Two Londoners: Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf
Francesca Orestano
The Plot is as follows: ... the incredulous and fugitive student ...
arrives at a mysterious conviction: some place in the world there is a
man from whom this clarity emanates; ... The student resolves to
dedicate his life to finding him.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim (1936)
Within the general aim of the conference these notes are to be read as
a possible approach, in ten stages, towards the construction of the
relationship between two great writers  Charles Dickens and
Virginia Woolf  who were both inspired by London in ways which I
consider typical of the modern mind responding to the environment
of the modern metropolis.
One. I have not found so far any critical investigation connecting
Dickens and Woolf. The fact that they figure as incompatible entities
in the literary canon, and therefore have never been associated, may
stem from a variety of reasons: no doubt because the “discovery” of
modernism set a specific focus on the twentieth century, and a
shadow on the literary forefathers of the movement, which was
1
enhanced by Woolf’s criticism of the so-called materialists –
Bennett, Galsworthy, Wells – and of naturalism in general. In the
critical assessments of the 1980s the accent had to be on modernism
and therefore the critical axe fell between the two centuries and the
two writers.
This divide also became a critical commonplace, a useful tool
to define modern/ist fiction. Leaska, for instance, sees “storytelling”
as “moving from the externality of Balzac and Dickens to the interior
realities of Proust and Joyce” (75). Again, Woolf’s undivided loyalty
to her contemporaries and to the writers of the past was ignored; the
wide horizon of her readings was overlooked, taking into no account
her response to modernist and Victorian writers, as stated in her 1919
diary entry: “what a lot I’ve got to read! The entire works of Mr
James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, so as to compare them
with the entire works of Dickens & Mrs Gaskell” (Diary 1: 247).
Ideology would provide another stumbling block: Bloomsbury, and
Woolf, have been represented as an upper-middle-class clique which
would have nothing to share with the precariously middle-class
Dickens, misjudging in this (at least as far as the Woolfs are
concerned) their political position as well as her commitments and
incisive social criticism. Family tradition added its hues: Leslie
Stephen’s judgement in his Dictionary of National Biography – “if
2
literary fame could be safely measured by popularity with the halfeducated, Dickens must claim the highest position among novelists”
(Hussey 70) – would be wielded by Woolf’s critics as evidence of
her own attitude, thus ignoring oppressive weight of “those 68 black
books” (Woolf, Letters 4: 145), and the sentiment of hatred they
fuelled in Virginia (Julia Briggs 26). But against Sir Leslie’s arrogant
condescension, one should rather keep in mind what Woolf
maintains in 1919, in a TLS review of Walter Crotch’s The Secret of
Dickens (1919): “no one has suffered more than Dickens from the
enthusiasm of his admirers, by which he has been made to appear not
so much a great writer as an intolerable institution” (Hussey 70).
Such a statement invites readers to consider the issue of the writer’s
reception, rather than the intrinsic value of his work. Last but not
least, adding to the distance of modernism from the Victorian age,
one should count the absence of Woolf, as a writer, from so many
early accounts of this art movement. Before Bonnie Kime Scott’s
The Gender of Modernism (1990), and a welcome swarm of critical
works focussing on women protagonists of the avant-garde scene,
Woolf was hardly mentioned in this context, or given a very minor
role. Thus the two writers fared like two monads, their works placed
in un-interacting worlds which suffered no links through history,
ideology, class, gender.
3
Space, however, seems to provide the common ground for the
encounter of the two writers. Space, and a specific place, London,
because more than any other context it is the metropolis and what it
stands for, that looms large in all the critical accounts of modernism.
In his appreciation of the modernist revolution, Bradbury remarks
that “the London cityscape as a scene and a set of social contrasts
becomes important literary subject-matter and the source of new
forms.” And he goes on to admit that “the London of strange, unreal
contrasts and encounters had been in fiction since Dickens” (181).
Dickens and Woolf, I suggest, can be brought to converge across
such conceptual and topographical ground – once the many
stumbling blocks and idées reçues are reconsidered and, possibly,
overcome.
