Spheres within spheres: nineteenth-century interstitial spaces and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013)

ABSTRACT

The introductory essay to this special issue on Nineteenth-Century Interstitial Spaces begins by noting the period’s pertinence for scholars exploring interstitiality, which as a concept may have existed in earlier historical eras but, as Tim Ingold, Roger Luckhurst, and others have argued, can be more forcefully aligned with the post-Enlightenment values of modernity. We tease out connections within and between the eight contributions to the issue, exploring the relationship between nineteenth-century spaces and other possible (spiritual) worlds, interstitial elements in the Victorian rural, colonial, and urban landscape, and, finally, interstitiality and interior spaces such as the Victorian office. Our own contribution then applies the idea of interstitiality to Eleanor Catton’s neo-Victorian novel The Luminaries (2013), pinpointing its attunement to the nineteenth-century experience of interstitial spaces and its allusion to particular Victorian practices and stories. Building on existing research influenced by the so-called spatial turn, the eight essays gathered here represent another, more recent scholarly shift highlighting the material properties of technological artefacts against their phenomenological or ideological impact.

KEYWORDS:

• Materiality
• mobility studies
• literature and colonialism
• neo-Victorian literature
• Eleanor Catton

In The Life of Lines (2015), Tim Ingold unfolds an interstitial way of looking at human life and the natural world. Surveying a wide range of phenomena – from the weaving of textiles and the practice of wayfaring to the growing of plants and the swirling of wind, light, and sound – he examines how apparently self-contained structures constantly intertwine and interpenetrate. The use of the present participle in describing the examples above is deliberate: in Ingold’s view, interstitiality designates a perpetual motion, “a movement of generation and dissolution in a world of becoming where things are not yet given – such that they might then be joined up – but on the way to being given” (Ingold 2015, 147). Despite the concept’s etymological connection to space, however, and despite Ingold’s succinct discussion of interstitial forms like the wall or the mountain, he does not dwell intensively on interstitiality from a spatial or architectural point of view. By exploring interstitiality from a spatial perspective, this special issue aims to deepen the line of thinking that Ingold unearths. Drawing on contemporary thinking about related issues such as infrastructure and interfaces, the following pages throw light on a wide range of in-between spaces, including the séance cabinet, the colonial fortress, the tram, the church door, the glazed window, the moors, the bureaucratic office, and moving panoramas.

As this brief overview suggests, the nineteenth century provides untilled ground for scholarly inquiries into the function of interstitial spaces. The current issue is not the first to delve into this area. Architectural historians have examined how new nineteenth-century technological innovations led to experiments with “the physical dimensions of windows, room volumes, air inlets, and chimneys,” which in turn led to new possibilities for “[t]he spaces between – the porches, entranceways, and lobbies that connected the outside with the new pristine interiors” (Lawrence 2020, 422, 420). Roger Luckhurst’s recent cultural history of the corridor, to focus on but one example, identifies some important fault-lines of nineteenth-century spatial interstitiality. His analysis of the corridor, defined as a “line that can cut through a system of lines (or spaces)” (Trüby et al. 2014, 14; as quoted in Luckhurst 2019, 21) dovetails nicely with Ingold’s perspective on interstitiality. Although the corridor has famous antecedents in buildings like the labyrinth of Knossos or the stoa of ancient Athens, it was only in the course of the Enlightenment that it acquired a more social conceptualisation: because of its indeterminate status, negotiating the division of life into public and private spaces, the corridor provided Enlightenment thinkers like Charles Fourier with a “rational” template for societal organisation. Offering an egalitarian alternative to the model of the nuclear family, their corridic schemes paved the way for a host of architectural innovations in the nineteenth century, including colonial settlements, exhibition halls, shopping arcades, hotels, prisons, workhouses, asylums, hospitals, universities, domestic houses, and offices. As with all utopian schemes, a dystopian outcome is lurking around the corner. The ambivalent feelings that the corridor thus inspired are reflected in a wide range of artefacts, Gothic fiction in particular. Jane Eyre, for instance, “is staged as a progression through six houses” (Luckhurst 2019, 222): in each of these, the novel pushes Jane to marginal nooks and crannies, creating instances of spatial dread. In Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and in his ghost stories, corridors and tunnels are used to explore encounters with suppressed parts of the self. As such, Victorian literature and culture have much to tell us about the ways in which the interstitial aspects of the built environment in the modern world inform the formation of our sensibilities and our sense of self.¹

In introducing this special issue, we will explore various other manifestations of interstitial space. Our aim is twofold: to highlight certain salient aspects of the contributions by situating them in the context of research in the field of English studies, and to use their findings as prompts for a reading of a contemporary neo-Victorian novel, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013). Set in the New Zealand town of Hokitika in the wake of the Otago gold rush, The Luminaries attaches particular importance to interstitial spaces. The novel opens as Walter Moody, a young prospector, enters the smoking room of a hotel and sees that twelve men have gathered, men who “[f]rom the variety of their comportment and dress – frock coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric, and twill – might have been twelve strangers on a railway car, each bound for a separate quarter of a city that possessed fog and tides enough to divide them” (Catton 2013, 3). This sentence contains multiple metaphors that all serve to enhance the in-betweenness of the room. The comparison between the hotel lobby and a railway carriage relies on a subtle difference: both are designed to accommodate people who are “on the way” between different places, but whereas the smoking room is fixed in time and place, the railway car is in motion. Just as significant is the image of the hotel’s surroundings as a sea or an ocean, rocked by tides and obscured by fog: we can think of the tides and of fog as what Ingold calls “phenomena of atmosphere,” “swirl[ing] around, very much like the wind, in the regions in-between [source and recipient]” (Ingold 2015, 93). The attention devoted to the different fabrics of the characters’ clothing, too, is significant. Relying on the principle of the knot, materials such as moleskin, cambric, and twill are not smooth and solid, but “punctured by other material components – interfaces – that allow the object to be used and connected to other objects” (Anusas and Ingold 2013, 59). As such, these woven fabrics exemplify “the fundamental principle of coherence […] in a world of life” (15). Since the novel’s plot revolves around the mysterious origins of gold that has been sewn into the seams of dresses that were sold as salvage, the description of different kinds of attire in the novel’s second sentence already hints at a crux in its plot. The dresses’ seams are also a pun that points to yet another interstitial space: seams may refer to fabrics as well as to layers of precious materials in the earth’s surface. The image of the seam thus entails a shift in terms of mobility: whereas the original “seams” in which the gold was discovered are anchored in the soil, the “seams” out of which the salvaged dresses are made serve as means of transportation. More generally, the reference to fabrics in the novel’s opening paragraph hints at the novel’s complex, tangled construction; readers are likely to find themselves in the position of the character Harald Nilssen, a commission merchant, who at a certain point “felt that he had missed a connexion somewhere – as if he had come across a knotted handkerchief, balled in the watch-pocket of an old vest, and could not for the life of him recall what the knot was supposed to prompt him to remember – what errand, what responsibility; where he’d been, even, when he tied the corners, and tucked the thing away against his heart” (145). The concept of interstitiality also informs the novel’s treatment of space; to see this, however, we need a deeper understanding of nineteenth-century interstitiality and its spatial conceptualisations, and it is this understanding that the present volume seeks to deliver.

