time. It is impossible to tell where human intention plays a factor in the act of looking. Instead, the environment allows for everything to stare, but no one to analyze what one is seeing. Everything (the sun, the earth, the houses, the roads) stares at everything else, but the narrator describes no single person. We hear of people from every country imaginable for a Victorian readership, yet no one is given subjectivity apart from the notion that everything and everyone's eyes "ache" from the "universal stare," which might as well be a glare considering the damage it causes. In a world full of light to the point where looking at one's surroundings hurts one's eyes, nothing is illuminated. The people of Marseilles do not glare, but instead they stare because it requires less action. Their eyes act in reaction to the atmosphere of the “universal stare” which in turn encourages them to stare. Marseilles's position in the book as a space for the intermingling of those who wait to travel to London makes it a space that is associated with the English city. Those who are in Marseilles are not in the city for the sake of trading with the French, but are waiting to be admitted from the East to the Western capital of London. The "stare" within Marseilles extends directly into London: Dickens's narrator describes the Harley Street "mansions and their inhabitants" as "so much alike in that respect, that the people were often to be found drawn up on opposite sides of dinner-tables, in the shade of their own loftiness, staring at the other side of the way with the dullness of houses.” 343 As with the "stare" in Marseilles, acts of vision in London are really passive. There is little difference between 343 Dickens, 292. 154 the manner in which people look at one another and the way houses spend their existences facing one another. A stare in London is just like a stare in Marseilles. Both can equally be performed on another by an inanimate object, such as a house, or a person. Further, both cities share a similar "staleness" or "dullness"—one from overly stimulating light, the other from excessive "gloominess" which further allows them to be linked within the novel. Within the first serialized part of the novel (chapters one through three), the narrator quickly shifts from Marseilles to London. As I mentioned earlier, without any description of the journey between the two places so common in Victorian novels, the excessively lit Babel of Marseilles becomes the gloomy Babel of London. 344 According to the King James Version of The Bible, used by the Church of England during the 1850s, Babel is the center point from which the Judeo-Christian God divided and scattered people across the globe because they dared to work together to 344 Natalie McKnight sees the Babel imagery and the excessive light of Marseilles as contrasting images in Little Dorrit. She argues, "In this description Dickens sets against a chaos of languages—a Babel of voices—the one great eye of the sun. He continues opposing chaos and the eye throughout the novel" (113). I argue that both images overexcite to the point of dullness, much like the overstimulation of the crowded London streets and the gloominess of London. While McKnight also sees the light of Marseilles as a contrasting image to the darkness of London, I see these two images as related (112). While it is true that the prisons are associated with darkness, Marseilles is a place where characters express feeling trapped as they await release to London. Apart from the fact that one is light and the other is dark, London and Marseilles are eerily similar. Further, as evidenced by a May 17, 1851 article in the Illustrated London News, London shared a key characteristic with Marseilles: a city that while associated with its country, can arguably be a melting pot of many cultures. The Illustrated London News complained "The Exhibition has deprived it of its local character, and rendered it no longer English merely, but cosmopolitan" (423) while in Little Dorrit even Frenchmen are listed among the many "descendents from all the builders of Babel come to trade at Marseilles" (39). Amanda Anderson argues that this part of the quotation from Dickens makes Marseilles almost another country "or, rather, no country" and based on the quotation from the Illustrated London News, the same could be said for London during and following the Great Exhibition (67). 155 create a tower to heaven. 345 It was the site where God punished humankind for attempting too much progress, which makes it a troubling metaphor for the Great Exhibition. Why would writers associate what Prince Albert labeled as the beginning of "a most wonderful transition" with an image steeped in the origins of ancient, international fragmentation? 346 Associating the Crystal Palace with the Tower of Babel implies the negative side of innovation: catastrophic consequences. Nonetheless, Great Exhibition writers focused on the notion that the creation of the Tower of Babel allowed for a once homogenized world to become diversified and divided as God forced people to different parts of the world with different languages. Like the Tower of Babel, the Great Exhibition was to be a place of innovation that involved cooperation; but, instead of stratifying the people and scattering them, it was to allow for unification and cooperation. In invoking the image of the Tower of Babel, Great Exhibition writers were taking one step back to "redeem" humankind's mistakes. In The Palace of Glass and the Gathering of the People: A Book for the Exhibition, Reverend John Stoughton perceives the Great Exhibition as undoing the damage of the original Tower of Babel: The moral dispersion, of which that at Babel was the type, shall be reversed; men shall be united in religion and love; and the lines of human 345 The Bible: Authorized King James Version. Introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Genesis 11:8-9. 346 Victorian writers, of course, commonly connected the past with their present. A sign, according to Peter J. Bowler, that in "an age obsessed with change," the people were "desperately hoping that history itself might supply the reassurance that could no longer be derived from ancient beliefs" (3). Some of the desire to associate with a society that over-reached in terms of its desire to innovate could also connect to an underlying knowledge of past societies and a concern that one day Great Britain would meet a similar fate. Bowler writes, "Any educated Victorian knew about the decline of classical civilization and was thus forced to confront the possibility that his own society might face a similar fate" (9). 156 interest, like the radii of a circle, concentrating in spiritual obedience and the glory of Christ, shall no longer confusedly and in strife cross each other as they do now, and ever must, while a base selfishness makes each man his own centre. 347 Even though Dickens does not unite his characters through religion, when he describes the predetermined paths his characters take, he uses similar circular imagery. His narrator refers to a character who "travel[s], by his opposite segment of the circle, to the same point" 348 as another. At times, such as the one from the previous quotation, the Marshalsea prison is the "centre" to which characters travel, while at others, residences such as the Sparkler house are "exactly in the centre of the habitable globe." 349 At any rate, the location which is at the "centre" is "stuffed and close as if it had an incurable cold in its head," a clear connection to the descriptions of an overcrowded London in the 1850s. In the case of the Sparkler house, for instance, being at the center creates a sensory overload; characters' eyes become "tired of the view" and their ears feel attacked by the "clanging among the unmelodious echoes of the streets." 350 Everything is close and stifling at the center, thus further proving that even though Little Dorrit's London may not be the hub of industry and progress as described by Dickens in "The Great Exhibition and the Little One," it is still the focal point to which other things gravitate. The center continues to move throughout the novel, but it always remains within or reminiscent of London, proving that the city itself, in its closed and overwhelming state, 347 Rev. John Stoughton, The Palace of Glass and the Gathering of the People: A Book for the Exhibition (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1851), 107. 348 Dickens, 103. 349 Ibid., 757. 350 Ibid. 157 is collapsing in on itself much like the House of Clennam at the end of the novel. London, even if it resists alteration in the form of the Great Victorian Way or in the form of population growth, will continue to change. Even as the city center appears to be contracting, Little Dorrit's London, like the Tower of Babel, emerges infinite in scope with centripetal force. The narrator describes Arthur's return to the city by extending out beyond Arthur's line of sight, when he says, Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed [. . .]. Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be corrupt on Sunday morning. [. . .] Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. 351 The expanding images of the city from ten thousand “respectable” upper and middle- class houses to endless working-class dwellings stretching "far away toward every point of the compass” appears to contradict the rest of the book's notion of a narrowing world with London at its center. 352 Yet, considering the origins of the word "compass" 353 and the notion that the world is stretching from one common point, the world is not as expansive as we might think, but a closed off unit. At the same time, the houses of 351 Ibid., 68. 