Two. Let us consider the city, London. In Victorian Cities Asa
Briggs provides a useful clue when he casts the East End against the
West End of London, as if they were two separate worlds, with a
very different character, nature, density, class. In the East End there
are “colour, vitality, excitement” (316), there are theatres and music
halls, and the streets are crowded and brightly lighted. Energy,
animation, excitement and exchange  these qualities are contrasted
with the dullness and monotony of the West End of London, which
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looked like “a dark and muddy country lane, with no glimmer of gas
and with nothing to do” (Asa Briggs 316). Briggs’s opposition West
End / East End thus offers a starting point, from where, besides
actual location and topography, other connections may be
established. Indeed, the paradigm of space is also endowed with
values other than those offered by the compass, which both writers
will acknowledge, confront and enhance.
Three. But to go back to facts. After their father’s death, in 1904, the
four young Stephens move from the genteel, almost rural seclusion
of 22, Hyde Park Gate, to 46 Gordon Square, a place chosen by
Vanessa by looking at the map of London and measuring how far
apart they were, “a district as far away in spirit from Kensington as
she could find” (Woolf Moments of Being 184; Lee 203). This was
Bloomsbury, dangerously close to the East End – Henry James
visited them and found the place shabby and bohemian. Relatives
came and snuffed the air. As Virginia puts it, “we were full of
experiments and reforms. ... everything was going to be new ...
everything was on trial”; in Bloomsbury “[t]here was room, and
freedom, ... the roar and splendour of the Strand ... the live realities
of the world” (Lee 207, 206).
5
Virginia Woolf begins in 1904 her lifelong hobby of “streethaunting.” She writes her first reviews. For a couple of years she
teaches at Morley College, an evening institute for working men and
women in Waterloo Road, across the river. Experiments in class
mixing. Experiments in sexual freedom. Nothing was unmentionable.
They go to plays, operas, concerts; to the Zoo; to the Speakers’
Corner. After 1907 the sisters become aware of the suffragette
movement, its marches and hunger strikes: Virginia “work[ed] for
the vote” (Lee 279). Not only political engagement seemed
scandalous: the Post-Impressionist exhibition of December 1910 too
was a source of scandal. “In or about December 1910, human
character changed” (Woolf, A Woman’s Essays 69).
After Vanessa’s wedding, Virginia moves to 29, Fitzroy
Square. In 1911 she’s in Brunswick Square 38, near the Foundling
Hospital. In 1912, Virginia and Leonard, just married, take lodgings
at 13, Clifford’s Inn, off Fleet Street, between Chancery and Fetter
Lane. After a parenthesis in Richmond (at Hogarth House, where the
press is started), in 1924 the Woolfs buy 52, Tavistock Square. In
1939 they move to 37, Mecklenburgh Square. Leonard’s first offices
are in Theobald’s Street. Thus, the move of the young Stephens took
them very close to Fitzroy Street and to Gower Street, where
Dickens’s family had initially encamped. The house in Doughty
6
Street, bought by Dickens in 1837, is close to Mecklenburgh Square.
At the Foundling Hospital Chapel, near Coram Fields, he would
attend service after Mary’s death. Then Dickens could afford to lease
Tavistock House, just off Tavistock Square. His Household Words
offices and flat were in Wellington Street, near the Strand, then in
Tavistock Street nearby; his first readings in St Martin’s Hall,
Longacre, near Drury Lane. Lincoln’s Inn Fields were nearby
(Ackroyd 70, 232-34, 661, 950). This kind of survey however, albeit
startingly rich in coincidences, is not the sole purpose of my notes.
Four. In 1905 Virginia Woolf reviews for TLS F. G. Kitton’s The
Dickens Country, a book which offers a scientific examination of
“the country where a great novelist lived in order to see to what
extent he was influenced by his surroundings” (Woolf, 1979 186).