One such conceptualisation pertains to the association between interstitial spaces and other possible worlds. Further delving into the overlaps between Victorian spiritualism and science (e.g. Galvan 2010; Noakes 2019), John Andrick turns to the overlooked figure of Anna Blackwell, a British follower of the French spiritiste movement. In 1842, Blackwell spent some formative months at Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist community that embraced the principles of Charles Fourier and that, in 1844, would construct one of the first housing estates with the corridor as its backbone, an experiment that Nathaniel Hawthorne would fictionalise in The Blithedale Romance (see Luckhurst 2019, 54–69). The experience at Brook Farm is one of the many influences behind Blackwell’s essays from the 1870s, in which she develops a worldview that has surprisingly much in common with certain concepts in contemporary quantum theory, such as entanglement or nonlocality: the interstitial spaces by which atoms are separated, she posits, are home to cosmic forces that bind atoms together and that can be penetrated by our own minds as well as spiritual beings. This intellectual context sheds light on the post office’s telephonic silence cabinet, which has its roots in the domestic séance. The séance can be understood as an interstitial “territory” where human and non-human actors interact and converse, where the veil between our world and other worlds is momentarily torn. Some of these séances featured a spirit cabinet, a cloth-covered or wooden enclosure, typically in the corner of a room, where spirits could materialise in the space between the screen and curtains. As Andrick shows, the design of the spirit cabinet informed the design of the early telephone box, which ostensibly had a similar function, that is, to further communication in between spirits that were separated in space if not in time. As a result of the telephone’s uncanny power and the phone booth’s uncanny atmosphere, a feeling arose that the telephone might also connect one with voices of the past, as many stories and accounts of unintended interference attest. Reviewing some of these stories, of which some come close to the genre of science fiction, Andrick draws attention to the importance of spiritualism for the literary history of communication technologies, thus complementing scholarship that looks at the history of communication technologies from perspectives more attuned to media and materiality (e.g. Arscott and Pettitt 2016; Menke 2023; Trotter 2020).

Continuing the issue’s focus on interstitial spaces that bridge a divide between different worlds, but doing so from the perspective of memory studies, Elisavet Ioannidou challenges one-dimensional assumptions about the inter-relationship of time and place, focussing on twinned close readings of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Ellen Wood’s Danesbury House (1860). Ioannidou engages, more specifically, in a sustained and revisionary fashion with Marc Augé’s concept of the non-place, arguing that memory traces can in fact define particular novelistic sites as non-places rather than classifying them as places. Within Ioannidou’s reading, troubling memories render place into non-place, creating an interstitial zone caught between past and present. In Brontë’s influential example of mid-Victorian Gothic fiction, it is the location of the moors that becomes an ambiguous, interstitial place, a space of exclusion for both Cathy and Heathcliff outside from the locales of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange where their identities are both discovered and eventually lost. In Ellen Wood’s sensational temperance tale, by contrast, the surprising non-place is the middle-class home, with the second Mrs Danesbury’s alcohol addiction leading to her inability to render the house a meaningful home for her family, turning it into merely a temporary site of domestic attachment that will be abandoned by her children as they succumb to the temptation of inebriation.

Further delving into the relationship between space and time, and foreshadowing the subsequent group of articles on landscapes, Patricia Smyth offers a reinterpretation of immersive restagings of Old London in the nineteenth century. The varied attractions and spectacles that Smyth uncovers in her article, from “London in the Olden Time” at the Royal Surrey Zoological Gardens (1844) to the “Old London Street” at the International Health Exhibition (1884) and many other fascinating material, textual and theatrical examples besides, have, as Smyth notes, traditionally been studied “top-down” as evidence of a triumphalist reading of the ascendance of the urban middle class in the century. Smyth’s account is more nuanced, and pursues the meanings created by the popular audience who experienced these entertainments first hand. Viewed in this light, these city simulacra provided an interstitial space that could serve as a form of consolation for urban dwellers disoriented by the pace of change in the material and social fabric of their environment. Smyth’s reading of these constructed, in-between spaces underscores their imaginative quality, defined in and by the memories of those who engaged with them rather than the period’s urban spatial realities.