352 Natalie McKnight, in Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners in Dickens reads the seemingly- endless rows of houses surrounding Arthur as a sign of the endless surveillance in Little Dorrit (114). While I agree with McKnight's interpretation of other elements of surveillance in the novel (particularly in regards to the light and shadow of Marseilles and London), I believe her interpretation is flawed in regards to this particular quotation because she ignores the social standing of those "surrounding" Arthur and the implications of an expanding London in terms of working-class dwellings encircling Arthur, a man who feels guilt for his family's wealth in the face of others' poverty. 353 While also an instrument of measure, throughout the late seventeenth century, a compass was “anything circular in shape, e.g. the globe” (OED “compass, n. 1 ). 158 London are expanding out throughout the globe, an image that the narrator reinforces when he describes different countries, such as France and Italy as being eerily similar to England, despite clear geographical and political differences. In 1851, another show opened in London, promising the world for a shilling: Mr. Wyld's Model of the Globe. Originally designed to be the centerpiece of the Great Exhibition of All Nations in the heart of the Crystal Palace so that "all nations there might see their homes," 354 the Globe proved too big for the structure. It was, therefore, sent to Leicester Square, and it became its own attraction. As it moved away from the Crystal Palace, its structure changed as well. No longer showcasing a traditional globe, Wyld moved the depictions of the world's landmasses and bodies of water to the interior. This innovative change afforded a visual advantage for viewers. No longer did the curve of the globe break up the surface of the world into parts, but it could be taken in as a whole view at once from the interior. James Wyld explains his choice to move the map to the globe's interior: [With a traditional globe w]e are obliged to look at it bit by bit; and then, by bringing together its several parts in such a way as the imagination can effect, we represent the whole to the mind. It need scarcely be remarked, how much the effect and greatness of the whole is thus weakened, and how imperfectly the relative positions and proportions of the respective parts are grasped by such a survey. 355 But in Mr. Wyld's Great Model of the Globe, "the eye may take in, by rapid survey, the whole extent, figure, magnitude, and multifarious features of the world we live in, as if it 354 "The Globe in a Square," Household Words, Vol. 3, no. 68, 371. 355 James Wyld, Notes to Accompany Mr. Wyld's Model of the Earth (London: Model of the Earth, 1851), 1. 159 were one vast plain—its physical phenomena of land and water, of elevation and depression, of rugged mountains and diversified plains." 356 What used to be traditionally viewed as parts of a whole can suddenly be experienced by the viewer in its entirety, yet this entirety is limiting and claustrophobic. 357 In the aptly titled "The Globe in a Square," a writer for Household Words describes the experience of entering Mr. Wyld's Globe: "We walk into Leicester-Square, and we enter a neatly-made brick packing-case, look at the world boxed up in a diameter of sixty feet." 358 Much like London, the world is "boxed up" or claustrophobic, yet at the same time, like Arthur Clennam's view of the confining and narrowing London, it is also as infinite as the houses extending out beyond eyesight. The interior of the globe allows "the spectator to extend his range of vision almost indefinitely over the vast and wondrous distributions of land and water brought at once 356 Ibid., 2. 357 Interestingly, as evidenced by a full-page advertisement on the opening pages of the first part of Little Dorrit published in December 1855, the stereoscope boasted the ability to see the whole world from the comfort of one's home. The ad for the London Stereoscope Company claims, "In a word, all the objects comprised in a voyage round the world may be viewed at our own fire-sides, as if the things themselves were under actual contemplation. We may look upon this invention as one of the wonders of our age." In the next passage, the notion of a narrowing world brought on by technological innovation becomes all the more obvious: "Vast fields of enjoyment are presented to us in a manner which seems little short of miraculous" (emphasis added). Further, this part also has advertisements for atlases, such as Black's General Atlas of the World, which underscored areas of particular interest to readers such as the Crimea region and the British Empire. In its advertisement published in the second part published in January 1856, the London Stereoscope Company asserts that it will "safely pack" and ship any order of stereoscope instrument and/or "charming binocular views" "to any part of England or the Colonies." This offer to send product across the world further emphasizes that the spaces between England and other parts of the globe had become easier to traverse, if one could order an object for enjoyment from London and receive it in India with ease. Additionally, many advertisements were related to travel, such as one for Travellers' and Marine Insurance Company and another for Allens' Patent Travelling Bag. It is obvious that people were travelling more and therefore required more innovative ways to carry their belongings and protect their property and well-being. 358 "The Globe in the Square," 370. 160 within his view." 359 Not only does Amy Dorrit shares this ability “to extend” her sight over large geographical distances in the second half of Little Dorrit, but Mr. Dorrit also refers to "the Eye of the Great World," 360 an image that signifies a single entity has the ability to "see" everything in the world at once. Yet Amy, unlike the viewers of Wyld’s Globe, is not quite able to see the whole world at once, although she does sense that London is closer to other cities than she previously imagined. After Mr. Dorrit is liberated from debtor's prison and the Dorrit family tries to achieve a new social standing in the second half of the novel, the family travels through Europe, yet no matter how far they roam, Amy sees the world as smaller and smaller. Just beyond the sites of Venice, for example, she can feel London's presence. In a letter to Arthur, Amy says she expects to see London on the horizon of the Swiss Alps: "For instance, when we were among the mountains, I often felt (I hesitate to tell such an idle thing, dear Mr. Clennam, even to you) as if the Marshalsea must be behind the great rock; or as if Mrs. Clennam’s room where I have worked so many days, and where I first saw you, must be just beyond that snow." 361 The narrator later describes how Amy connected Venice's "streets of water" with London's streets, almost as if the rippling waves allowed her to see the Marshalsea Prison to which she had grown accustomed: She would think of that old gate, and of herself sitting at it in the dead of night, pillowing Maggy’s head; and of other places and of other scenes associated with those different times. And then she would lean upon her 359 Littell's Living Age, (Vol. 30, 1851), 152. 360 Dickens, 655. 361 Ibid., 522. 161 balcony, and look over at the water, as though they all lay underneath it. When she got to that, she would musingly watch it running, as if, in the general vision, it might run dry, and show her the prison again, and herself, and the old room, and the old inmates, and the old visitors: all lasting realities that had never changed. 362 Both of these quotations from the novel demonstrate a sense that London is inescapable. While traveling to a new city traditionally invokes the notion of starting over, for Amy, Venice does nothing except remind her of London. She expects to find London buried under Venice's canals or hidden just out of sight in the mountains. At the center of Venice, she anticipates that she will see the London she remembers. In both of these passages, London connects to the rest of the world, but its bond has been buried under water, snow, or rock. In her ability to see beyond what others notice, Amy is able to perceive the potential for London and the rest of the world to connect with little geographical or political distance between cities and countries. Even without emptying the canals of Venice and digging for a common bond, Amy unites the international locales of the novel. While Mr. Wyld designed his Globe to grant the viewer access to the whole globe at once, in reality, Wyld's Globe did not allow for the ability to see perfectly everything at the same time, as his writings imply. Instead, Wyld's Globe shortened distances between places, which permitted a glance to include locations that would normally not be connected even on a cursory view of a map. For Amy, London is just out of reach, but significantly, the foreign locales she visits on her family’s tour of Europe do not provide distance from her home, but instead serve as reminders that London is not far 362 Ibid., 520. 162 away. Little Dorrit’s London, despite its apparent stagnation, is united with the rest of the world, just like Dickens's London in "The Great Exhibition and the Little One" is as well. Apart from Amy’s ability to visualize London just out of sight, but close enough to reach on foot, sound unites these other locales to London demonstrating that the metropolis is not as isolated as its gloomy description might imply. In Venice, Amy becomes inspired to "muse" on the nature of the "streets of water" when she hears "the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning corners of the flowing streets." 363 In London, "some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling," 364 while in Marseilles, "discordant church bells and rattling of vicious drums" 365 make noise. Significantly, Marseilles, the first city featured in the novel, is a city of excessive sound. In the chapter entitled “Fellow Tourists,” Dickens allows British characters to complain about the “loud” nature of the French, not just the Marseillais. One character comments, “‘When these people howl, they howl to be heard,’” and when asked if he is specifically referring to the people of Marseilles he says, “‘I mean the French people. They’re always at it. As to Marseilles, we know what Marseilles is. It sent the most insurrectionary tune into the world that was ever composed.’” 