Dickens is indeed a Londoner – a Cockney. But his kingdom,
according to Woolf, has been explored by Kitton with “superfluous
zeal and a too minute knowledge to the task” (188). Kitton’s book,
Woolf remarks, is a storehouse of facts: it reckons every house,
lodging and inn where Dickens slept during his life; the mugs from
which he drank; the “stiff wooden chair” in which he sat. Vividly it
describes the first dwelling places of Boz, the “dreary and dingy back
streets in Camden-town and the neighbourhood of the Debtors’
7
Prison” (188-89) – and in this, Woolf acknowledges, Kitton comes
closer to the life of Dickens because “no one probably has ever
known his London so intimately as Dickens did, or has painted the
life of the streets with such first-hand knowledge” (189). But, Woolf
concludes,
a writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the
risk of disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into
tangible brick and mortar. ... No city indeed is so real as this that we
make for ourselves and people to our liking; and to insist that it has a
counterpart in the cities of the earth is to rob it of half its charm.
(189)
I shall therefore follow Woolf’s advice – toning down, for the
moment, the brick-and-mortar city and looking instead for the
writers’ counterpart, the phantom city and territory of their brain. It’s
a sense of place, of belonging, that binds both authors to the great
London thoroughfares and the slums, to palaces and prisons, banks
and pawn-shops, the bridges and the river – landmarks which are
instantly recognizable, in their pages, and indeed marked on the map
of London, but also features of a symbolic territory, invested with a
dialectic function.
8
Dickens was not born in London; Woolf was born in a very
sheltered environment – the nursery, the walks in the park, and St.
Ives, in Cornwall, in the summer. Yet London is the city where they
both become writers. Thus they are Londoners in so far as London
provides them with “the proper stuff of fiction” (Woolf, The
Crowded Dance 12), a stuff which is given verbal emplotment and
form in their stories, in sketches and descriptions we either define as
grotesque, as so many images and shapes in a Dickensian magic
lantern, or as modernist, as clusters of impressions falling on the
conscience from all sides, like atoms, evanescent or sharp as steel. In
both cases, it is not a matter of flat realism, but of an endless
generation of forms, of lists, accumulation, and unnecessary details.
It is a matter of anthropomorphic transformations, of spectral aura
attaching itself to houses, objects, places. A matter of timing.
Five. This happens because their London is above all a written
London. Dickens’s fiction, with very few exceptions, is set in
London. The same for his short stories and journalism. He spans
London from Hampstead and Highgate and Camden Town to the
South, across the river; from Twickenham to the East, the docks, and
the powerful magnet of Rochester. Woolf’s production is mainly,
albeit not exclusively, set in London: the beginning of The Voyage
9
Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), parts of Jacob’s Room (1922) and
especially Mrs Dalloway (1925), parts of Orlando (1928), of A Room
of One’s Own (1929), of The Waves (1931), of Flush (1933) and the
entirety of The Years (1937). Many short stories thematise the rich
stuff of London: notably “Street-haunting: A London Adventure,”
and her five London sketches, The London Scene (193132), which
describe the docks, Oxford Street, great men’s houses, abbeys and
cathedrals and the House of Commons. Their work as writers is
inextricable from London.
Six. Asa Briggs’s distinction beween the West End and the East End
provides the next step, from where the juxtaposition between the
brick-and-mortar city and the phantom city of their fiction can be
worked out. While we are sure that there are places such as the
Strand, Oxford Street, Holborn, Covent Garden, St Paul, which
provide the still centre of the maelstrom – the point of interest among
thousand different scenes, the stationary timeless gyre in the great
vortex of London (to use a modernist tag) or the “whirl of noise and
motion ... at the very core of London” (NN 89), to go with Dickens –
we also realize that their fiction exploits the West End / East End
opposition in a similar paradigmatic way.