The following three articles shift our attention from spaces in between different worlds and times to interstitial elements in the Victorian rural, colonial, and urban landscape. Delphine Gatehouse examines the effect of the Act for the Commutation of Tithes on people’s understanding of the agrarian landscape. To facilitate the process of commutation, an inventory of centuries of particularised agrarian practice was needed, to which end a small army of surveyors and commissioners ventured forth, carving out new districts and gathering all kinds of extraneous information, which they incorporated into highly detailed maps. These maps, Gatehouse argues, can be understood as a kind of interface, a technological construct that mediates between two distinct entities or states, “a liminal or threshold condition that both delimits the space for a kind of inhabitation and opens up otherwise unavailable phenomena, conditions, situations, and territories for exploration, use, participation, and exploitation” (Hookway 2014, 5). Heeding calls in map studies to shift focus onto the materiality of maps and their historical conditions of circulation, she considers the church door as a noticeboard for the Act. The notices affixed to church doors, she argues, can be considered as the landscape’s “data double” (Trotter 2020, 11), unweaving and reweaving people’s relation to the land that they thought they knew. The church door, itself a threshold between the profane and the sacred, between local reality and national institution, emphasises the way in which an interstitial space is used to reconfigure the relationship between people and their land. George Eliot reflects on these historical dynamics in Silas Marner, whose title character often shows himself to be bewildered by and estranged from his surroundings; his cataleptic crises tend to arrest him at interstitial sites such as stiles or doors. His story allows readers to experience one’s confrontation with a defamiliarising projection of the world. Challenging accounts of the novel that stress its fairy-tale status or its investment in rootedness, Gatehouse shows how the novel uses tithe legislation to explore the simultaneous occurrence of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (Deleuze and Guattari 1983).

Interstitial spaces may have a more sinister meaning when we look at them from a global point of view and we reconsider the notion of the “contact zone,” which Mary Louise Pratt characterised as “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relation, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 1992, 6). Examining the ways in which the history of the Black Atlantic informs the novels of Caryl Phillips, Giovanna Buonanno draws the reader’s attention to the slave ship and the colonial fort, two sites that mark the transition from freedom to slavery. Buonanno briefly considers the potential of Foucault’s notion of the ship as a heterotopic space, a place where conventional norms are upset and reversed, which could be one way of exploring the political dimensions of specific interstitial spaces (such as, for instance, that of the tram in Jason Finch’s contribution), but she abandons this notion as it cannot capture the violence and horror of the Middle Passage. It is more helpful to follow Paul Gilroy’s suggestion that the history of slave ships and associated spaces like the colonial fort are part of “the discontinuous histories of England’s ports, its interfaces with the wider world” (Gilroy 1993, 17). Phillips’s novels depict these “interfaces” – a notion that Delphine Gatehouse also explores – in harrowing detail. The sense of unbelonging that these spaces instil, so Phillips suggests, is not unfinished at the moment of arrival, but seeps into the life of the colonial plantation as well as that of the British countryside (and that of the North, linked to Liverpool, in particular). In his depiction of these spaces, as Buonanno shows, Phillips draws heavily on texts such as the logbooks and correspondence of eighteenth-century captains and the diaries and travel journals of nineteenth-century women writers, the kind of texts that fall in between different categories and that, as such, provide an intertextual counterpart for the interstitial places that the novels describe. Phillips’s work thus shows how Britain and the colonies were, as John McLeod puts it, “closely bound as part of a knotted, webbed, and matted historical weave which cannot be neatly disentangled” (2020, 456–457).

Jason Finch’s essay takes us from the territories of the rural landscape and the ship-bearing oceans to another place that has attracted the attention of generations of critics: the urban space of the period, and the “monster city” of London in particular. He examines an urban mode of transport, the tramway, that is inherently interstitial. A fixed rail infrastructure that is intermediate between the off-road railway and the on-road transport of the bus, the tramway creates a contested and mobilised public space. Taking stock of London’s complex and rapidly changing transport landscape, Finch examines trams’ development from horse-drawn carriages in the late-Victorian era to their status as envoys of a new, electrified modernity in the years before the First World War, before their decline and replacement by other means of public transport in the 1930s. In contrast to approaches that emphasise trams’ technical aspects or their status as heritage, Finch taps into recent developments in mobility studies (e.g. Aguiar, Mathieson and Pearce 2019) and uses literary texts to examine the strong sensory and affective responses that trams elicited. Focussing on the role of trams in the work of Arthur Morrison, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, and situating their representations of trams in their historical context, Finch examines how trams functioned as a contact zone that allowed people to redraw their own cartographies of what London meant, in terms of space as well as of its inhabitants. Fictional and non-fictional writing on trams shows that the tram allowed people to feel and sense London’s multiple identities; while the city became increasingly segregated as it grew in size, the tram shuttled people between these different areas, thus undermining notions of respectability and bringing the periphery into the centre. This social aspect is compounded by the arrival of the electric tram and the light and noise that it was accompanied by.

Our final two articles continue Finch’s focus on the city, but move to interior spaces. Christopher Ferguson’s article adds a much-needed spatial dimension to the well-developed scholarly interest in urban life as an intensely visual sensory experience exemplified by the work of Lynda Nead (2000), Chris Otter (2008), and Isobel Armstrong (2008). His contribution to the special issue focuses in detail on an intriguing new genre of urban writing: the glazed window narrative. Ranging energetically across a diverse set of texts which include essays by Charles Lamb and Elizabeth Robins Pennell and witness testimonies from trials at the Old Bailey, Ferguson argues that the glazed window creates a uniquely interstitial urban space. Reorienting existing work done on nineteenth-century glass by scholars such as Armstrong, he turns to the experience of individuals positioned inside windows, looking out rather than into domestic space. Drawing on the ideas of Michel de Certeau and Gaston Bachelard, Ferguson concludes that the distinctive nature of this in-between space means that his window observers are characterised by a sense of confidence and self-assurance, and a belief that they can understand a situation viewed through the glass that moves beyond the visual alone. His account thus complements and complicates accounts that stress the subjective inside and the non-subjective outside (e.g. Santana-Acuña 2019).

