Book at Lunchtime: Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction - The Lodger World

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Charles Dickens and the
Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World by Dr Ushashi Dasgupta.
Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held
weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of
disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. When
Dickens was nineteen years old, he wrote a poem for Maria Beadnell,
the young woman he wished to marry. The poem imagined Maria as a
welcoming landlady offering lodgings to let. Almost forty years
later, Dickens died, leaving his final novel unfinished - in its
last scene, another landlady sets breakfast down for her enigmatic
lodger. These kinds of characters are everywhere in Dickens's
writing. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger
World explores the significance of tenancy in his fiction. In
nineteenth century Britain the vast majority of people rented,
rather than owned, their homes. Instead of keeping to themselves,
they shared space - renting, lodging, taking lodgers in, or simply
living side-by-side in a crowded modern city. Charles Dickens
explored both the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in
rented spaces, the loneliness and sociability, the interactions
between cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play, and the
relationship between space and money. In Charles Dickens and the
Properties of Fiction, Dr Ushashi Dasgupta demonstrates that a
cosy, secluded home life was beyond the reach of most Victorian
Londoners, and considers Dickens's nuanced conception of
domesticity. Panel includes: Dr Ushashi Dasgupta is the The
Jonathan and Julia Aisbitt Fellow and Tutor in English at Pembroke
College, Oxford. Her research centres around nineteenth-century
fiction, specialising in the relationship between literature, space
and architecture, in particular, the ways in which fiction
articulates urban and domestic experience. Charles Dickens and the
Properties of Fiction is her first book, and her next project asks
what it means to feel at home in a book, exploring the practice of
re-reading, from the nineteenth century to the present. Professor
Sophia Psarra is Professor of Architecture and Spatial Design at
University College London. Her research is transdisciplinary,
spanning architecture and urbanism, spatial morphology, history,
and cultural studies, and has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust,
NSF-USA and the Onassis Foundation. Professor Psarra is also a
prize-winning practicing architect, and her work has resulted in
creative installations and design projects as well as a number of
publications, which include The Venice Variations and Architecture
and Narrative. Professor Jeremy Tambling is a writer and critic who
has been engaged with education and teaching at all levels and
across the range, including holding the Chair of Comparative
Literature in Hong Kong, and of Literature in Manchester. As a
literary scholar, he uses critical and cultural theory, especially
the culture of cities, and particularly that of London, as a way of
approaching writing on many forms and periods of literature, as
well as film and opera. Professor Tambling’s many publications
include, most recently, Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, and the Dance
of Death.