10
A few examples for Dickens. It is hard to place with absolute
precision the line and topographical divide, on the map of London,
between West and East: it may well be Oxford Street, or somewhere
around Piccadilly. Wigmore and Wimpole Street, perhaps. Some
locations however are fearfully distinguished: in Dombey and Son
Mr Dombey lives in Bryanston Square which is “dreadfully genteel”;
nearby, in Portland Place there are the Veneerings and in Portman
Square the Podsnaps of Our Mutual Friend; in Little Dorrit Tite
Barnacle’s home is in Grosvenor Square; Pall Mall is where Tigg
Montague has set the bogus Anglo-Bengalee Assurance office in
Martin Chuzzlewit; Long’s Hotel in Bond Street and the hotel in
Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, are the exclusive places where
meetings are held in Dombey and Son as well as in Little Dorrit.
Cadogan Place liminally connects Belgravia with Chelsea (a rung
below), and Chelsea, a quiet village near the river in Dickens’s times,
leads to elegant suburban Arcadias, towards Chiswick. In Cheyne
Row the Carlyles lived: Woolf would visit and write sketches of their
house.
Between the West and the East End there lies a mixed
territory of negotiation. All kinds of mediators are to be met there,
selling everything: in Nicholas Nickleby the Mantalinis operate in the
genteel area of Wigmore Street; in Little Dorrit Merdle’s dwelling is
11
in Harley Street, Cavendish Square, but his bank in Lombard Street;
in Regent Street we find Lord Verisopht, and tucked behind in
Golden Square, Ralph Nickleby. Swallow Street and St. George’s
Street where Nancy goes in Oliver Twist are near Piccadilly; the
Opera Colonnade is there; the Albany, and the Adelphi, residences
with temporary inmates, are not far from Buckingham Street and
Villiers Street (as well as Hungerford stairs), even though the
construction of Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross station in the
1830s would cancel part of those slums, with the old Hungerford
Stairs and market (Sanders 95)
My point is that the East End – the hubs of which are the
Strand, High Holborn and Holborn Viaduct, Snow Hill and Newgate
Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Temple, Ludgate Hill and St.
Paul’s Cathedral, the knot of Lombard, Leadenhall, Threadneedle,
Gracechurch Street, Tower Hill and the Tower, the Monument (and
beyond: Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Limehouse, Wapping, the
Docks) – is the inexhaustible brick mine for the phantom city of the
two great writers. Dickens’s stories exploit the contrast between the
East and the West of London to expose the aspirations to
respectability and mock-gentility of swindlers, the devious
perambulations and circumlocutions of bankers, money-lenders and
usurers, the hunting grounds of prostitutes. For Dickens a single
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stride can mark the difference: across the dividing line, even a bun or
penny loaf is not the same (“On an Amateur Beat”, UT 341).
Woolf too exploits these dialectics in order to be true to life,
to deal with “the proper stuff of fiction” – which is everything
indeed, because writing is “a complex art, much infected by life” – as
she remarks in 1930 in “Memories of a Working Women’s Guild” (A
Woman’s Essays 146), and the drawing room and tea table convey
but a very limited idea of it. The East End thus coincides with the
acquisition of freedom and knowledge by young persons, often
female characters, who escape the curtained homes in the West End,
to confront the complexity of the East End – in a sense to plunge into
the city of Dickens. Therefore it is not only a topography of the city
they seek and explore: as Woolf maintains in 1926, when we read
Dickens “we remodel our psychological geography” (Hollington 3:
83), such is his creative power.
A few examples for Woolf. Psychological geography
operates at its most intense degree when young, inexperienced
persons such as Katherine Hilbery (Night and Day), or Elizabeth
Dalloway (Mrs Dalloway) escape from their respectable houses,
from Cheyne Walk (near the Carlyles’ home) and from Victoria
Street, to bypass the elegant shops of Bond Street and Burlington
Arcade, and plunge in the Strand, Holborn, St. Paul. Elizabeth
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Dalloway ventures like a pioneer towards Fleet Street – where her
mother has never set foot, apparently. Jacob Flanders settles in
London, not far from Queen’s Square. He has his office in Gray’s
Inn Road; there he learns that “[t]he streets of London have their
map; but our passions are uncharted” (Jacob’s Room 82). The voice
of the author following the character offers (in true omniscient style)
prophetic warnings that lurk, invisible but efficient, in the streets of
Central London: “As frequent as street-corners in Holborn are these
chasms in the continuity of our ways” (Jacob’s Room 82).