Daniel Jenkin-Smith takes us to another interior space, that of the Victorian office. As he notes towards the beginning of his contribution to the special issue, there has been a surprising lack of academic discussion of the Dickensian office. This lack of acknowledgement of office space in the oeuvre of this writer reflects its seemingly peripheral role in Dickens’s fiction. As Jenkin-Smith argues, however, offices in Dickens are doubly interstitial, playing an intermediary role in the social traffic of his narratives but also, more abstractly and deeply, within the Dickensian imaginary. In “Earthly Intermundia,” Jenkin-Smith explores a chronological range of representations of office space in three of Dickens’s novels, The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House. These works are related not only to Dickens’s novelistic development but also to broader bureaucratic and economic crises around definitions of (office) space in its interaction between both the material and abstract realms of office experience and also the whole and the part of administrative activity. In Dickens’s first novel, these conflicts, according to Jenkin-Smith, can be related to the formal tensions that underlie the Pickwickian text; by the time we reach the mid-career work Dombey and Son, these paradoxical relationships more deeply inform the novel’s moral and social vision. It is in Bleak House, finally, that Dickens’s critique of bureaucratic knowledge and power leads to its presentation as an all-pervading fog masking a world whose ambiguities can only be partially represented and resolved by the novel’s fragmentary and fundamentally divided narrative.

These eight different perspectives extend scholarship in and after the so-called spatial turn (e.g. Hallet 2009; Tally 2023) in intriguing ways. Having its origins in the works of French thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974), Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1974), and Michel Foucault’s “Of Other Spaces” (1984), the spatial turn revolved around a postmodern “recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge” (Cosgrove 1999, 7). As the presence of these thinkers in this issue’s contributions indicates, their ideas remain important touchstones for thinking about space and help us understand the ways in which interstitial spaces are involved in issues of power and memory. At the same time, our contributors are particularly attentive to the materiality and historicity of the media and the technology through which interstitial spaces manifest themselves. Drawing on current developments in a huge variety of related fields of inquiry – mobility studies, urban studies, transport studies, infrastructure studies, memory studies, science studies, to name but a few – these essays are in tune with another, more recent turn in which scholars highlight the material properties of technological artefacts against their phenomenological or ideological impact: although none of the authors describe themselves as media archaeologists, they seem to share this movement’s cartographic view of culture as “sedimented and layered, a fold of time and materiality where the past might be suddenly discovered anew, and the new technologies grow obsolete increasingly fast” (Parikka 2012, 3). Since this issue has focused on geospaces and fictional worlds, it is important to highlight that the topic of interstitiality could also be approached from different points of view. One is that of the circulation of books and cultural transfer: just like people, literary texts travel within and across borders, and these moments of exchange and contact have had a formative impact on the development of cultural history. One could think of Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever’s theorisation of the Channel as a transnational literary zone, an interstitial space where complex processes of rewriting, sharing, policing, translating, or otherwise influencing take place, thus complicating seemingly clear-cut understandings of national literary traditions and their genesis (Cohen and Dever 2002; see Sapiro 2014 and Espagne 2013). Furthermore, the field of spatial literary studies is marked by the possibilities of reconstructing space through GIS and digital (web-based), “augmented” maps, whose spatial narratives give users an enriched experience of the real world (e.g. Bodenhamer and Corrigan 2015; Segal and Vannieuwenhuyze 2020).

As a twenty-first-century, neo-Victorian novel, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries stands at a remove from the experience that contemporary artists transmogrified into their works. As scholars in the field of neo-Victorian Studies have shown, however, neo-Victorian texts may change the lens through which we see the nineteenth century (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 2014; Heilmann and Llewellyn 2014). In its imaginative and detailed recreation of nineteenth-century New Zealand, a novel like Catton’s might be considered as a deep map, an attempt “to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history, and everything you might ever want to say about a place” (Pearson and Shanks 2001, 64–65). The creation of such a deep map is a practice with nineteenth-century antecedents, as Patricia Smyth’s article suggests. Although the novel lacks a haptic and ocular dimension, the readers of The Luminaries (and, indeed, the viewers of the BBC adaptation) find themselves in a position not unlike that of the spectator immersed in recreations of Old London that Smyth discusses: the novel, too, can be considered as a kind of “dream geography” that invites comparisons between the present moment and the historical past, and it is these comparisons that the various insights in the present issue allow us to interrogate.²

