To this nexus of associations – involving De Quincey, Egyptology, and imperialism – I want to adduce another that runs deeply through Dickens’ trope, and in some ways subsumes the rest: Victorian London as a writer’s necropolis, a failed library of disintegrating paper and dead letters. Nor does the Dickensian dust from “caravans of turbaned merchants” count only as a figuration of the anxieties of Empire, the return of an atomized colonial/Eastern repressed, although this too informs the vision: he says later of the wind, “the shrewd East rasped and notched us, as with jagged razors” (348), language evocative of the British military conflicts in Lebanon, India, Burma, and China of the 1840s and early 1850s. It’s not only that (thanks to early Egyptologists like Giovanni Belzoni, William Bankes, and Henry Salt), the relics of Pharaonic Egypt were now visible in British museums, travel books, theatres, panoramas and exhibitions in this period, and thus freshly available for circulation, which is true. However, I want to suggest that this moment – Dickens near the Thames in 1853, thinking about death (the essay deals with suicides) and being pelted by the granular dust of mummies – is over-determined by a number of cultural phenomena that turned Victorian London into an Egyptianized dreamscape. Indeed, in an earlier article, Dickens had described an observer of an Egyptian panorama in Picadilly as wandering “among temples, palaces, colossal statues, crocodiles, tombs, obelisks, mummies, sand and ruin he proceeded, like an opium-eater in a dream” (“Some Account” 208). His visionary catalogue provides Eastern, and primarily Egyptian, sources for the wind’s sharp edges, a speculative accounting that leads us to ask the same question in a different key: where is this coming from? The short answer is Thomas De Quincey – Dickens’ great precursor as London streetwalker – whose jumbled Eastern nightmares in the Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) set the stage for just such a fantasia. Like the “dark and stormy night” from Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830) which it resembles, this is emphatically London weather, and yet, in his speculations on the origins of those “stinging particles” in the wind, Dickens travels very much farther afield. O! It was very very dark upon the Thames, and it was bitter bitter cold. Some of the component parts of the sharp-edged vapour that came flying up the Thames at London might be mummy-dust, dry atoms from the Temple at Jerusalem, camels’ foot-prints, crocodiles’ hatching-places, loosened grains of expression from the visages of blunt-nosed sphynxes, waifs and strays from caravans of turbaned merchants, vegetation from Jungles, frozen snow from the Himalayas.
Article body I.Ĭharles Dickens begins “Down With the Tide,” an 1853 essay published in Household Words, with a description of the weather at once familiar and strange:Ī very dark night it was, and bitter cold the east wind blowing bleak, and bringing with it stinging particles from marsh, and moor, and fen – from the Great Desert and Old Egypt, may be. Read in the context of these changes, and in relation to Egyptology (that other burgeoning industry of records and remains), the work of Dickens reflects deep anxieties regarding the whelming flood of precariously fragile paper-anxieties that have a center in the necropolitan library. The Victorian era was the great age of paper, as technological developments transformed the industry and multiplied its productivity many times over.
I connect this phenomenon to the British reception of the material legacies of ancient Egypt, particularly the mummified dead. Dickens is particularly haunted by an urban vision of paper as everywhere and everywhere turning into blank, wasting forms. With reference to developments in papermaking technologies and the beginnings of Egyptian archaeology, I demonstrate some of the ways that nineteenth-century authors were newly troubled by the archival as such. This essay examines a nexus of images in Dickens’ work – involving dust, Egyptian ruins and mummies, and paper – as revealing characteristic Victorian concerns regarding the changing status of paper and the archive. In his journalism and novels (particularly Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend), Charles Dickens presents London as a writer’s necropolis, a city of disintegrating paper and dead letters, a failed archival space.
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