Born in the naval town of Portsmouth, Dickens was 3 years old when his family moved to London in 1815. After nearly two years
residing in Norfolk Street (now Cleveland Street, w1), just north of Oxford Street, the family moved out of London to Chatham
in Kent, returning five years later to the new housing development in Camden Town. While the family’s movements were certainly
exacerbated by John Dickens’s shiftlessness, his employment as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office was also subject to the vagaries
of historical circumstance. It was the ending of hostilities at the close of the Napoleonic wars that led to his recall from
Portsmouth to London.
1 The end of the wars also marked the beginning of a distinctive period of demographic change in Britain. Over the next generation,
during which Dickens came to maturity, many factors would reshape the demographic map. These included the development of new
transportation networks (roads, railways and steam ships), industrialisation, a shift of political interest from country to
city linked to parliamentary reform, a boom in foreign emigration, and the rapid expansion of towns and cities. Dickens’s
works both reflected and reflected on the changing national map and told influential stories about a society that was shaped
by the movement of people to and within cities.
The Dickens family’s two-stage move from coastal towns to London should be considered as part of the large-scale gravitation
of people towards the city. Dickens’s lifetime was remarkable for the expansion of conurbations, of which the growth of London
was the most spectacular. By 1851 over half of the population of Britain lived in towns, and ten cities had populations that
exceeded 1 million.
2 London’s population was 2,363,00, that is, more than 13 per cent of the total population of England and Wales.
3 Demographic historians remind us that much of the expansion of cities was due to ‘natural growth’ (rise in fertility set
against falling mortality rates), yet a sizeable proportion is also explained by the movement of people from country or small
town to city. This movement
brought about an attendant depopulation of rural areas. David Feldman notes that 40 per cent of urban expansion was due to
movement from country areas, and that rural depopulation was not checked until the beginning of the twentieth century. He
writes that in the period 1841 to 1881, ‘London received a net increase of 1.1 million migrants’, while the ‘eight largest
northern towns received, on balance, 800,000’ and ‘colliery districts and the smaller textile and industrial towns [such as
Preston] … an additional 600,000’.
4
Dombey and Son presents a compelling account of migration to London, in which the city is depicted as a hungry monster consuming as fodder
the incoming population:
Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always … in one direction – always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase
or other of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the
hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death, – they passed on to the monster, roaring
in the distance, and were lost. (ch. 33)
Although Dickens does not always see the citywards movement of people in such unremittingly negative terms, his works almost
exclusively document inward flows of people and often convey a sense of the mesmeric appeal that London holds for those outside
its limits. By contrast, he gives relatively little attention to northern industrial towns. Exceptionally, Hard Times is set in Coketown, modelled on Preston, to where the allegedly self-made Josiah Bounderby claims falsely to have migrated
from an impoverished childhood in a London slum, when in fact he grew up comfortably in the country.
Literary works had long mythologised the movement of people from country to town as a moral problem. Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted
Village’ (1770) and Wordsworth’s ‘Michael’ (1800) present two elegiac accounts of rural depopulation that reflect the loosened
hold of rural society in Britain brought about by new forms of capital and the enclosure of common land. Literary responses
to demographic change are intertwined with conventions of pastoral poetry that stretch back to classical traditions, notably
Virgil’s
Eclogues, in which the country is seen as place of innocent pleasure.
5 Nineteenth-century literary representations intensify contrasts between country and city. They associate rural locations
with a traditional world of wholesome, face-to-face social relations, and urban places with states of corruption and alienation
connected with capitalism, technological innovation and industrial development.
In Dickens these conventional associations are frequently expressed in terms of health and sickness. An early example in ‘Our
Next-Door Neighbour’ in Sketches by Boz is the case of a widow and her son who have moved from country to city through poverty and shame. The boy is dying of a disease
– likely consumption – that is, if not caused, certainly exacerbated by the privations of their new environment. As he lies
on his deathbed, his mother expresses the wish that they should return to the country, ‘so that he might get well’, a sentiment
echoed in the boy’s dying gasps: ‘bury me in the open fields – anywhere but in these dreadful streets’. Similarly Nell, in
The Old Curiosity Shop, while fleeing from London with her grandfather, contracts consumption when they wander unsuspectingly into the new industrial
towns, depicted as nightmarish death-traps. These associations of country and city translate into a moral topography that
is seen most clearly in Oliver Twist where a sharp distinction is drawn between the crime-ridden, overcrowded and diseased Jacob’s Island in London’s impoverished
East End, and the countrified peacefulness of the Maylies’ home in the far western suburbs. Dickens draws on a pattern of
imagery established in eighteenth-century critiques of commercial society when he contrasts the morally pure and rurally located
Rose with the artificial urban prostitute Nancy.