366 This quotation illustrates that the revolutionary song of France can travel the world and affect other places, such as London. The British characters comment on the French howling as if it 363 Ibid., 519. 364 Ibid., 67. 365 Ibid., 40. 366 Ibid., 53. 163 were a negative trait, but the notion that Marseilles as a port city (one in which people travel through and experience influence) not only makes, but significantly, dispatches “the most insurrectionary tune in the world that was ever composed” says a great deal about the significance of the time spent in Marseilles on the rest of the novel and the influential effects of the French revolution on Little Dorrit's London. Marseilles is sound, and unsatisfied, revolutionary sound at that. Characters throughout the book continue to hum tunes and make songs out of sounds they hear, clearly referencing the time spent in Marseilles under the insurrectionary influence of the city. Despite the city's clear connection and affinity with London, it is still geographically and politically associated with France. In London, Arthur Clennam, who spent time in Marseilles, finds himself creating lyrics to the sound of a church bell, significantly the same sound that Amy hears in her journey through Europe. From the vantage point of a coffee-house window, he looks out on the streets and counts “one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year.” 367 Significantly, these bells inspire “burdens of songs” that he cannot help but create. 368 The word “burden” is particularly interesting 367 Ibid., 68. 368 Further, in that vein, back to the image of Babel, specific sounds are associated with the image in addition to the visual implications of the intermingling of all the world’s people in a single location. According to the biblical story, to punish the people for building such a structure, God dispatches them to all corners of the globe and takes away their ability to communicate with one another in one universal language. As evidenced by a few of the quotations I discussed earlier, when the Great Exhibition opened, writers immediately became fixated on the image of the Tower of Babel and the near-deafening sound of everyone in the world speaking different languages all at once became closely associated with the Crystal Palace. One author worried 164 here, suggesting the refrain of a song in the early nineteenth century, yet at the same time, the word carried and still carries connotations of responsibility, obligation, and culpability, not to mention physical and mental encumbrance. 369 Throughout the novel, Arthur feels guilty 370 when he observes the metaphorical prisons of the “free” working- class people and the actual prisons of those inside the Marshalsea. The sound of the bell awakens in him feelings of previous regret: “its sound revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on. about the Queen's English surviving an assault by ‘barbarous hordes of foreigners, each speaking in strange tongues’” (Routledge’s Guide 8). Another, on experiencing the opening day of the Exhibition, wrote, “‘It would be vain to attempt a description of the noise, the tumult, the cries, the eagerness, the activity, the zeal, which are everywhere manifested. At the Tower of Babel there were as many various tongues spoken, but people were far from understanding each other as well'" (The Industry of Nations, as Exemplified in The Great Exhibition of 1851. (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1852), 153.) The Tower of Babel image brings along with it images of loud noise that are indistinguishable and impossible to universally comprehend. Yet at the same time, the insurrectionary sounds exhibited in Marseilles have no need to be translated because unlike speech, the tune and the howl are both universal in terms of the message expressed and the emotional response elicited. 369 “burden, burthen, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press. 8 June 2009 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/ /50029537>. 370 Jeff Nunokawa in Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel argues that characters, such as Arthur, experience guilt in Little Dorrit because of the "destabilizing rule of equivalent exchange that governs the economy of Little Dorrit, a rule that ensures that anything taken will be taken away" (20). While Nunokawa focuses in on Arthur's "sense of guilt" over his family fortune and the Dorrit family's misfortune, his argument can still be relevant to the general dis-ease Arthur feels toward his place in society in general and those who his family has taken advantage of to gain wealth and status. Nunokawa says, "Clennam's 'vague sense of guilt' describes not merely his suspicion that the accumulation of the family fortune involved an act of theft, but also his recognition that it was accumulated at all. The specter that haunts Clennam's inheritance is not simply the rumor that it is constituted in part by a particular kind of appropriation, that in 'grasping at money, someone may have been grievously deceived, injured, ruined,' but a more general apprehension that is expressed but not comprehended by his suspicion of a particular theft" (21). 165 ‘Heaven forgive me,’ said he, ‘and those who trained me.’” 371 In asking forgiveness for his lineage, Arthur rebels against a succession of discipline and obedience that has reinforced social differences throughout England’s history. He sees an unending “procession” not as making progress (as the word "procession" implies), but as a constant reinforcement of social order. At the same time, the notion of a procession that "continued to march on" combined with a vision of the future when he dismally reflects on the number of sick people who might die before the end of the year, point to change, not stagnation. Yes, these statements do not imply social advancement or growth, but they do show a continuation of history and a succession of power. The notion of progress not as positive social change, but as the succession of orders of power, connects to Dickens's description of his visit to the site of the then- defunct Marshalsea Prison in his "Preface to the 1857 edition" of Little Dorrit. In the Preface, he visits the site of the Marshalsea Prison to "find the outer front courtyard, often mentioned here [in the novel], metamorphosed into a butter shop." 372 Dickens describes his contemporary London as one surrounded by progress and change, yet at the same time, little has transformed. The Marshalsea Prison might appear no longer to be the debtors' prison of Dickens' youth. The space once occupied by a former government institution might appear to be altered into a site of commerce, but much like the butter shop and the living quarters Dickens sees in 1857, the Marshalsea Prison existed within traditional Victorian commodity culture. Even after prisons were no longer privatized, 371 Dickens, 69. 372 Ibid., 35. 166 Dickens clearly shows how it was a continued site of commodity exchange; even as those who were imprisoned were removed from traditional ways of accumulating wealth, prisoners, such as Mr. Dorrit, still exchanged services for money. Much like the exchange that occurs every day in the butter shop in 1857, Mr. Dorrit finds a way to "earn" a living off of what service he can provide to visitors when he accepts "Testimonials" 373 from visitors for the pleasure of hearing his story. In the Preface, Dickens describes a nostalgic desire to set his "feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea jail," yet at the same time, he relishes in the fact that the physical look of the prison is "little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free." 374 Despite Dickens' celebration of England's progress in "The Great Exhibition and the Little One," in his preface to Little Dorrit, he takes comfort in the familiarity that continued stagnation and little alteration afford. In Little Dorrit, Dickens's narrator laments that the London of the novel does not allow for anything to stimulate London's working-class population. Of the London streets and sights, Dickens’ narrator bemoans: Everything was bolted and barred that could possibly furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world—all taboo with that enlightened strictness [. . .]. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six 373 Ibid., 123-24. 374 Ibid., 36. 167 days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it—or the worst, according to probabilities. 375 Even though the narrator expresses the desire for any event that would "furnish relief to an overworked people" from the monotony of the streets, during the Great Exhibition, on July 27, 1851, Dickens wrote in a letter to W.H. Wills: I have always had an instinctive feeling against the Exhibition, of a faint, inexplicable sort. I have a confidence in its being a correct one somehow or other—perhaps it was a foreshadowing of its bewilderment of the public. My apprehension—and prediction—is, that they will come out of it at last, with that feeling of boredom and lassitude (to say nothing of having spent their money) that the reaction will not be as wholesome and vigorous and quick, as folks expect. 376 In 1850, Dickens, with other "men known for their promotion of the welfare of working people and workers' leaders" 377 such as J.S. Mill and Thackeray, became an active member of the Central Committee for the Working Classes, which was created to allow the working-classes to enjoy the Exhibition while preventing threats to the public well- being of London with the predicted influx in street traffic and potentially riotous mobs of working-class people. 