The Victorians’ fascination with spiritualism – which extended to Australia and New Zealand, as John Andrick shows in his reading of a story about an “electroscope” that could look across distances as vast as the Tasman sea – provides us with one explanation to unravel the mystery at the heart of Catton’s novel, whose plot is shaped by an astrological pattern. As the character chart at the beginning of the novel details, the seven characters central to the plot each represent a planet and a related trait (Walter Moody, for instance, represents Mercury; his dominant characteristic is that of reason), while the surrounding characters – the twelve men who have gathered in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel – correspond to the different constellations of the zodiac as well as to a specific house in the novel (Harald Nilssen, for instance, is related to his office on Gibson Quay). Like atoms in Blackwell’s thinking, these different characters combine and interact in different patterns, with the planetary characters in the centre and the stellar ones in the periphery; as Walter Moody reflects, after a ghostly encounter on board the ship that takes him to Hokitika, the Godspeed, “[t]here was this large world of rolling time and shifting space, and that small, stilled world of horror and unease; they fit inside each other, a sphere within a sphere” (23). The most important collision – the crux of the plot – is that between Emery Staines and Anna Wetherell. Both arrive in New Zealand on 27 April 1865; having briefly met on deck, they lose sight of one another upon landing at Dunedin and are detained by the novel’s two antagonists: Francis Carver, a ruthless smuggler, and Lydia Wells, née Greenway, owner and operator of a brothel. When, after many months, Staines and Wetherell meet again in Hokitika and they spend the night together on 14 January 1866, a kind of supernatural entanglement takes place: everything that Anna consumes or receives – air, food, but also a bullet – is transferred to Staines, and vice versa. An explanation of this supernatural event is offered at the end of the novel. As a sideline to her main work, Lydia Greenway Wells spends her afternoons in a hotel reading the fortunes of diggers and travellers newly arrived; drawing the chart of Emery Staines, and, back home, that of Anna Wetherell, she discovers that they “have an astral soul-mate, whose path through life perfectly mirrors [their] own” (716). This connection explains why Anna Wetherell’s self-inflicted gun-shot leaves no trace, or why, as one character perceives, she smells of the ship crate in which Emery Staines got caught during an opium-induced stupor, “[t]hat tarred ropy smell, the dusty damp of bleached teak, oiled sailcloth, candle wax” (154). That it is Lydia Wells who should offer this explanation may come as a surprise, given that earlier in the novel she organised a séance that, so the reader presumes, is a sham: once “the corners of the room [have] vanished internally into black” (511), she attempts to communicate with the spirit of Emery Staines and begins to suffer paroxysms until, “in a voice that did not belong to her” (512), she directs herself, in Cantonese, to one of the Chinese men present, Sook Yongsheng, reminding him of his vow to revenge himself on Francis Carver (who swindled Sook’s father and abandoned Sook in Sydney). After this occurrence, she pitches sideways onto the floor, the lamp tips over, and the entire surface of the elliptical table bursts into flame (a trick that is made possible by means of a thread that connects her dress to the lamp and of coating the table in paraffin oil). The séance fails; Lydia Wells does not make any kind of communion with the realm of the dead. However, if we look at this séance as disrupted by a form of “interference” (516), as one of the diggers says, as if wires have been crossed, then even this event confirms that there is an interstitial connection between earth and sky.

The theme of interference also resurfaces in another interstitial space, that of the office. For a novel that various critics have described as “Dickensian” in its characterisation and its convoluted plot (Blake 2021; Roorbach 2013), it is not surprising that the crisis that Jenkin-Smith identifies – those moments when the interference of paperwork upsets the office’s task of mediating between centralisation and atomisation – has a place in The Luminaries. When Francis Carver – impersonating Crosbie Wells, whose birth certificate he has appropriated – wants to place an advertisement as Crosbie Francis Wells, Benjamin Löwenthal (editor, writer, publisher, and printer of the West Coast Times) decides to excise the middle name in order to avoid a “widow” (a single word marooned at the top of the next column), thus upsetting Carver’s scheme but throwing up yet another hurdle for the characters that aim to uncover it (204–205). Another important document is the record that Charlie Frost has to write when the gold found in Crosbie Wells’s cottage is smelted (185). Noticing that each square has the word “Aurora” on its bottom, his record is a vital clue for retracing the gold’s journey. The most mysterious bit of paper is undoubtedly the deed that the chaplain Cowell Devlin finds in Crosbie Wells’s cottage and that he hides between the pages of his bible. “[T]rapped between the grating and the bottom” (90) of the stove’s ash drawer, Devlin finds a note in which Emery Staines promises to pay Anna Wetherell two thousand pounds. Witnessed by Crosbie Wells, with “only a space” (91) next to Emery Staines’s name, the deed is invalid. When Devlin finally shows the note to its beneficiary, however, Anna Wetherell (who has never learned to write) signs it in Staines’s name. While at first sight this is a forgery, the signature is accurate: the supernatural fusion between the two “luminaries” ensures that it is indeed Staines who signs, acting through the body of his “soul-mate”. Although The Luminaries does not revel in documentary proliferation in the way that Dickens’s novels do, it is significant that its plot relies on a similar preoccupation with obstructive mediation, thus confounding the totalising vision that “official” bureaucracy is supposed to aggregate. Paradoxically, the man who finally unravels these paper trails, and who can present a redacted version in front of the law, the lawyer-turned-digger Walter Moody, has himself travelled to Hokitika under a false name (30, 354, 505).

The novel’s interest in the simultaneity of different worlds, and in the kinds of interference that upset their smooth coexistence, has a temporal dimension. As in many Victorian and neo-Victorian works, characters are haunted by the ghosts of the past, and these ghosts are not averse to taking on a bodily form. Ioannidou’s analysis of non-places helps us better understand the spatial aspects of this “hauntology” through two recurring non-places in which characters can reinvent themselves. The first example of such a non-place is the hotel, which fits Augé’s definition of a place “occupied by individuals in states of transit that preclude the formation of attachments” (Augé 1995, 77). As Ioannidou argues, this kind of space may still have potential for subjectification insofar as it allows people to work through the memories and traumas of the past and to envision alternative possibilities for themselves. When Walter Moody enters the Crown Hotel, freshly arrived and still reeling from his encounter with what he assumes must have been a revenant, he feels that the hotel “had the appearance of a place rebuilt from memory after a great passage of time” (5). “The bareness” of his room is strangely reassuring, lending “the place a spectral, unfinished quality that might have been disquieting, had the prospect through the buckled glass been of a different street and a different age” (22). Even on reaching the shore, he feels unburdened, as if the “mist and driving rain” are “a kind of cloth, spectral” that “screen him from the shapes of his own recent past” (20). A second and less obvious example of a non-place is the gaol-house. At the time of the story, 1866, the Hokitika gaol-house is no more than an annex to the police camp. Its walls are not made from stone but from textile, a “patterned calico that had been stretched tight and tacked to the building’s frame, and when the timber creaked in the wind […] the walls all quivered and rippled, like the surface of a pool – so that, watching them tremble, one could not help but call to mind that two-inch space between the doubled cloth, that dead space around the framing, full of dust, and patterned by the moving shadows of the bodies in the room beyond” (101).