The crowd and din of the city are cast against the silent, plush
covered rooms where no suffragette or New Woman would be
admitted. The suffragettes, as in Night and Day, have their offices
near Russell Square, in Bloomsbury. It’s a gesture which stresses
again the polarity West / East in all its symbolic weight. The
paradigm is perhaps better explained in Flush. A Biography (1933),
set in Dickens’s 1840s London.1
Elizabeth Barrett lives with her spaniel, Flush, in the genteel
context of Wimpole Street: to the North is Regent Park, where
aristocratic dogs must be kept on a chain, but to the South-east, near
the intersection between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street,
Replying to Ethel Smyth’s criticism, that The Waves was marred by “aetheriality,
for not being Dickensian enough”, Woolf decided that Flush would provide more
“low life scenes” (Lee 620).
1
14
there is the dreaded St. Giles, its Rookeries, Tom-All-Alone, the
Seven Dials. “Behind Miss Barrett’s bedroom ... was one of the
worst slums in London. Mixed up with that respectability was this
filth” (Flush 8788). In absolute agreement with Dickens’s
psychological geography, Wimpole Street lives “cheek by jowl with
St. Giles” (Flush 89). Flush is kidnapped, a ransom is requested or
his ears and paws will be sent back in a brown paper parcel.
In Whitechapel, or in a triangular space of ground at the bottom of
the Tottenham Court Road, poverty and vice and misery had bred
and seethed and propagated their kind for centuries without
interference. A dense mass of aged buildings in St. Giles was
“wellnigh a penal settlement, a pauper metropolis in itself.” Aptly
enough, where the poor conglomerated thus, the settlement was
called a Rookery. ... [The buildings] were cells of brick intersected
by lanes which ran with filth. All day the lanes buzzed with halfdressed human beings; at night there poured back again into the
stream the thieves, beggars, and prostitutes who had been plying
their trade in the West End. (Flush 88)
The dynamics of the West End / East End negotiations are clear: as
they were clear in Dickens’s plots where investors, politicians,
bankers, lawyers, capitalists and money-lenders reside in respectable
15
quarters while their business is being carried out in much less
wholesome locations. Or the reverse.
Dickens’s young women too cross the dialectic border:
Nancy in Oliver Twist; Kate Nickleby, or Florence Dombey – who
moves to the healthier Leadenhall environment. Amy Dorrit from the
Iron Bridge seems capable of taking in her view the whole city, the
river, the house of Mrs Clennam and the Marshalsea and Borough at
once. In her eyes “teeming ideas of Covent Garden, as a place of past
and present mystery, romance, abundance, want, beauty, ugliness,
fair country gardens, and foul street gutters” (LD 208) weld polarity
into one vision. Lizzie Hexam moves with agility up and down the
river.
Seven. The comparison, however, cannot be pushed too far, casting
the two writers into a too rigid frame of concordance, disregarding
the differences, and the necessary caution in dealing with such
complex individuals. Around these individuals, however, there is one
London, and this territory of the brain (to quote Woolf) is pretty
homogeneous with Dickens’s London: the same clocks and church
bells strike their timeless hour, despite the renovations, the making of
the embankment in 1879, the sanitary measures and rescue of slum
16
areas, the pulling down of Newgate Prison in 1902 (Sanders 154).
Theirs is a timeless London. An unreal city.
Eight. Their city is indeed a text. The most striking evidence of this
is their fascination with writings covering the walls of London,
staring from the shops, hanging from posters, from horizontal and
vertical signs, straight or reflected in mirrors. Or written in the sky
above London.
These written signs operate most powerfully when they are
obscure, like the writing on the wall, or like the “MOOREEFFOC”
printed outside the St. Martin’s Lane coffee room which Dickens
recalls, with a shiver, in the autobiographical fragment enclosed in
Forster’s Life (Hollington 1: 80).