378 It is interesting how a man such as Dickens who appeared to support working-class people in his novels such as Hard Times and who championed the cause of the working-class Exhibition visitor in the Central Committee for the Working Classes would then, in 1851, say that he did not believe that the working-classes could 375 Ibid., 67-68. 376 Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens ed. by Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988), 6:448-449. 377 Ibid., 6:56. 378 Philip Landon, "Great Exhibitions: Representations of the Crystal Palace in Mayhew, Dickens, and Dostoevsky," Nineteenth Century Contexts 20 (1997): 36-37. 168 benefit from experiencing the Exhibition. In fact, he stated that they would be bored, a telling contrast to comments in Little Dorrit. Instead of supporting the notion that the working-classes needed a change from "weary life," as he claims in Little Dorrit, in his 1851 letter, Dickens seems to be content with more of the same monotony. In the course of Dickens's life, London's population more than tripled in size. 379 Following 1855, after the Parliamentary Select Committee rejected Paxton's plan, London continued to grow. In 1867, one journalist wrote: The truth is, that the rate of increase of the population of London has followed the frequent enlargement of its borders; [. . .] As the area has been increased the rate of increase has expanded, from natural reason that when a certain maximum density of population has been reached there must be an overflow into the adjacent districts, which remain, perhaps, outside the metropolitan limits for a while, but eventually become merged in the mass. 380 At the end of the nineteenth century, in 1899, writers still complained that "the main London streets are altogether too narrow for the London traffic, and that until we make up our minds to widen them, we shall go from bad to worse" ("Narrow London" 4). Forty-four years after the Parliamentary Select Committee rejected Paxton's plan for The Great Victorian Way, London's streets continued to be packed with increasing traffic, and the city continued to feel the added weight of increased commerce brought on by its position as capital of the British Empire. Even as the latter half of the nineteenth century saw technological innovations such as the telephone, the light bulb, and the prototype for 379 Murray Baumgarten, "Dickens, London, & The Invention of Modern Urban Life," in Dickens: The Craft of Fiction and the Challenges of Reading, eds Rossana Bonadei, Clotilde de Stasio, Carlo Pagetti, and Alessandro Vescovi, (Milan: Unicopli, 2000), 195. 380 "Growth of London," The Pall Mall Gazette (London, England), 8 March, 1867, 3. 169 the motion picture camera, not to mention strides in increasingly efficient means of travel, London's streets remained too small for the bourgeoning city population. Even as Paxton's plan for the Great Victorian Way accommodated trains to enter in and out of the city, London traffic most likely would have continued to increase. While the metaphor is imperfect, the girdle, despite its intentions to keep London's population stagnant through innovation, would soon have been unable to serve its purpose. The city's districts would have continued to grow outside of its boundaries. Visitors would have continued to flock to the city. Despite the fact that The Great Victorian Way could have ameliorated a portion of London's traffic issues, it would not have stopped the great Victorian tendency towards growth and the traffic that goes along with a bourgeoning city and a shrinking world. 170 Coda Reconstructing the Palace: The Crystal Palace in Modern and Contemporary Fiction and Culture Nearly 160 years following the close of the Great Exhibition, contemporary representations of the Victorian period continue to focus on the Crystal Palace. Even though in 1851 new and ever-expanding technology, such as the railroad, began to dominate the British landscape, writers who wish to set their novels or movies in the Victorian period are drawn to the glass and iron structure of the Crystal Palace as an emblematic setting for their work. Screenwriters who adapt Victorian fiction add the Great Exhibition building into their movies set in the late nineteenth-century disregarding historical accuracy in favor of the iconic mid-Victorian building. Most recently, in the 2009 feature film Sherlock Holmes, advertisements for the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace prominently line London's streets, despite the fact that the Great Exhibition closed years before Arthur Conan Doyle was born. Logically speaking, no advertisements would remain on London's streets for 35 years after the Great Exhibition. The Crystal Palace so often becomes fuzzily iconic and oddly necessary to telling a story in the mid-Victorian period: for instance, Sandy Welch inserts a scene into her 2004 miniseries North and South that was never in Elizabeth Gaskell's original novel. Welch's addition allows twenty-first century viewers the opportunity to see for themselves why Margaret becomes attracted to the mill operator Thornton. 171 In the third episode of the miniseries, after Margaret has rejected Thornton's advances, she bumps into him at the Crystal Palace. The camera lingers on him from a distance and Margaret (along with the camera) gazes as he engages in a debate about the state of England's working class. Later in the same scene, when another character insults Thornton, Margaret, who had just amplified the importance of the Great Exhibition—"I think it's wonderful. It seems as though all the world is here for us to see"—advocates for Thornton as well. She says to Henry who has just doubted whether a man like Thornton could "have appreciated a show like this," "No, you're wrong. [. . .] He's very interested in the world. Really. I know him to be." Thus, appreciating the Crystal Palace means that one can show compassion for the world and not be disgusted at the exotic or foreign as Margaret's companions are. For Margaret, the Crystal Palace has become the world. In seeing Thornton at the Great Exhibition, Margaret's eyes are opened to their common appreciation for the world around them, a clear clue to viewers that Margaret will begin to realize her attraction to Thornton. Within the space of the Crystal Palace, Margaret's character in the miniseries goes from fighting with Thornton to fighting for him. Suddenly, in this transformative space, their class and ideological differences no longer matter. Oddly, Lisa Kleypas's narrator of the paperback romance Seduce Me at Sunrise, set in London during the Great Exhibition, summarizes best why our contemporary imagination of the Victorian period hones in on the Crystal Palace. In paragraph of historical facts which includes the number of iron columns and panes of glass in the Crystal Palace, the narrator describing the scene makes a curious historical assumption, 172 "The exhibition was important in a social sense as well as a scientific one. It provided an opportunity for all classes and regions, the high and the low, to mingle freely beneath one roof in a way that seldom happened." 381 It is this belief that the Crystal Palace allowed for social mingling that also drives Kaoru Mori's graphic novel series Emma to include a pivotal moment within the walls of the Crystal Palace: the first kiss between her titular character, Emma, a maid, and Will, an upper-class gentleman. For the twenty-first century reader and writer, the Crystal Palace is a safe place; no class confusion can be found, only universal acceptance. It is a place in which our modern democratic ideals can be acted out in a historical setting and a location that can be reimagined to include our modern fantasy of equality between the classes. Yet, this democratizing Crystal Palace never existed. Instead, apart from its current imaginings, it was an incubator of class confusion, not class equality. Unlike the imagined Crystal Palace in the miniseries, the actual building was anything but light and airy with open, unpopulated spaces. It was not the desolate space of the graphic novel Emma perfect for two characters (one of the gentry and another of the working-class) who normally could not find a place to connect, to share their first kiss. Instead, it was an overcrowded, anxiety-provoking arena, making most mid- Victorian observers uneasy. While our version of the Crystal Palace allowed Victorians to "see" clearly (whether into their hearts, as in the North and South miniseries and the graphic novel series Emma) or into their own social hypocrisy (from the perspective of a twenty-first century writer), in actuality, writers who attended the Great Exhibition did 381 Lisa Kleypas, Seduce Me at Sunrise (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), 146. 