University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Haney Foundation Series)

In the 1830s and '40s, a new preoccupation with the housing of the poor emerged in British print and visual culture. In response to cholera outbreaks, political unrest, and government initiatives, commentators evinced a keen desire to document housing conditions and agitate for housing reform. Consistently and strikingly, these efforts focused on opening the domestic interiors of the poor to public view. In Open Houses, Barbara Leckie addresses the massive body of print materials dedicated to convincing the reader of the wretchedness, unworthiness, and antipoetic quality of the living conditions of the poor and, accordingly, the urgent need for architectural reform. Putting these exposés into dialogue with the Victorian novel and the architectural idea (the manipulation of architecture and the built environment to produce certain effects), she illustrates the ways in which "looking into" the house animated new models for social critique and fictional form. As housing conditions failed to improve despite the ubiquity of these documentary and fictional exposés, commentators became increasingly skeptical about the capacity of print to generate change. Focusing on Bleak House, Middlemarch, and The Princess Casamassima, Leckie argues that writers offered a persuasive counterargument for the novel's intervention in social debates. Open Houses returns the architectural idea to the central position it occupied in nineteenth-century England and reconfigures how we understand innovations in the genre of the novel, the agitation for social reform, and the contours of nineteenth-century modernity. Review "Open Houses is a stimulating, provocative book convincingly underpinned by extensive research, sharp critical readings, and a confident familiarity with current theory. Barbara Leckie is an excellent critic of nineteenth-century fiction, but her conspicuous achievement is to bring fictional and nonfictional writings in dialogue with one another in a way that sheds light on both."—Kate Flint, University of Southern California From the Author Barbara Leckie is an Associate Professor in English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University and author of Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857-1914, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. About the Author Barbara Leckie is an Associate Professor in English and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University and author of Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857-1914, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction. "Let Us Look into the House" History was too much occupied with courts and camps to spare a line for the hut of the peasant or the garret of the mechanic. —Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848) In the early pages of Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke (1848), Alton longs to write of the magical and beautiful tropical lands familiar to him from missionary publications. He soon meets Sandy Mackaye, however, who asks him, rhetorically, "Whaur de ye live?" and entreats him to write about his experience of East London (94). Taken aback, Alton protests that such a topic would be "unpoetical" (96). Mackaye, in turn, takes issue with Alton's evaluation, "No poetry there!" he counters, "Come wi' me, and see." The two men enter a "huge, miserable house," once a mansion for a single family but now whittled away to its very bones, the banisters either burnt for firewood or rotting to the touch, the damp plaster peeling from walls and ceilings, and the windows patched with rags. They make their way up a dark stairwell to a "comfortless" garret. There "was no bed in the room—no table" (97). This is the home of a quiet, kind, struggling family. Mackaye seeks to help them, and a warmhearted conversation of adversity