In Mrs Dalloway the aeroplane traces letters in the sky: “But
what letters? A C was it? an E, then an L?” “‘Glaxo,’ said Mrs
Coates. ... ‘Kreemo’ murmured Mrs Bletchley ... it’s TOFFEE,’
murmured Mr Bowley” (22). A nice rhyme with COFFEE. The
aeroplane writes on the page of the London sky from West to East,
above Regent’s Park, over St. Paul, towards Greenwich, and then
back over Ludgate Circus (23). Thus signs and letters, signifiers,
potential texts, haunt the brick and the phantom city, asking to be
observed, decoded – written down and read. Ominously, indirectly,
17
they also suggest the dialogical uncertainty set between image and
word, between discours and figure, and described by Jonathan Crary
as techniques of the observer, or by Jean-François Lyotard at the
other end of the spectrum. It’s a fact that both writers are strongly
visual, even though their final achievement is a city made of words.
Their ears also catch every voice, speech, word, inflection, precious
cockney mannerism, dialogue.
As we read in Woolf’s Diary – November 1927 – Dickens’s
voices are inextricable from this rich verbal soil:
I heard a man in a bus talk about quality & state of gentlemaness; &
you would call me Sir; as I you Madam. This to a working woman,
dowdy pasty plush with a baby. “Had more’n 8” she said to the
conductor; whom she called young man; & he called her Ma. This is
Dickens; or Shakespeare; or simple English cockney: whichever it is
I adore it; & warm the cockles of my heart at it. (Diary 3: 165)
Nine. To enter Dickens’s and Woolf’s city of words, The Years
(1937) is perhaps the fittest example, providing, as it does, a
multitude of sounds and echoes rising from London streets, East and
West, genteel and poor. The famous cries of London are heard in
markets, from street-vendors and pedlars; the sound of musical
instruments, the din, the bustle, traffic and hum of the city are
18
carefully recorded. Woolf composed the novel out of the novel-essay
The Pargiters which came out, partly as The Years, in 1937, and as
Three Guineas in 1938. The 1930s are marked as well by Woolf’s
increasing critical interest in Dickens’s work and technique.
The novel describes a family group, the Pargiters, extending,
fragmenting, and gathering again from a large dispersed nucleus of
distant relations into the many people convening to the last party.
Woolf wanted to give her readers “facts, as well as the vision” (Diary
4: 151). It is a fact that the novel encodes the years from 1880 to
“The Present Moment,” giving simultaneously the brick-and-mortar
London, perpetually transformed by deaths, marriages, changes of
residence, impoverishment, and the unchanging timeless pattern that
goes with it, the city’s “eternal waltz ... from Shoreditch to
Hammersmith” (The Years 129).
Leading figure in the waltz is Colonel Pargiter who, while his
wife is dying, visits his mistress whom he keeps in a sordid dingy flat
near Westminster, near his exclusive, respectable club. His young
daughter Rose is molested by a man unbuttoning himself in the dark
genteel street where they live. She will become a suffragette. Eleanor
(Nell!) Pargiter goes as far as Bayswater to supervise the
construction of Rigby Cottages for the poor – close to Burdett
Coutts’s and Dickens’s Urania Cottage perhaps. The mythical river
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of oblivion and undoing flows under the bridges, as we see it in so
many scenes by Dickens (OCS 9-11); it flows under London Bridge,
where a young relative sadly lingers thinking of her lost love, with
ripples of muddy gold (The Years 161), like “little spots of lighted
water “ (Dickens, LD 217); with the usual tugs “and the usual barges
with black tarpaulin” (The Years 161; OCS 11).
Parents die. Orphaned cousins move to poverty-stricken
lodgings south of the river, in Milton Street, “a dusky street, with old
houses, now let out as lodgings; but they had seen better days” (The
Years 310). Yet in their shabby bohemian house an old chair,
crimson and gilt, with wooden claws, still presides, a relic from past
times. Still frowning: the anthropomorphic object in pure Dickensian
style.