Not only does Catton’s description of these interstitial walls neatly fit in with the novel’s concern with the supernatural, it also recalls Ingold’s distinction, following Gottfried Semper and Vilém Flusser, between “two kinds of wall (corresponding to Wand and Mauer): the screen wall, generally of woven fabric, and the solid wall, hewn from rock or built up from heavy components” (2015, 29). The former is tied to the ground, creating a home that is that of the tent, a home in which different life-lines are knotted together. Indeed, the gaol is an eerie, ghostly space, which nevertheless allows for the possibility for Anna Wetherell’s rebirth. After the merger of her soul with that of Emery Staines, she collapses and is taken to the gaol on the charge of disorderly behaviour; she is rescued through the aid of two good spirits, the magistrate Aubert Gascoigne and the chaplain Cowell Devlin. When we meet her again in the rooms of the Gridiron Hotel in Revell street, she is, quite literally, changed and transformed. These acts of kindness go against the intentions of the gaol-house governor, George Shepard, an iron-willed martinet who, in spite of his name, passes judgement on the basis of first appearances, firmly believing that Anne Wetherell – a fallen woman, an addict, and, from all accounts, a suicide – is beyond redemption. Given these predispositions, it makes sense that Shepard goes to serious lengths to build a new gaol-house, even blackmailing the merchant Harald Nilssen. This new gaol-house will be situated on the Seaview Terrace, a location that suggest neither the idea of place or a non-place, but mere empty space: “The shoreline was not visible from the terrace, owing to the steepness of the cliff below – the edge gave out abruptly into a scree of loose stones and clay – and the blankness of this vista, trisected into earth, water, air, with no trees to interrupt the level, and no contour to soften the shape of the land, alarmed one’s senses to the point that one was soon compelled to turn one’s back upon the ocean altogether” (304). The anxiety that this location inspires is echoed in the solid walls that the convicts are constructing, and from which no escape into an alternative future will be possible; as the narrator tells us, “the house of self-undoing is a prison built by prisoners, airless, doorless, and mortared from within” (531).

The hotel and the gaol-house, then, allow characters to reinvent themselves. This act of reinvention is, of course, tied to the novel’s colonial setting: most of the immigrant characters have travelled to New Zealand to escape their own pasts and begin a new life. These acts of reinvention circle around the nature of gold. The novel’s representation of the transformation of the rural landscape reveals ways in which land redistribution – as mediated by particular interfaces – at once augments people’s knowledge of and estranges them from the land. This effect is felt most keenly by Te Rau Tauwhare, who has a deep and intimate understanding of the land of his iwi, “the entire western coast of the South Island, from the steep-sided fjords in the south to the palms and stony beaches in the far north” (98). Six years before the novel’s beginning, “the Crown had purchased this extensive tract of land for a sum of three hundred pounds” (98), carving the land up into artificial units and enabling diggers to purchase “a prospector’s licence at a pound apiece, and land at a price of ten shillings per acre” (99). Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the concept of a highly detailed map – which occurs only twice – is associated with people beyond the pale of “civilisation”: Crosbie Wells, who has deliberately settled on border of the small strip of land that the Poutini ngai Tahu retained and who says he can “sketch the place” and draw “a bloody map” (762) to describe the site where he struck gold, and Te Rau Tauwhare, who “could picture the entire length of [the West Coast] as though upon a richly illustrated map” (370). Te Rau Tauwhare even embodies the notion of a map: his face is tattooed in a way that reminds one character “of the wind patterns on a map,” with “large swirls” and “deep whorls” (95). These various references suggest a map that is internalised, intuitive, and personal – a far cry from the colonial and scientific maps produced by European explorers, but not unlike Barbara Hilliam’s beautifully inaccurate, evocative sketch of Hokitika and its surroundings, which appears at the beginning of the novel.

The novel does, however, draw the reader’s attention to a different kind of interface that mediates the relation between people and the land. Using an image that adumbrates tropes surrounding the stock market exchange, Catton suggests that the bank provides an interface that facilitates this act of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation: above the bankers’ cubicles, which are situated against the wall, hangs “a gilt-framed chalkboard, upon which [is] written that week’s yield in ore, with subtotals for each district, and a grand total for the Hokitika region as a whole. Whenever a sum of raw gold was banked or bought, the chalked numbers were erased and then totalled anew – typically to a murmur of appreciation from the men in the room” (106). The function of this board is analogous to that of the tithe notice as discussed by Delphine Gatehouse: it is the land’s data double, mediating between the community and the riches that the land holds. While the resonance between the tithe notice and the goldfield announcements is perhaps no more than a distant echo, one may even wonder if Catton had Silas Marner in mind when writing her novel, since the novels feature two highly similar characters, Molly Farren and Anna Wetherell: both are addicted to opium, both suffer abuse (Farren from her husband, who refuses to acknowledge her; Wetherell from her procurers, to whom she is indebted), and both lose their children whilst on the road in between different places (Farren wants to confront her husband on New Year’s Eve but freezes to death in the snow, leaving her daughter a foundling; Wetherell loses her unborn child when she is accosted by Francis Carver [818]). Crosbie Wells, too, may be said to have an antecedent in Eliot’s novel: betrayed by his wife, having lost his fortune, settling down at the outermost edge of the Crown settlement, hoarding a new-found treasure, he shares many characteristics with Silas Marner, who, cast out from the community of Lantern Yard through the offices of his best friend, settles down at the unenclosed piece of land adjacent to Raveloe where, through weaving, he reassembles his fortune. The causes behind Marner’s and Wells’s estrangement from the land are different in kind – the tithe system for the former, gold-mining for the latter – but similar in nature, insofar as both rely on a technological interface that mediates between people and the land.

