Earthly intermundia: office space in the works of Charles Dickens

ABSTRACT

Charles Dickens’s literary preoccupation with bureaucracy reflects its ascendant, but often contradictory, position in Victorian society. Exclusive, disordered, and in parts archaic – but at the same time increasingly pervasive, and visibly cohering into a recognisably modern form – bureaucratic organisation became a major (albeit neither infallible, nor uncontested) phenomenon in fiction during this period as much as in real life. In this article I explore such portrayals by focusing on Dickens’s aesthetic of the ostensible centre of bureaucratic power, the office itself, as a space. By rooting his ironical and often paradoxical uses of this setting within the broader crises of social knowledge and materiality that underlay nineteenth-century bureaucratisation, I argue that the Dickensian office, between The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House, performs a range of functions directly linked to its multifaceted condition of interstiality. These interstices are literal, in the office’s capacity as a physical intermediary, but also social, conceptual, and in terms of literary form.

KEYWORDS:

• Dickens
• space
• office
• bureaucracy
• clerks
• metaphysics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Clerks, wills, documents, and offices are ever-present in nineteenth-century fiction, often performing a range of supplementary roles comparable to those seen throughout Dickens’s oeuvre: as obstructive or mediating agents, as vehicles for social knowledge, as episodes in Bildungsromane, or by falling into a broader panorama of satirical social “types.” Aside from a few notable exceptions, offices generally move to centre stage towards the fin de siècle in minor naturalistic or novelty narratives of various kinds. For studies of the nineteenth-century cultural preoccupation with offices and clerks, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), Arlene Young, Culture, Class, and Gender in the Victorian Novel – Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (1999), Jonathan Wild, The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture − 1880–1939 (2008), Katherine Mullin, Working Girls – Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity (2016), Maurice S. Lee, Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution (2019), and Nicola Bishop, Lower-Middle-Class Nation – The White-Collar Worker in British Popular Culture (2021).

2. For comparable explorations of “interference factors,” see also Kafka on office “parapraxis” (2012, 122–139) and Ralph Kingston on “paper drift” (2012, 14) and le crime de bureau (60).

3. Recurring instances of metonymy in Dickensian characterisation stress that what Elana Gomel calls Dickens’s “rhetoric of the fragmented body” is not limited to his clerks (1996, 49). Rather, this play of dismemberment and recomposition performs a range of functions, of which the clerk’s paradoxical alienation of head from hand (or his analogous balance of “work” and “life”) literalises aspects of the broader crises that typify the office in the nineteenth-century social imaginary.

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Daniel Jenkin-Smith

Daniel Jenkin-Smith is a scholar of nineteenth-century French and English literature. His research focuses on interactions between literary culture and socio-economic life, particularly focusing on literary portrayals of office work. He is currently preparing a monograph on the “Rise of Office Literature.”