173 not experience such clarity, but, so often, an overwhelming distortion of their senses. A space we culturally inscribe with intelligibility and a new world order, much like our own idealized view of our contemporary museum spaces, seemed, in fact, far from an intelligible area, marked by something as reductive as equality. While writers today equate the Crystal Palace with unity and see the building itself as an emblem of solid Victorian social and technological progress, cultural discussion in 1851 was anything but universally accepting or calm. Yet, the current incarnations of the Crystal Palace in our contemporary fiction do have one notion right: it possessed the ability to transform, though its transformations existed on a temporary and sensory level. While I discuss in my first chapter how the notion of class intermingling inside the walls of the Crystal Palace was a mid-Victorian cultural myth which we later inscribed onto our impression of mid-Victorian London, my dissertation as a whole relies on the concept of the Crystal Palace as a space coded by disorder, a disorder shadowed by notions of upheaval. And yet, even in the face of historical inaccuracy, these incarnations of the Crystal Palace continue to abound. Last March, a convention, "The Great Exhibition of 2010" was held at London's La Scala club. True, there was no Crystal Palace building, but the steampunk 382 convention was held in a club, that required money to enter and 382 Steampunk is a complicated cultural phenomenon that involves incorporating technology unavailable to those living in the nineteenth century with clothes, gadgets and values of the Victorian era (however modernized or simplified). In her forward to Steampunk Style Jewelry: Victorian, Fantasy, and Mechanical Necklaces, Jean Campbell writes, "Surely you've heard the saying, 'It's never too late to have a happy childhood.' The exploding cultural wavefront known as Steampunk might as well adopt as its motto, 'It's never too late to live splendidly like a Victorian.' But, of course, just as no sane adult seeks to replicate exactly all the cramped and shortsighted parameters of childhood, so no thoughtful creator or lifestyle adopter seeks to authentically 174 participate for its limited, one night transformation, a link (however superficial) to the Crystal Palace's system of entry which excluded those who could not afford the shilling fee. While BBC News is quick to note that The Great Exhibition of 2010 was "on a smaller scale than the 19th century original," 383 the fact that it was a steampunk convention indicates that technological modernity more than class equality also dictates our contemporary reading of the Crystal Palace. As BBC News comments, "The Victorian elements are present [. . .] because that was the last great industrial shift that mirrors the big changes being inflicted on society by the rise of the net." One attendee reflecting on how the changes in Victorian society mirrors the technological transitions in contemporary British society, said, "'Think about how things were 10 years ago, 20 years ago. [. . .] Everything has changed. Now no-one can even say what things are going to be like in five years time.'" Much like the Great Exhibition which embodied a sense that the world was changing in unknown and unpredictable cultural directions, the Great Exhibition of 2010 caught the clichéd but vital idea of "transition." These incarnations of the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition are not simply nostalgic. While, according to Susan Stewart, "Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, inhabit the constricted and narrow-minded conditions of 150 years ago (6)". In Steampunk, authenticity is not encouraged. In fact, the phrase "live splendidly like a Victorian" directly involves the shutting out of the working-classes and the privileging of the upper-classes. After all, no one could "live splendidly like a Victorian" factory worker. Steampunk seeks to replicate or play off of Victorian upper-class clothing, while at the same time affording advanced technological elements to the costumes. In many ways, it is privilege heaped on privilege, even as it claims to reject "the constricted and narrow-minded conditions of 150 years ago." 383 Ward, Mark. "Steampunks Gather for Great Exhibition," BBC News online. 30 March 2010. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8593305.stm> 175 always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack," 384 these incarnations of 1851 do not manifest as a "felt lack" but more as a reflection of contemporary society. As Arjun Appadurai says, The past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory. It has become a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued. 385 While Appadurai refers to the way contemporary American society appropriates cultural images from the past for our commercial and social benefit, his statement that "the past is now not a land to return to in a simple politics of memory" applies to Victorian reconstructions of the more recent past as well as today's renovation of the Victorian era. Appadurai says "one might suggest that the issue is no longer one of nostalgia but of a social imaginaire built largely around reruns." Instead of the term nostalgia, 386 which is coded with a certain homesickness and a longing to return to a native land, the notion of the rerun or reconstruction is particularly relevant to post-Great Exhibition England, as well as to contemporary American and British society. Even though, according to Stewart, nostalgia is a longing for that which never existed, the fact remains that our contemporary versions of the Crystal Palace represent a reappropriation of the event that 384 Stewart, 23. 385 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30. 386 Dating back to the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century, nostalgia was a clinical condition, one that was thought to affect soldiers who longed to return to their homeland. The notion that this homesickness deserved medical attention and definition began to dissipate in the mid-nineteenth century (Colley 2-3). 176 reenacts scenes from our own cultural milieu. Even if these scenes do not speak to how our cultural attitude, 387 they do speak to how we view our society in relation to the Victorian era and how we redefine history to show our own realistic or perceived progress in relation to nineteenth century England. Right before the Great Exhibition closed in 1852, debate raged regarding the Crystal Palace's fate. Paxton among others thought that the building, gutted of its current exhibitions, could remain in Hyde Park as a palace for the people, a greenhouse that could be enjoyed by Londoners in the winter. Interestingly, the glass and iron that defined the Crystal Palace building was not owned by the Great Exhibition committee, England, or anyone involved in the fate of the Crystal Palace, but by the engineering company Fox and Henderson, who, under the original contract, could reclaim and reuse the beams and glass of the Crystal Palace in any means they saw necessary following its closure. 388 Even though the Crystal Palace is usually referred to as being transported to Sydenham and reconstructed there as an exact replica of the original, the building's parts, while mostly original, did change and the Crystal Palace at Sydenham was darker visually, "less light" 389 structurally than the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace. Some of these structural changes no doubt had to do with the fact that the Crystal Palace at Sydenham was to be a permanent museum. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that while the move 387 After all, even though Emma depicts class equality in the Crystal Palace, class inequalities abound today. 388 Chris Hopkins, "Victorian Modernity? Writing the Great Exhibition." Varieties of Victorianisms: The Uses of the Past. Ed. Gary Day (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 44. [40- 62] 389 Ibid. 177 to Sydenham did extinguish the debate over the fate of the Crystal Palace, it was not an exact transplantation, but a reinvention of the original structure. Even though the Great Exhibition was a contentious subject before the Crystal Palace was constructed and opened to the public, very few photographs or visual representations exist of the building of the Crystal Palace leading up to the Exhibition opening. Yes, it is true that Mayhew and Cruikshank wrote and published 1851 before the opening of the Great Exhibition and described the anticipated hubbub long before the opening ceremony or the first shilling day which indicates documentation of and fascination with the building leading up to its opening. But significantly, in Mayhew and Cruikshank's novel, the Crystal Palace was already constructed and well-populated. Instead of being well-documented before the Great Exhibition opening, visual representations abound of the Crystal Palace during the Great Exhibition and its transformation from the site of the Great Exhibition to the new museum known as the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. We see the Crystal Palace in London during the Great Exhibition, overrun by visitors, and we see it in the process of being torn down and recreated at Sydenham. We even see images of the desolate Hyde Park, tree stumps and all in Mr. Goggleye's Visit to the Exhibition of National Industry. Sponsored by the Crystal Palace Art-Union, Philip Henry Delamotte even went so far as to chronicle the rebuilding of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in a 160 photograph series published in two volumes entitled Photographic Views of the Progress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham. Before the Great Exhibition, the building of the Crystal Palace was of little social significance, but during and after the Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace was a symbolic 178 site of Victorian progress, even as its interior collection changed when it moved away from London’s city center. While one would expect to see laborers rebuilding the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in Delamotte's photographs, very few show work going on. Instead, many feature only the evidence of labor: a cart here, a pulley there, and piles of dirt and lumber everywhere. In the eleventh photograph, entitled "Delivery of Materials from Hyde Park," for example, not a single worker is in the frame despite the photograph's title. Even the horses pulling the carts of supplies are out of focus. The same can be said of photograph number 26 "The Commencement of the Greek Court." Apart from the exposed ceiling beams and the lumber on the floor, the only sign that workers exist is the solitary dusty jacket hanging on the right wall. Out of the two volumes of 160 pictures, only two photographs feature the workers' faces, and even those photographs' titles do not describe what is actually going on in the picture. Photograph number 61 "Breakfast Time at the Crystal Palace" features five men facing the camera (none eating) with the Crystal Palace barely in the shot. Number 90 "Dinner-Time at the Crystal Palace" blurs the faces of the twelve men featured, so that more of the Crystal Palace becomes visible. It seems that when choosing between photographing the laborers working on the building (a task necessary for one pursuing the documentation of the "progress of the Crystal Palace, Sydenham") or the building itself, Delamotte always chose the building and views of its preferably without laborers. 