Going Astray Dickens and London

Among the numerous books on Dickenss London, Going Astray is unique in combining detailed topography and biography with close textual analysis and theoretically informed critiques of most of the novelists major works. In Jeremy Tamblings intriguing and illuminating synthesis, the London A-Z meets Nietzsche, Benjamin and Derrida. Rick Allen, author of The Moving Pageant: A Literary Sourcebook on London Street-Life, 1700-1914

Dickens wrote so insistently about London its streets, its people, its unknown areas that certain parts of the city are forever haunted by him. Going Astray: Dickens and London looks at the novelists delight in losing the self in the labyrinthine city and maps that interest, onto the compulsion to go astray in writing.

Drawing on all Dickens published writings (including the journalism but concentrating on the novels), Jeremy Tambling considers the authors kaleidoscopic characterisations of London: as prison and as legal centre; as the heart of empire and of traumatic memory; as the place of the uncanny; as an old curiosity shop. His study examines the relations between narrative and the city, and explores how the metropolis encapsulates the problems of modernity for Dickens as well as suggesting the limits of representation.

Combining contemporary literary and cultural theory with historical maps, photographs and contextual detail, Jeremy Tamblings book is an indispensable guide to Dickens, nineteenth- century literature, and the city itself.

Chapter One: Introduction: Dickens and London Chapter Two: Dickens London, Allegory Chapter Three: Mapping the City: Oliver Twist Chapter Four: Tales from Master Humphrey’s Clock Chapter Five: Camden Town: The Railway in Dombey and Son Chapter Six: David Copperfield Chapter Seven: Bleak House: London Before the Law Chapter Eight: London and Taboo: Little Dorrit Chapter Nine: Traumatic London: Great Expectations Chapter Ten: ‘The Scene of My Death’: The River in Our Mutual Friend Chapter Eleven: ‘City Full of Dreams’: The Uncommercial Traveller Chapter Twelve: Dickens’s London: Dickens and Gissing Notes Dickens’s London: A Gazetteer