The Luminaries supplements its engagement with the interstitial nature of the interfaces by which colonial land is managed with the depiction of colonial spaces on the edges of this landscape. The tangled nature of colonial relations and the sense of unbelonging that they create form an important part of The Luminaries, which explores the issue of the contact zone from an antipodean point of view. While most of the characters in Catton’s book are British settlers who have come to New Zealand to improve their fortunes, the novel also includes subaltern perspectives through the inclusion of Sook Yongsheng (a “hatter” or solitary digger, who was forced to emigrate when his father unknowingly colluded in the opium trade), Quee Long (a digger indentured to the unprofitable Aurora goldmine), and the aforementioned Te Rau Tauwhare (a Māori greenstone hunter, whose tribe has been dispossessed of most of its land and who now works as guide). While Quee Long’s condition is closest to that of the plantation slave, Sook Yongsheng’s story is the more tragic one, as the novel’s villain, Francis Carver, first swindles his father, and later abandons him in Sydney. There is some poetic justice: after Francis Carver is eventually exposed, he is killed by Te Rau Tauwhare (who told Carver that his best friend, Crosbie Wells, could be found in the Arahura valley, not knowing that Carver had a score to settle), who smashes Carver’s head in with club made from pounamu. As this synopsis suggests, the dynamic of colonial relationships in Catton’s novel is less clear-cut than those in Phillips’s novels, as discussed by Giovanna Buonanno. Hokitika’s very location, “between the jungle and surf” (6), “a narrow corridor of flat land between the coastline and the sudden alps” (19), may be said to mirror that of colonial settlements in Africa, but there is no binary dyad. Indeed, the Chinese characters’ ship journeys receive short shrift: “Ah Sook remembered [his journey on the Palmerston] only as a static, nauseated haze, slowly brightening, like the onset of a migraine” (448).

The trope of the coffin-ship does appear in a seminal event, that is, the last journey of the Godspeed, a barque that runs between different coastal towns in New Zealand as well as across the Tasman sea to Australia. Travelling from Port Chalmers to the West coast, the ship is caught in a storm a couple of hours before it is to land at Hokitika, and Walter Moody wants to return his suitcase to the hold. Hearing “a furious knocking, loud enough to be heard over all the other din” (355), he pries the lid from a shipping crate and discovers, to his horror, a man whose chest, once Moody has loosed his collar, “began to bleed […] bubbling, as if from a pump” (358). Shaken by what he considers an apparition, a ghost, Moody swarms back up. As the novel unfolds, it becomes apparent that this ghost is Emery Staines, who disappeared thirteen days ago. The novel gives little detail about Staines’s background, other than that he enjoyed a sheltered, bookish, and privileged upbringing, but his presence in a casket in the hold of a smuggler’s ship suggests that he, too, might be seen as having a more complex colonial background, in spite of his white skin. Given this subtext, it is quite fitting that in the television adaptation the role of Emery Staines is played by a British actor with an immigrant background, Himesh Patel. Importantly, the Godspeed never makes it to Hokitika: the weather is too rough and too many crafts have run aground on the treacherous sand bar in the bay to run the risk of docking the ship. All passengers are ferried across to the shore, and, later at night, the ship founders. Here, too, the novel depicts some kind of poetic justice: “the shifty movement of the Hokitika bar owed, in the large part, to the silt and gravel that was carried down the Hokitika River from the claims upstream, and now clotted the river mouth, invisibly, in ever-changing patterns that answered only to the tide” (376). As such, The Luminaries uses a shipwreck narrative to makes us think about humans’ impact on seas, which are interstitial by nature, their “heave and swell, their levels rising and falling with the tides” (Ingold 2015, 40; on shipwreck narratives, see Mentz 2015).

Hokitika’s status as a colonial settlement might seem to debar it from a comparison with London, yet such a comparison is not as far-fetched as it may seem. As Andrew McCann has argued, in the works of colonial writers in the antipodes, such as Marcus Clarke, “an exaggerated, sometimes quite fantastic sense of metropolitan continuity powerfully suggests the colonial dilemma: the colony reproduces the metropolis, but in the urgency of its desire to do so, it also reveals its own distance from it” (McCann 2004, 8). Interstitial elements in the urban landscape, like public transport, illustrate as much. One scene is particularly emblematic: the young banker Charlie Frost is forced to travel to Kaniere, where the goldfields are situated, and since the coach has already departed, the most comfortable way of doing so is by means of a “ferry service,” although this is perhaps too strong a name for a “painted dinghy” that is in fact “a lifeboat, salvaged from a wreck” (206). Travelling upstream, he has “his first impression of Hokitika’s environs at large” (209) and is “appalled” by the primitive atmosphere, from the long-wracking cough of a man building a fire, a “Hotel” that is no more than a tent, and a man relieving himself in the river. Even more troubling is his inability to conceal his feelings: a pair of diggers “evidently found Frost’s horror very amusing; one of them tipped his hat, and the other gave a mock salute” (210). Taking the ferry, in other words, transforms Frost’s mental cartography. The ferry’s function is thus not all that different from the London tram, and the gentle comedy that Catton engages in is not unlike that found in the works of Arthur Morrison. The very fact that the river is an exemplary transitory place only amplifies the interstitial nature of the setting: “the ferryman joins his life with the river, submitting in every crossing to its flow: as when he pushes his boat out into the stream, angling the boat to the current, and in answering to it with his oars” (Ingold 151). Perhaps the implicit comparison between tram and ferry gains in critical purchase if we consider the fact that in late 1866, a few months after the story of The Luminaries ends, a tramway was completed that, in 1867, would take travellers from the Hokitika wharf to the Terminus Hotel in Kaniere (Hokitika 2016). It almost seems as if Catton consciously decided to set the novel just before this more modern, industrial equivalent would appear. If one follows this speculative train of thought, one might surmise that, on the one hand, she thus enhances the “Romantic” nature of the setting while, on the other hand, she is also highlighting the continuity between Romantic alienation and the estrangement wrought by colonial capitalism.