The cries of London are heard everywhere, in Covent Garden,
from Holborn vendors: “Nice vilets, sweet vilets” (174); “Old chairs
and baskets to mend” (307); the “monotonous cry of a man selling
vegetables” (317); in the Borough a man buys old iron, or perhaps
sells it (162), trundling a barrow full of bedsteads, grates, pokers.
Music pervades the air, from the Italian organ-grinder with his
“merry little jig” (225) to the voice of a singer practising scales and
the notes of a trombone heard from the street (316), mixed with
children crying and mothers scolding from the windows. The island
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is full of voices. As Woolf remarks, “Dickens creates character
through dialogue” (Letters 5: 334): words are the thing.
In these years, and increasingly from the 1930s onward,
Dickens is never very far from Woolf’s imagination and critical
work. I should say closer. He is mentioned in memorable essays such
as
“Memories
“Craftsmanship”
of
a
(1937),
Working
“The
Women’s
Art
of
Guild”
(1930),
Biography”
(1939),
“Reviewing” (1939), “The Leaning Tower” (1940). In Moments of
Being perhaps, we find the most interesting passage, about a hidden
pattern behind the cotton-wool of life from which the entirety of past
and present experience could be caught alive and written into stories:
All artists I suppose feel something like this. It is one of the obscure
elements in life that has never been much discussed. ... Why did
Dickens spend his entire life writing stories? What was his
conception? I bring in Dickens partly because I am reading Nicholas
Nickleby2 at the moment; also partly because it struck me, on my
walk yesterday, that these moments of being of mine were
scaffolding in the background; were the invisible and silent part of
my life as a child. But in the foreground there were of course people;
and these people were like characters in Dickens. They were
2
Of course re-reading: she had read Nicholas Nickleby in September 1897 (A
Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals of Virginia Woolf 126).
21
caricatures; they were very simple; they were immensely alive. They
could be made with three strokes of the pen, if I could do it. Dickens
owes his astonishing power to make characters alive to the fact that
he saw them as a child sees them; as I saw Mr. Wolstenholme, C. B.
Clarke, and Mr. Gibbs. (Moments of Being 73)
The same curiosity about Dickens’s ability to create character is
expressed in a 1939 diary entry:
I am reading Dickens; by way of a refresher. How he lives; not
writes: both a virtue & a fault. Like seeing something emerge;
without containing mind. Yet the accuracy & even sometimes the
penetration – into Miss Squeers & Miss Price & the farmer [in
Nicholas Nickleby] for example – remarkable. I cant [sic] dip my
critical mind, even if I try to. (Diary 5: 214)
To read Dickens is indeed renewing one’s vision, which is the most
unexpected
remark
from
a
modernist
writer
devoted
to
experimentalism: “This is the way to keep off the settling down &
refrigeration of old age. And to flout all preconceived theories – For
more & more I doubt if enough is known to sketch even probable
lines, all too emphatic & conventional” (Diary 5: 214). And again, the
power and vitality of Dickens’s figures offers Woolf the key to a
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kind of artless art of writing, where the fine Jamesian tools of
suggestion and allusion are to be discarded in favour of a few bold
strokes:
I read about 100 pages of Dickens yesterday, & see something vague
about the drama & fiction: how the emphasis, the caricature of these
innumerable scenes, forever forming character, descend from the
stage. Literature – that is the shading, suggesting, as of Henry James,
hardly used. All bold & coloured. Rather monotonous, yet so
abundant, so creative: yes: but not highly creative: not suggestive.
Everything laid on the table. Nothing to engender in solitude. That’s
why it’s so rapid & attractive: nothing to make one put the book
down & think. (Diary 5: 214-5)
Ten. This is the sketch of an ending. Because it was difficult in 1939
to keep one’s mind fixed on the pages of a book. I shall quote a few
diary entries, in sequence.
