The City and its Subjects: A Reading of Little Dorrit and In The Year of Jubilee

In both Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) and George Gissing's In the Year of Jubilee (1894) the spatial logic of the city and its topography play a constitutive role in the formation and development of character. Architectural forms and the labyrinthine nature of nineteenth-century London determine the kinds of action and movement that define and limit characters. In Little Dorrit we see a bleak example of the above in the carceral model represented by the Marshalsea prison for London’s debtors. The novel illustrates how exterior spaces impinge on inner experiences and shape character in tangible ways. Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee shows us the ideological forms that shape the experience of living in suburban London. While Gissing’s novel describes a higher social class and its aspirations, the novel gives us a fascinating insight into the gendered nature of urban space as experienced by its central character Nancy Lord. Both novels show, in similar yet different ways, how the urban environment directly impacts the spatial grammar of the novel and as a consequence shapes the very form of these novels