390 390 Some of this no doubt had to do with how cameras focused since even in the final photographs after the Crystal Palace at Sydenham opened, only one photograph features the building populated. 179 Figure 3: Cruikshank's "The Opening of the Great Bee-Hive" (1851). 180 At the same time, all visual representations of the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace show the building teeming with people and objects. Delamotte's pictorial views of the space allow it to be remembered and enjoyed without people, which is particularly troubling since the photographs were taken during the period when most photographers engaged in ethnographic snapshots designed to compare individual faces and physical features of people throughout the world. 391 Delamotte's photographs artificially create a sense of serenity that was hardly a feature of the Crystal Palace at either Hyde Park and Sydenham (see a comparison of Figure 3 against any of Delamotte's photographs, for example). Helen Groth argues that "the invention of photography complicated the always troubled distinction between illusion and truth" and that Victorian photography desired "to arrest time," 392 two facts that illuminate the obviously omitted truth of the people laboring to reconstruct the Crystal Palace. The time arrested in these photographs is not that of the Crystal Palace experienced by the people. Instead, it is one of privilege, a sight unavailable to visitors to the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park or Sydenham. If one purchases Delamotte's volumes, one gets a private viewing of the Crystal Palace without interruption even from those who are working to rebuild it. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, unlike the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace, shared a mission common to today's museums: the permanent and continued display of objects in order to impact visitors for generations. In Guide to the Crystal Palace and 391 Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 202. 392 Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2-3. 181 Park, Samuel Phillips explains, "Day by day the people will have an opportunity of witnessing the growth of their Palace, and the extension of its means of good. An institution intended to last for ages, and to widen the scope, and to brighten the path, of education throughout the land, must have time to consolidate its own powers of action, and to complete its own system of instruction." 393 Even though the Crystal Palace was supposedly a place of "growth" and a place in which visitors could look to the future, during its early years in the 1850s, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham did not look forward (as the Great Exhibition did with its many exhibitions of industry). A permanent outdoor exhibit was added to the Crystal Palace grounds in which models of extinct animals from all over the globe could mingle. Creatures from dinosaurs to extinct elk roam the plains, but Routledge's Guide to the Crystal Palace and Park at Sydenham quickly reassures readers that the sight of extinct beasts and monsters will not be shocking: "The first sight of these monsters will not be found so alarming as some persons may suppose, for, although there are of vast and gigantic dimensions, there is nothing disproportionate, unnatural, or repulsive, in their appearance." 394 As the guidebook suggests, after witnessing monuments and sarcophaguses from ancient civilizations, it is only natural to view extinct animals on the Crystal Palace's courtyard: We now pass on to inspect the records of ages, in comparison with which the oldest monuments of Egypt or Assyria, appear in the freshness of youth itself. [. . .] In the journey which the visitor now takes, his first step will land him in realms far beyond the limits of recorded time, and below the dust of any of the representatives of the human race; he will find 393 (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1854), 10. 394 (London: George Routledge & Co., 1854), 185. 182 himself surrounded by the relics of time when passing seasons and fleeting years marked not the lapse of duration; but when those distant epochs were recorded by the successive formations and extinctions of ancient worlds, with their rank vegetation, and gigantic forms of animal existence. 395 Even as the Crystal Palace at Sydenham attempts to "widen the scope" and "brighten the path of education" through a turn backwards, a clear division remains between what belongs inside the Crystal Palace and what belongs outside: the historical objects connected to man belong inside, while those of geological fossils and models of extinct animals are outside. And yet, bearing in mind Delamotte's pictures of the Crystal Palace as a space without man, the Crystal Palace itself has become a place where people can step back "far beyond the limits of recorded time, and below the dust of any of the representatives of the human race" and experience life before the possibility of mobs of Exhibition visitors and technological and social advancement possible in the 1850s. Although the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham and allowed a means to continue after the Great Exhibition closed, the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace was still viewed as a cultural phenomenon worth celebrating and remembering even though the building was reconstructed not too far from its original site. While Thomas Hardy wrote "The Fiddler of the Reels" in 1893 and published it in 1894, the story begins with memories of and longing for the Great Exhibition 42 years earlier, during "the era of great hope and activity" 396 brought on by the Exhibition in 1851. A character who is only described as "the old gentleman" begins the story of working-class betrayal and seduction 395 185. 396 Life's Little Ironies (New York and London: Harper Brothers Publishers, 1905), 159. 183 with a discussion of the Great Exhibition, specifically how "none of the younger generation can realize the sense of novelty it produced in us who were then in our prime" and how other exhibitions pale in comparison to "the parent of them all, and now a thing of old times—the Great Exhibition of 1851, in Hyde Park, London." 397 On the surface, the tale of Ned the builder and Car'line, the woman who a bewitching fiddler seduced, has little to do with the Great Exhibition apart from a few key facts. First, Ned traveled to London from the country and found work building the Crystal Palace. Second, when Car'line finally agrees to marry him, Ned promises her that after they get married, they will see the Great Exhibition on their wedding day. And third, when Ned and Car'line attend the Great Exhibition, Car'line imagines (or does she actually see?) the man who seduced her and left her with a bastard daughter. While the short story ends with a preposterous plot twist in which the fiddler returns and re-seduces Car'line with his music only to kidnap their daughter and disappear forever, the Great Exhibition does play a key role in the story. Much like the fiddler known as Mop, the Crystal Palace is associated with novelty. The Great Exhibition, which the old gentleman says is "the only exhibition that ever made, or ever will make, any impression upon my imagination," shares in common traits with Mop who is the only man capable of seducing Car'line, drawing her into an imagination- overwhelming hysterical state with his music. Just as "the old gentleman" says "'I will not go round the corner to see a dozen of them [exhibitions, world's fairs] nowadays,'" Car'line finds one man bewitching and capable of seducing her, despite her attempt at a 397 Ibid., 152. 184 normative relationship with Ned. Within the transitive space of the Crystal Palace, Car'line imagines that she sees Mop, but he disappears. Like Mop, the Great Exhibition "folded itself up and became a thing of the past" 398 by the end of the story, never to return again despite the desire of the people. Yet unlike Mop, who Hardy's narrator describes in vivid detail, the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace are barely depicted. Without description for the scene, we learn that Ned, who did not have "the slightest ear for music" and "could not sing two notes in tune, much less play them," 399 could construct the Crystal Palace, a site which the story describes as a "huge glass-house, then unexampled in the world's history." 400 Ned is "a central man in the movement" meaning that without him, the Crystal Palace could not have been built, a feat the story does not ignore, but one that cannot make him bewitch Car'line as does Mop's artistic skill. Even as Ned takes Car'line to the Great Exhibition, a site that demonstrates his building prowess and the site to which "people were flocking thither from all parts of the globe," 401 in order to seduce her on their wedding day, Car'line cannot help but see Mop in a reflection of a large mirror. Even though the story's introduction clearly states that the Great Exhibition had transformative powers even over language (the old gentleman says, "'A noun substantive went so far as to become an adjective in honor of the occasion. It was 'exhibition' hat, 'exhibition' razor- 398 Ibid., 165. 399 Ibid., 158. 400 Ibid., 159. 401 Ibid. 185 strop, 'exhibition' watch; nay even 'exhibition' weather, 'exhibition' spirits, sweethearts, babies, wives—for the time.'" 402 ), the Crystal Palace does little for making Car'line forget Mop. Instead, its sheer size only reminds her of him more. Like Mop, the Great Exhibition bewitches; yet unlike Mop who only enthralls women sexually, the Great Exhibition enchants everything, even objects, "for the time." The story's narrator refuses to attend future exhibitions because they do not possess the original's ability to transform. Even after the Crystal Palace moved to Sydenham, in 1852 and then republished again in 1853, the narrative poem A Reminiscence of the Great Exhibition of 1851 justifies its continued publication in a note at the beginning of the poem. A. Edmond writes, undying "interest" "still survives, and must long survive, not to be extinguished by the fame of its successor."" 