“Friday 1 September. War is on us this morning” (Diary 5: 232).
First air raids on September 6th.
“Monday 11 September. Very empty streets. A curious strained
silence. ... London after sunset a mediaeval city of darkness &
brigandage” (Diary 5: 236).
23
“Wednesday 25 October. To relax I read Little Dorrit” (Diary 5:
243). The bombing of London goes on, unremittingly. Reading,
dropping the book: “Mill I should be reading. Or Little Dorrit, but
both are gone stale, like a cheese that has been cut in & left” (Diary
5: 257).
Friday 2 February [1940]. So the screw tightens gradually; & I can’t
even imagine London in peace. ... And London, in nips, is cramped
& creased. Odd how often I think with what is love I suppose of the
City: of the walk to the Tower: that is my England; I mean, if a bomb
destroyed one of those little alleys with the brass bound curtains &
the river smell & the old woman reading I should feel – well, what
the patriots feel – (Diary 5: 263)
In September, for half a day in London, Woolf sees the extension of
the damages in Bloomsbury. Near Doughty Street some houses are
still smouldering; Mecklenburgh Square is roped off; destruction has
hit Argyll Street, left ruins in Gray’s Inn Road and Holborn; a vast
gap has appeared on top of Chancery Lane; Lincoln Inn is all
damaged, but walls still up (Diary 5: 316-17). Between 18
September and 20 October 1940, Mecklenburgh Square, Gordon
Square, Brunswick Square, Oxford Street, the British Museum
24
forecourt are smashed by bombs. On Thursday 17 October news are
that “Tavistock Sqre is no more” (Diary 5: 329).
She writes about rubble, books, diaries, a sign “To Let” idly
hanging where there’s nothing around:
So to Tavistock Sq. ... Three houses ... gone. Basement all rubble.
Only relics an old basket chair (bought in Fitzroy Sqre days) &
Penmans board To Let. Otherwise bricks & wood splinters. One
glass door in the next door house hanging. I cd just see a piece of my
studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many
books.... So to Meck. All again litter, glass, black soft dust, plaster
powder. ... Books all over dining room floor. ... A wind blowing
through. I began to hunt out diaries. (Diary 5: 331)
On January 1rst 1941 Woolf writes that “on Sunday night ... London
was burning. 8 of my city churches destroyed, & the Guildhall”
(Diary 5: 351). These passages from the diary have been culled out
because they mark a roll-call of destruction, naming places familiar
to Dickens as well as to Woolf, streets, squares, monuments which
would give scaffolding and substance to the unreal city of their art.
And, to match with this sense of destruction, and confirm the extent
of the loss, Woolf writes to Ethel Smyth, confessing that to her
25
London represents “Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens. It is my only
patriotism” (Letters 6: 460).
As we read on, London disappears in all its completeness,
like a vanishing pageant. Streets become holes, houses reduced to a
wall, squares, gashed into corners, are dismantled:
Wednesday 15 January 1941: ... We were in London on Monday. I
went to London Bridge. I looked at the river, very misty; some tufts
of smoke, perhaps from burning houses. There was another fire on
Saturday. Then I saw a cliff of wall, eaten out, at one corner; a great
corner all smashed; a Bank; the Monument erect; tried to get a Bus;
... A complete jam of traffic; for streets were being blown up. So by
tube to the Temple; & there wandered in the desolate ruins of my old
squares: gashed; dismantled; the old red bricks all white powder,
something like a builders yard. Grey dirt & broken windows;
sightseers; all that completeness ravished & demolished. (Diary 5:
352-53)
Oxford Street becomes “a wide grey ribbon” (Diary 5: 355). What
was there before, the scene described in so many sketches and
novels, with all its vital energy of names and places, now can only
exist as a ghost, in a spectral life: “the sight of Oxford Street and
Piccadilly ... haunts me” (Diary 5: 358). When the brick-and-mortar
26
city and the phantom city of the brain, the London of Dickens and
Woolf is no more – Virginia Woolf is no more either, in March 1941.
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