Many of the problems of urban life on which Dickens focusses are caused by the accumulation of people in an environment that
lacked the infrastructure to accommodate them. Although Dickens invariably blames government and officials for poor housing
conditions, overcrowding in the slums and rookeries of London, in part caused by incoming migrants, creates the conditions
for crime, disease and demoralisation. Thus while he treats slum inhabitants sympathetically, he also associates them with
the dangers linked to promiscuous mixing and uncontrolled body contact, both of which lead to contagion, crime and sexual
incontinence. In ‘Gin-Shops’ in Sketches by Boz, he describes the rookeries ‘in and near Drury-lane, Holborn, St Giles’s, Covent Garden and Clare-market’ in which there
is ‘more of filth and squalid misery … than in any part of this mighty city’: ‘wretched houses with broken windows patched
with rags and paper; every room let out to a different family and in many instances to two or even three’. His description
highlights the variety of people crammed together in a confined place, ‘lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling,
fighting and swearing’.
This early representation emphasises the squalid conditions of the slums, while subsequent accounts stress their demoralising
effects, associating overcrowding with death and disease. In this, Dickens follows public
health reformers, including the Poor Law commissioner Edwin Chadwick (1800–90), whose influential official reports emphasised
the risks to health caused by overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions. These concerns came to a head in the cholera
epidemic of the late 1840s. Dickens’s works from this time describe slums as curiously empty places, rendered vacant through
fatal disease. In
Dombey and Son we are invited to ‘follow the good clergyman or doctor’ into the slum, and witness ‘millions of immortal creatures [who]
have no other world on earth’, a multitudinous crowd rendered ghostly and unreal by the pestilential environment (ch. 47).
Likewise, in
Bleak House the notorious rookery Tom-All-Alone’s – the resort of the itinerant Jo, the crossing sweeper, and the migrant labourers the
brickmakers, who have tramped from St Albans in search of work – seems eerily vacant, its inhabitants dehumanised as ‘maggots’:
‘a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers,
where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint’ (ch.
16). The presentation of slum dwellers as at best sickly automata and at worst vermin intensifies the sense that these are
zones paradoxically disgorged of human life.
Dickens does not, however, express solely negative views of urban migration. More usually a character’s move to London is
narrated as an adventurous, if daunting or dangerous, thing to do. Dickens’s protagonists famously move to London from the
country – for example Oliver (from a town 75 miles north of London [ch. 8]), David Copperfield (from Blunderstone in Suffolk)
and Pip (from Kent). Although in each case the move is fraught with hazards, it is also charged with opportunity and excitement
– not to mention narrative intrigue. There are frequent references to Dick Whittington, whose mythic journey to London brought
wealth and power, most explicitly emulated by Walter (in Dombey and Son) and Dick Swiveller (in The Old Curiosity Shop).
Historical evidence suggests that the distance travelled by Dickens’s protagonists is further than typical urban migrants
of this period. The largest group of migrants (42 per cent according to the 1851 census statistics) travelled less than 50
km (31 miles). Michael Anderson’s study of census returns shows that in ten randomly selected London districts, 43 per cent
of residents were born outside London, of whom 10 per cent came from a distance of 50 to 100 km, 28 per cent from over 100
km and 10 per cent from Ireland. Anderson’s evidence reveals that the dominant experience of migration was one of assimilation.
6 Dickens’s novels, with their narrative emphasis on coincidence and the establishment of networks
of indebtedness and family and friendly associations, reflect this. He describes the city as a net that draws people inwards.
Regional, national and ethnic differences persist, as exemplified by the French émigré family the Manettes, Charles Darnay
or the Welsh maid Miss Pross and her ne’er-do-well brother Samuel, in
A Tale of Two Cities, yet these tend to be woven into the general fabric of London life. London is a mixing place where different types can be
tolerated if not absorbed. In
The Mystery of Edwin Drood, for instance, London is felt to be a better environment for Neville Landless, whose exotic appearance and undiplomatic behaviour
had turned him into a scapegoat in provincial Cloisterham.
In Anderson’s view, only the Irish were a clearly demarcated and disadvantaged group in terms of employment and housing. Between
1841 and 1861 in-migration from Ireland to England and Wales rose from 290,000 per year to 600,000, with most gravitating
towards urban areas.
7 References to Irish immigrants, particularly in overcrowded slums, are scattered throughout the works. Dickens’s characterisations
of the Irish as, for instance, servants (
Bleak House, ch. 43), labourers (‘Gin Shops’,
Sketches by Boz), pugnacious drunks (
Oliver Twist, ch. 8) and cadgers (‘On Duty with Inspector Field’, 363) endorse widely held views in this period. In describing a nocturnal
visit to the lodging houses of London in ‘On Duty with Inspector Field’ (
Household Words, 14 June 1851), Dickens gropes his way into a room full of Irish families teeming with children. ‘Does anybody lie there?
Me, Sir, Irish me, a widder with six children. And yonder? Me, Sir, Irish me, with me wife and eight poor babes’ (362–3).
He documents, in passing, four families with a total of twenty-three children, intimating the Malthusian view that the problem
with the Irish is reproductive profusion.