Capitalism also informs the way in which the novel depicts another particular interstitial space in the urban landscape. The Luminaries gestures towards the glazed window narrative in two different ways. On the one hand, the novel frequently situates Anna Wetherell in this kind of space, as she watches “[f]rom her high window on the upper floor of the Gridiron Hotel” how “the diggers struggle up and down Revell-street” (231). Knowing that they are being watched, and hoping to impress her, other characters adjust their behaviour; the hotelier Edgar Clinch, for instance, who loves drawing his favourite guest’s bath, hopes “that Anna was looking down upon him from her window on the floor above” as he pours “the spent bathwater, clouded with dirt, into the gutter at the edge of the road” (248). Even though Anna Wetherell’s confidence grows as the novel progresses, her condition is precarious, and the superior vantage point that she occupies does come with the command and confidence that it should inspire. Rather, her association with windows points to her status as an object of desire. The novel thus plays with another trope of the glazed window, in which “the invisible wall of solid crystal” distances “consumers from the goods they desire while simultaneously heightening that desire” (Miller 1995, 5). The function of the window as a screen that stimulates desire is also in evidence when Sook Yongsheng finally seizes the chance to kill Francis Carver: “he saw through the window that Carver had his back to the door and was shuffling through the papers on the secretary” (611). On the other hand, it could be argued that the novel’s style is suffused with the kind of perspective that the glazed window was supposed to provide, even though that perspective manifests itself not in the context of glazed windows but, rather, nearly every encounter that the characters participate in. The novels’ characters, that is, are all marked by a “high level of confidence in their ability to read the deeper meanings of urban life,” in Ferguson’s words, “out of the surface-level details provided by the visual sense alone.” Catton revels in long passages of free indirect speech in which characters ruminate on their interlocutors’ qualities, qualities that match their planetary or stellar sign, thus providing a stylistic equivalent for the dynamic relationship between inside and outside that a glass window may create.

Eleanor Catton’s treatment of space and place, then, is clearly attuned to the nineteenth-century experience of interstitial spaces, and alludes to particular Victorian practices and stories. Some of the characteristics and functions of such spaces, too, are markedly present: interstitial spaces in The Luminaries tend to give access to the past or to parts of the world beyond the characters’ immediate ken, thus prompting them to question their sense of self as well as their relationships with others. In other words, interstitial sites often serve as settings for moments of interference, moments when the coexistence between different times or worlds is upset, as if a stitch is dropped and the smooth surface of the present is punctured. At the same time, the interstitial spaces of The Luminaries also differ from those discussed in this issue in that they tend to be in a rough, unsophisticated state: instead of a tram, a dingy, instead of a built asylum, a tent, instead of an accurate map, a tattoo. In space as much as in time, the hotels and offices that Catton depicts are a far cry from contemporary experiments with corridors: it is almost as if the novel makes a conscious effort to depict sites of interstitiality before they were transformed by the advent of modern technology. As such, twenty-first-century readers are asked to think about their own relation to the world just before its passage into modernity, in the same way that the spectacles of Old London prompted Victorian viewers to reflect on the materiality and textures of their city. A more contemporary way of describing this endeavour would be to see it as an attempt to redress the lost geographical perspectives of the era: “just as in astronomy, the addition of a geographical parallax does not simply add a missing dimension or introduce a new ‘factor’ in an already received history” but it “displaces the object of study and thereby transforms it” (Smith 2003, 9). This interpretation may explain the novel’s peculiar construction: it creates a parallax zone not only by juxtaposing the interstitial spaces of nineteenth-century New Zealand with those of nineteenth-century England, but it also does so by constructing a plot that mimics the movement of heavenly bodies themselves. As an example of a work that fits in with the “planetary turn” (Elias and Moraru, 2015), Catton’s novel asks us to reconsider the material environment from a relational point of view. The topic of interstitiality thus seems to be a productive way of giving the spatial turn a planetary twist.

Acknowledgments

This special issue would have remained a blank page without the assistance that we received from Birte Christ, Talin de Jeu, Esther Folkersma, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Ghidy de Koning, László Munteán, Lilla Papp, Marle Zwietering, and the various anonymous reviewers. We gratefully acknowledge the vital role played by our co-editor, Joanna Hofer-Robinson.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frederik Van Dam

Frederik Van Dam is Assistant Professor of European Literature at Radboud University, Nijmegen (NL). His scholarship is situated at the intersection of intellectual history and literary criticism, with a focus on the long nineteenth century. He is the author of Anthony Trollope’s Late Style: Victorian Liberalism and Literary Form (2016) and the main editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope (2019). His articles have appeared in journals such as English Literary History, Studies in Romanticism, and Partial Answers. He is currently developing a project that revolves around the relationship between literature and cultural diplomacy. In 2015, he interviewed the éminence grise J. Hillis Miller for a documentary, The Pleasure of that Obstinacy.

Chris Louttit

Chris Louttit is Assistant Professor of English Literature and a member of the Radboud Institute for Culture & History (RICH) at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on the mid-Victorian novel and its multimedia afterlives, and he has published a number of articles on these topics in venues such as Adaptation, Book History, Gothic Studies, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Philological Quarterly, and Women’s Writing. He has co-edited special issues of Nineteenth-Century Prose (on Dickens’s non-fiction) and Neo-Victorian Studies (on screen Victoriana), and other forthcoming publications include a chapter on the uses of Dickens in the work of a New Yorker cartoonist in Adaptation and Illustration: Towards a Front-Line Approach (2024). He is currently Editor-in-Chief of English Studies, serves as the President of the Dickens Society, and is at work on a study of the Victorian Bohemian novel.

Notes

1. The corridor also plays a role in other periods and art movements; for an illuminating account of the corridor in American modernism, which looks at the corridor as a structure, or even a programme, for the channelling of information, see Marshall (2013).

2. Barbara Franchi (2018) suggests that the novel represents the quest for a postcolonial and feminine modernity through the trope of the woman traveller.