403 Two years following the Great Exhibition's closing, readers still longed for descriptions and celebrations of it more than the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. A simple examination of the cultural artifacts preserved in London's Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Library clearly indicates that not only more books and articles discussed the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace more than the Sydenham one, but also, that the artifacts from the Great Exhibition were kept by more visitors, their families, and collectors than those from Sydenham. Even in the face of dinosaurs, people were not "dazzled" or confused when they visited the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. 402 Ibid., 152. 403 A. Edmond, of Peckham. (London: Jones & Causton, 1853), 2. 186 The Crystal Palace burned down in 1936, but, there are three architectural sites that embody the spirit of the Crystal Palace in troubling ways: first, Richard Armiger's "Model of the Crystal Palace on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Millennium Dome at Greenwich, and the Prince Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens. Made in 2001 and coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the opening of the Crystal Palace, Armiger's Model of the Crystal Palace is not intimidating in size. Instead, it is quite small at 147 centimeters in length, 89 centimeters in width, and 108.5 centimeters in height. While it houses a few models of trees, the Crystal Palace model at 1/32 the size of the original remains empty. Acrylic, brass and Alaskan cedar create the illusion of iron and glass that supported the original. Even if one ignores the model's diminutive presence and its unoriginal components, the physical model represents only half of the Crystal Palace. It is as if a completed model had been made, and then sawed in two down the Crystal Transept Nave. Fittingly, a mirror completes the second half of the model leaving the viewer with a transient and unfinished visual experience. No longer a transitive space, the Crystal Palace on display has been reduced to a small, semi-material figure behind glass. It remains a permanent exhibition that prohibits interaction, and therefore change. Vases and other objects once on display during the Great Exhibition dwarf the model raising the questions: to what extent is the Crystal Palace culturally important without the people and objects inside it, and how can a museum today effectively depict the Great Exhibition without the original building, objects, and visitors? The now non-operational Millennium Dome, on the other hand, has the opposite problem. Not diminutive by anyone's standards, the Millennium Dome was designed to 187 be the largest enclosed structure in the world in order to represent "a new, brighter Britain," 404 and yet it was universally declared a "major fiasco" 405 and "cultural disaster" 406 when it was built at the turn of the twenty-first century. Writers, such as Ronald R. Thomas compare the Millennium Dome to Victorian spectacles including the Crystal Palace, 407 which Thomas sees as "at once precedent and counterpoint for the dome." 408 Unlike the Crystal Palace, which was described as a location consistently, the Millennium Dome, despite its size, was thought to represent time not space. According to a quotation attributed to Blair on the official Millennium Dome website, he "described the Dome not as a place but 'a time for the nation to come together to be excited, entertained, moved and uplifted.'" 409 Located on "top of the world's prime meridian, where time begins," the Dome, according to Blair, was to be "'the home of time.'" Faced with the reality that Great Britain no longer had an empire or space to expand, Blair 404 Robert Orchard, "Dome Woes Haunt Blair." BBC News 15 February 2001. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1172367.stm> 405 Sutherland Lyall, Remarkable Structures: Engineering Today's Innovative Buildings (New York: Princeton's Architectural Press, 2002), 38. 406 Jim McGuigan "The Social Construction of a Cultural Disaster: New Labour's Millennium Experience" in Cultural Studies 17.5 (5 September 2003), 670. 407 Thomas's analysis of George Cruikshank's "All the World Going to See the Great Exhibition of 1851" for example, places the Crystal Palace "at the prime meridian, a spectacular beacon (like the Millennium Dome that will follow)" (28). He sees the Millennium Dome as a "monument to British primordial space," an odd choice of phrases considering that he considers the Crystal Palace to be "at once precedent and counterpoint for the dome" (26). 408 "The Legacy of Victorian Spectacle: The Map of Time and Architecture of Empty Space," in Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time ed. by Christine L. Krueger (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 26. 409 Quoted in "The Legacy of Victorian Spectacle," 27. 188 focused on one thing in which England still had "proprietary interest": "the passage of time." 410 In criticizing the Dome as "impractical, extravagant, and useless," The New Yorker in 1998 says, "With the approach of the millennium, this feeling has intensified, and it has become commonplace to hear people in London say things like 'We may no longer have an empire, but we still own time.'" 411 Originally, in 1994, the British government thought it would be a good idea to ring in the new millennium with a national exhibition in the tradition of the Great Exhibition. By 1997, the project changed to one of seemingly lighthearted entertainment instead of education. In 1997, Tony Blair, in the face of criticism relating to government overspending for a seemingly frivolous project, declared the Millennium Dome a symbol of Great Britain's position as a world leader: "'Britain need not settle for second best,'" he said in response to criticism over the project. 412 Much like the Great Exhibition, the Dome allows "the opportunity to proclaim the image of self-assured Britain at the cutting edge of technology and productivity," and yet, unlike the Great Exhibition, it did not come close to achieving its objectives. Even as the Millennium Dome was to avoid dwelling on the past and "England's decline from her former glory," past exhibitions loomed over the project. 413 As critics point out, the Millennium Dome website and publicity avoided mention of the Great 410 Paul Goldberger, "The Sky Line: The Big Top" New Yorker April 27 & May 4, 1998, 153. 411 152. 412 154. 413 Jay Clayton, Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 11 189 Exhibition in an attempt to point to Britain's declining place in the world: "To claim London as the center of world capitalism today would be even more implausible than to suggest any foreign city during the reign of Queen Victoria," 414 Clayton argues. And yet, in choosing who would be in charge of the Dome's construction, Blair appointed Peter Mandelson whose grandfather had arranged 1951's centennial celebration of the Great Exhibition. 415 Despite comparisons to Disneyworld which called the Millennium Dome "an English Epcot Center," the Millennium Dome failed to reach the its projected goal for visitors. Instead, only 6.5 million people experienced the Millennium Dome while it was open for one year. 416 To put this figure in perspective, over six million people 417 visited the Great Exhibition. Accounting for the advances in travel, the fact that these two events produced similar numbers nearly 150 years apart, indicate the comparative problems British citizens had with the Millennium Dome. In contrast to the now defunct Millennium Dome, we have the Albert Memorial. Unlike the Millennium Dome, which was touted as a celebration of present and future England even though it could not escape the past, the Albert Memorial, on first glance, is a physical structure designed with the intention of remembering and celebrating the past, not a nod to the future. Yet, when writing about the Albert Memorial, most focus on the canopy surrounding the statue, "a feat of Victorian engineering" with a 175-foot Gothic 414 Ibid., 13. 415 New Yorker, 154. 416 Jim McGuigan, Cultural Analysis (London: SAGE Publications, 2010), 54. 417 C. H. Gibbs-Smith, The Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: The Victoria and Albert Museum ,1981), 24. 190 spire that many at the time thought would topple to the ground. 418 Even though memory and remembering are supposedly the purposes of a memorial, the Albert Memorial looks to the future in its opulent design even while gesturing to the past with its Gothic spire. At the same time, the statue under the garish canopy reveals a different dimension to the past/future dynamic at work in the memorial's exterior. When critics discuss the Albert Memorial, they usually speak about the outside of the structure, the canopy, and the Gothic spire. Oddly, even though the outside structure took 10 years to complete from breaking ground in 1864, the statue of Prince Albert was not placed under the canopy until 1876. 