Essays

“Smoke […] is the London ivy” (BH p.133)

London-“that great large place!” (OT p.57), is the city where Oliver Twist hopes to find a hiding place and a benevolent person to take him in. It is here where “millions and billions are traded daily” (HM p.15), it is a “jumping-off point and playground” (HM p.15) to others.
Although Job has read Dickens’ novels and evaluates that the city is “nothing like what he had expected” (HM p.61) there are many parallels between the picture of London which the frequently mentioned author (compare HM p.61, 76, 119, 165, 274) paints in Oliver Twist and Bleak House, and the one portrayed in Amanda Craig’s novel Hearts and Minds
When asked for her opinion on the capitol, Bleak Houses protagonists only reply is that “The fog is very dense” (BH p.36) and is backed up by Dickens’ numerous and elaborate descriptions of the “Fog everywhere” (BH p.1). Oliver Twist reckons that he has never seen “a dirtier or more wretched place” (OT p.63). Indeed, Charles Dickens emphasizes the squalor one would encounter in the 19th century London. Hearts and Minds, set in the present, relays a similarly sordid picture of the “decay” (HM p.1) in this city.
The omnipresence and sustainability of filth of the” great (and dirty) city” (BH p.1) is evident to both Amanda Craig and Charles Dickens. Job contemplates the futility of his job, vacuuming cars although “it will always come back, this London dust” (HM p.161), which is also referred to as the “dust of ages” (HM p.1) and “eternal dust of London” (HM p.1). Dickens exaggerates by comparing the landscape to the one found on earth thousands of years ago, so that “it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus” (BH p.1) in the city, where the time is “adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud” (BH p.1). In fact, the air is so saturated with smoke and the windows are “encrusted with dirt” (BH p.4 to a degree at which it becomes hard to look outside. Although “the soot [has] been scoured away during the last century” (HM p.119) the city is “never clean” (HM p.1).
The never-ending circle of life and matter in London is illustrated by the example that “every glass of water from its taps, it is said, has passed six times through the kidneys of another” (HM p.1).
Job was disappointed to discover that “instead of spreading out horizontally the buildings here are vertical” (HM p.61) and pities the little space has. Indeed Dickens’ novels do not hide the fact that London streets are at times “narrow” (OT p.63; BH p.36) and “of high houses” (BH p.36).
The city is characterized by means of personifications in both Hearts and Minds and Bleak House. In the former it is said to have a body, which’s pulse is that of electrical power, since “the city is never wholly dark” (HM p.1). Even at the time of Dickens “most of the shops lighted two hours before their time” (BH p.2) and the lights therefore had a personified “haggard and unwilling” (BH p.29) look.
London seems to offer contradictory olfactory experiences. In contrast to the “fresh air” (BH p.63) praised in a passage of Bleak House, Oliver Twist recounts that “the air was impregnated with filthy odours” (OT p.63) and the preface of Hearts and Minds describes a “sour air […which] is never clean” (HM p.1).
Although they are harder to come by, leafing through Dickens’ novels, one may also come upon more positive depictions of the “wonderful city” (BH p.63) with “the brilliancy of the shops, the great traffic and the crowds of people” (BH p.63). This corresponds with Ian’s comparison of the city centre to “a bowl of jewels” (HM p. 15).
Oliver Twist is right when he contemplates, that there are “ways of living in that vast city which [most people] had no idea of” (OT p.57). While his own life in homelessness and dependence on benefactors is one, the “drunken men and women “(OT p.63) and “ill-looking fellows” (OT p.63) he encounters on the “narrow and muddy” (OT p.63) streets are other examples for ‘untraditional’ lives led in London. These “extraordinary creatures in rags, secretly groping among the swept-out rubbish” (BH p.50) are also observed in Bleak House. Hearts and Minds main aim seems to be the depiction of the different ways of living one can find in one city, although that of a common beggar is not one of them.
Anna is trafficked into prostitution and held captive in a brothel. Her “colleague” Cristina is also a prostitute, but does not see another way to live in the city. Without wanting to analyze their characters in detail, their lifestyles are somewhat comparable to Nancy’s in Oliver Twist.
Job is of the opinion that there are “still men like Bill Sikes with their dogs and their violence. He sees them right outside his home” (HM p. 119). Indeed, while there is no villain quite like him in Hearts and Minds, Dmitri and Sergei are drunk, ruthless and brutal characters that beat prostitutes and don’t appear to be equipped with any morality at all.
The class system and the resulting living conditions in London are visible in all three novels, but only Hearts and Minds emphasizes the role immigrants, especially illegal ones, play. Multicultural London where everyone looks “unalike” (HM p.32), where there are “people with narrow eyes or broad noses”(HM p.32) and some wear headscarves (HM p.26) and others “veils” (p.26). Thus, only this novel creates the feeling that “in London the world comes to you” (HM p.232).
When leaving London, Esther Summerson passes through “suburbs which, of themselves, would have made a pretty large town” (BH p.63). Job has a similar impression as he departs and sees that “the city is bleeding out into another town” and “that had he spent all his life minicabbing, he might never have learnt the name of each street” (HM p.411).
The examined novels prove that while it may be true for other books, Katie’s impression that “the real London would, for her, always be overlaid by its literature, which smoothes away every unpleasantness” (HM p.76) does not apply to the works of Charles Dickens and Amanda Craig. The severity of different issues in the London they describe may vary, but despite the centuries in between their making these novels relate an image of the capitol, that is to an extent still very much unchanged in its essence. This leads to the conclusion that for one, Amanda Craig probably enjoyed the style of Dickens’ novels and that she was also convinced, that the problems in the London of the nineteenth century have not yet been addressed properly, perhaps never will be.
Sources
Amanda Craig: Hearts and Minds. Little Brown, 2009
Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist. Penguin Books, 2002
Charles Dickens: Bleak House. Mandarin Paperback, 1991