Historians of migration today emphasise the complexity of patterns of migration in the nineteenth century, and the extent
to which people, over a lifetime, typically made multiple moves in various directions. Many relocations would have been from
smaller to larger conurbations and sometimes to a settler colony abroad, but many would also have been within the same town
or city, and some even would have been from city to smaller town or rural area.
8 Such mobility was usually triggered by a need for employment or housing. Dickens’s own childhood experience of migration
– by the time he was age 12, he had lived at eight different addresses – is perhaps closer to the norm than might be assumed.
His ever-increasing literary success brought residential stability (four main addresses between 1837 and his death in 1870)
– yet his almost pathological feelings of restlessness persisted and were manifest in periods of
foreign travel (in, for example, America, Italy, Switzerland and France), in his self-styled nomadic occupation of his ‘gypsy
tent’, his office in Wellington Street (see his letter to Spencer Lyttelton of 20 May 1851 [
Letters,
VI, 393]), and in his frequently narrated habits of night walking (see, for example, ‘Shy Neighbourhoods’,
All the Year Round, 26 May 1860, and ‘Night Walks’,
All the Year Round, 21 July 1860). While at times his novels suggest that migration is a one-way road to death, more often they present a world
in which characters are always on the move – by carriage, train, steamship and frequently on foot – and they evoke an edgy
environment of constant movement, similar to the world he inhabited himself. The comings and goings between Wiltshire and
London in
Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, or between London and Leicestershire in
Bleak House, or London and Cloisterham (Rochester) in
Edwin Drood, demonstrate that in Dickens’s world travel tends to be ongoing and stasis never achieved. Travellers abroad come back to
Britain (Woodcourt in
Bleak House, Harmon in
Our Mutual Friend), and even Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley return from their ill-fated experiment in foreign emigration in
Martin Chuzzlewit. Indeed, the negative view of foreign emigration presented in
Martin Chuzzlewit, and endorsed in
Bleak House in Mrs Jellyby’s scheme, is expressed through images of enervation – the febrile swamps of America or the inky paralysis
of Caddy Jellyby’s letters – which contrast with the nimble communication networks of British national life. The slums of
London (in
Bleak House and elsewhere) and the American swamps (described in
Martin Chuzzlewit) take on common exotic characteristics, and city slums seem to be at an exaggerated distance from middle-class English life,
penetrated only by characters depicted as explorers of foreign terrain. Dickens’s novels frequently distort the dimensions
of geographical distance, so that it is not always clear how far a character has travelled, or just how that distance should
be measured.
Dickens is alert to the benefits of mobility, although he deplores the enforced movement of people and the various economic
and social forces that evict them from their homes. His novels are full of accounts of displaced people, such as the inhabitants
of Staggs Gardens in
Dombey and Son, victims of the railway development; or the Micawbers in
David Copperfield, who cannot pay the rent; or Betty Higden in
Our Mutual Friend, who runs away to avoid the workhouse. On her journey she is later threatened with being sent to her ‘settlement’, by which
is meant the parish in which she has legal entitlement to poor relief. There are scattered references throughout the novels
to the laws of settlement, which
had been established in the sixteenth century and persisted in a complicated form in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which
regulated the provision of poor relief for most of the Victorian era. Where a person had ‘settlement’ was judged according
to factors including place of birth, occupation and property, and paupers like Betty would systematically be removed to their
‘settlement’ on becoming, or threatening to become, chargeable in another parish. During the 1850s these laws came under particular
scrutiny by reformers, including Dickens, who saw them as both inhumane and an impediment to the free movement of labour.
They had provoked sharp practices on the part of employers and landowners, who forced workers to live in adjoining parishes
so as to avoid the cost of relief should they become unemployed. In a
Household Words article (‘How to Kill Labourers’, 2 April 1853), Henry Morley highlighted the case of the labourer who was forced to live
at such a distance from his place of work, that by the end of his life he had walked ‘eighty-two thousand, three hundred and
sixty-eight miles’ in his daily commute. In
Bleak House, a novel preoccupied with the terms ‘removal’ and ‘settlement’, Dickens explored the paradoxes created by these laws as they
aimed to root people in particular places, yet forced them into unnecessary journeys.
9
Feldman cautions against conflating mobility and migration in the analysis of nineteenth-century population. ‘Migrations’,
he argues, ‘have occurred when people cross boundaries’, and it is this ‘which converts mere mobility into migration’.
10 Yet in Dickens’s works the two activities are difficult to separate. His depictions of urban migrants often carry the negative
associations of involuntary displacement, although elsewhere he associates mobility with energy, adventure and economic advancement,
and celebrates the thrill of moving. He conjures an ideal in which people might move freely within a nation in which there
are no internal boundaries. With that in mind, we might say that Dickens’s preference is for mobility rather than migrancy,
and for a population in constant motion, of which London – the eternally moving city – provides a perfect model for the nation.