419 The statue, placed on display nearly a quarter century after the Great Exhibition, speaks to the memory of the man and the Exhibition along with the future of England. The statue depicts the Prince with a book in his right hand, his fingers holding pages open in a well-worn tome. On the outer cover, the book reads "Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations 1851." With the Great Exhibition on its right, the statue's face and body is turned to the left. Albert's right side of his body is relaxed, his knee stretched out, unlike the left side, which remains bent. Seated, he could use his right hand (and the Great Exhibition book) to push off from the bench and spring forward to the left. If we view the monument not as solely remembering Albert, but also as a construction of historical events, we can see in the positioning of his body with the Great Exhibition book, that the Great Exhibition, while remembered in writing, is in the past, 418 Helen Rappaport, Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 13 419 "London Statues and Memorials" Notes and Queries: A Medium of Intercommunication for Literary Men, General Readers, Etc. No. 224 [10th series] April 11, 1908 [282-84], 283. 191 and England (memorialized in Albert turning to the left) is looking to the future. At the same time, the Gothic designs in the structure, combined with Albert's fingers marking pages in the book indicate that even as England looks to the future, England's past will be ubiquitous. As Prince Albert said in his speech in 1850, England was, and maybe still is, in an age of transition, and the gilded statue paused between the events of 1851 and the future ahead of those living in 1876 symbolizes a struggle to hold onto the social and cultural mores of the past while looking forward to new possibilities for the present and future. Reconstruction, whether of the Crystal Palace in its new location at Sydenham or of historical events in contemporary fiction set during the 1850s, involves taking an object or event out of the past and repositioning it for literary, monetary, and even social gain. As we study literature and history, we must watch out for reconstructing the past in favor of celebrating our present. It is easy to read onto past confusion a narrative that erases cultural steps backward or ignores past unrest. The idea of defining Victorian values accurately is ridiculous. People will always remain divided on issues and apprehensive about what change means for their own futures. But as evidenced by the Albert Memorial, a statue designed to force remembrance on those passing it, a study of the past automatically implies a gesture to the future. That these two cannot be separated, perhaps marked the failure of the Millennium Dome. In implying that one could ignore the past and yet represent the future, the dome became a location without history, yet one constantly haunted by it. Without history and the possibility of a future (however bleak, different, or disturbing), there is no hope for those seeking social change; so while at 192 times historically inaccurate and troubling, reconstructions of historical events have a place in our culture, reminding us that nothing is as simple as we might believe. While the Crystal Palace has been deconstructed and reconstructed both in actuality and in our cultural imagination, what has become of the other transitive spaces of this study? Significantly, the transitive spaces of the narratives I explore do not get torn down (although they are in metaphorical or literal danger). Neither do they find themselves greatly displaced from the original story in completely foreign surroundings in the novel's final scene. 420 Instead, the transitive spaces of the Thornton House in North and South, Mary's disabled body in Hide and Seek, and London in Little Dorrit do not change themselves, but instead, the way characters interact with and view these spaces transition in order for the novels to resolve. In Little Dorrit, for instance, Dickens's final five chapter titles are "Closing In," "Closed," "Going," "Going!" and "Gone." The question of whether London is expanding or contracting becomes resolved as the narrative once a story of seemingly unending roads and potential for characters becomes one of personal peace. In Amy and Arthur's marriage, Dickens allows these two characters to create their own world one that is secure enough to "step down" into the turmoil of London's streets without the social and political influences experienced in earlier chapters. Dickens's narrator writes: They paused for a moment on the steps of the portico, looking at the fresh perspective of the street in the autumn morning sun's bright rays, and then went down. Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. 420 Even as Mary becomes a member of a new family, the novel does not displace her within its pages. While the boring "stillness" of her future home is stated in the novel's first volume, the final scene of resolution is one of peace within the Blyth house. 193 [. . .] They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the forward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar. 421 While the London streets once served as a site of moral and physical influence, at the end of the novel, Amy and Arthur are able to "step down" and find quiet in the roaring streets. While London within the novel has not changed and remains as a transitive space, Amy and Arthur are now immune to its pressures and the mid-Victorian anxiety associated with accosting one's senses with the potential for social and cultural change. Similarly, the Thornton House neither falls to the ground during the workers's riot nor does it transition into a solely working-class space. Instead, Margaret, over the course of the narrative, develops her ability to interpret within the space of the Thornton House. By the novel's end, the Thornton House is no longer threatening. It's true: most likely, the parlor remains poorly lit and the sound of the factory still pervades the private dwelling. Yet, even then, the characters, particularly the novel's heroine who will now occupy the space full time, is adept at reading her environment and those around her, a skill she perfected within the transitive space of the mill-house and one that allows her to overcome any possibility for mid-Victorian defined anxiety. Similarly, in Hide and Seek, Mary's body itself does not undergo a metamorphosis, but characters, once they solve the "mystery" of who she is and where she belongs, no longer have physical and emotional reactions to her presence. While we read that all of the characters could hear in the final scene, we know that Mary did not experience a physical transformation. She cannot experience what the others hear, just as 421 894-895. 194 she could not earlier in the novel. Still disabled, Mary has not changed; instead, with her new place in the Thorpe household and in the upper-middle class, Mary no longer creates anxiety-produced sensory distortion for the characters around her. Just as Amy and Arthur found peace in the middle of the London streets, those around Mary no longer feel her effects. Of course, the question can be raised: Does Mary's body still emanate the same sensory-produced anxiety as it once did even if the other characters no longer react? And yet, in narratives which feature the transitive spaces, perceived potential for change is equal to actual change. As stated in the introduction, even if we take into account that the 1850s in retrospect did not herald in a new era of social change, the then seemingly endless possibilities for social change allowed for the proliferation of individual mid- Victorian defined anxiety. Oddly enough, while the sources of the anxiety that these novels confront and illuminate come from the exterior world, the peace that allows the narratives to resolve comes from a character's interior. Interestingly, within narrative, transitive spaces are never fully "resolved," but how characters react to them changes. What once was a seemingly infinite number of possible futures for the space (and thus the future of the characters and Great Britain at large) become resolved into one possible future and a relatively unthreatening one at that. The novels do not require that the characters deconstruct and reconstruct the physical spaces, but instead, reconstruct how they define and interact with the tumultuous locations, a perhaps telling parallel to our own reconstruction of the Crystal Palace for our contemporary sensibilities. 195 Bibliography “All the World and His Wife; Or, What Brought Everybody to London in 1851.” The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist. Ed. W. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Situated between the Chartist Rebellion of 1848 and the Second Reform Act in 1867, the 1850s traditionally have been viewed as an era of social and cultural peace. The Great Exhibition’s declared intended goal of unity—between the world’s countries and all classes of British subjects—enhances our contemporary stance that the 1850s were a relatively peaceful period in British history. And yet, the Great Exhibition, apart from its proposed and publicized goal of worldwide harmony was not a place in which the classes of Britain and the people of the world could mingle freely with one another.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Creator Alvandi Hunt, Natasha (author)

Core Title Transitive spaces: mid-Victorian anxiety in the face of change

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 01/18/2011

Defense Date 12/01/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1850s,1851,anxiety,Change,Chartism,Chartist,city,Collins,Crystal Palace,Dickens,Gaskell,Great Exhibition,House,location,mid-Victorian,OAI-PMH Harvest,Rebellion,senses,space,spaces,transition,victorian,working-class

Place Name Great Britain (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kincaid, James R. (committee chair), Anderson, Emily (committee member), Bleichmar, Daniela (committee member)

Creator Email alvandi@usc.edu,nataliahunt@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3613

Unique identifier UC181380

Identifier etd-Alvandi-4243 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-437344 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3613 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Alvandi-4243.pdf

Dmrecord 437344

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Alvandi Hunt, Natasha

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu