Going Astray : Dickens and London

‘Among the numerous books on Dickens’s London, Going Astray is unique in combining detailed topography and biography with close textual analysis and theoretically informed critiques of most of the novelist’s major works. In Jeremy Tambling’s 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 novelist’s 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 author’s 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 Tambling’s book is an indispensable guide to Dickens, nineteenth- century literature, and the city itself. 

London streets, its people, its crowds, its buildings. It is Dickens’s constant subject, from his early journalism, Sketches by Boz, to The Uncommercial Traveller, from his first novel, Pickwick Papers,to the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

 Going Astray: Dickens and London is a major new work of criticism that attempts a reading of Dickens’s novels in the light of the study of London. Its guiding premise is that Dickens’s novels not only use London as a background, but that they are about London, even when they seem not to be. Professor Tambling’s close readings of the novels are interlaced with more theoretical meditations on the nature of the nineteenth century metropolis. It is, then, a study not only of Dickens, but of urban culture, too. The book is informed by theoretical studies of the city, chiefly Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and aims to give a reading of London that is as ‘thick’ as the reading Benjamin gave of Paris. Tambling’s rich prose style, his inquiring mind, and his eye for the odd or arcane detail gives the book a peculiar and engaging eclecticism that is both scholarly and adventurous. The book is supported by almost 100 photographs of sites associated with Dickens’s novels, taken especially for the book, and a selection of historical maps that are reproduced in detail and in full colour. The book closes with a fascinating gazetteer of Dickens’s London. Rooted in a deep understanding of Dickens’s novels and a thorough acquaintance with the city he chose as his subject, Going Astray bring an exciting new slant to an often clichéd area.