‘An indistinct desire’: Psychogeography in David Copperfield

Although Charles Dickens is not often considered a psychogeographic author, this article contends that he employs psychogeography in David Copperfield to elucidate the social inequality and injustice perpetrated in the backstreets of Victorian London. Dickens’s main character, appropriately nicknamed Trot, walks through the city’s most depressed neighbourhoods, acting as a psychogeographic flâneur, or urban explorer, who contemplates people’s emotional reactions to their physical environment. Most notably, Trot connects prostitute Martha Endell to the London slums that trap her in misogyny and classism. Tying place to character is what makes this portion of Dickens’s work distinctly psychogeographic. Specifically, linking Martha to the notoriously filthy Thames River reveals the Victorian capacity for cruel judgment of women in general and female sex workers in particular. Further, our novel approach offers a psychogeographic framework for reconsidering the urban setting in other Dickens works.