UCLA

“Walking London” examines a trio of novels in relation to the development of the city of London. I define walking in the everyday sense of bipedal ambulation but also as a convergence between the self and the environment. Walking defined as such invites us to rethink agency implied in the most basic mobility that is believed to distinguish upright humans from animals that walk on all fours, in the context of the material conditions of the streets assailing the autonomy of human individuals. In novels by Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells, many characters walk London, and their pedestrian gaits are different depending on the modes of the urban environment developing at the time.

From the year 1855, in which the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) was established, the Victorian urbanization of London aimed at reorganizing urban space in accordance with the anthropocentric order in control of environmental threats to London’s human denizens. Their efforts, however, were challenged by densely crowded streets, cross-species encounters, and accelerating traffic. My first chapter reads Dickens’s Little Dorrit in the context of the notoriously crowded streets in mid-nineteenth-century London, where people walked, jostling and jostled. Jostling involves unintentional collisions between characters and, at the level of form, between multiple plots, and generates unplanned efficacy of collectives. My second chapter focuses on Dracula as a rabid stray dog, which prowls in and across London blurring the human-animal binary implemented in urban space. The novel’s narratives also prowl, as does Dracula, emulating animal intelligence, not human, in the way they rely on instant perception lacking reflection. My third chapter examines the loss of locus in accelerated movement effected by the commercially industrialized London described in Wells’s Tono-Bungay and the reformulation of the novel as a genre unsettling the reading subject along the narrative flow. The city and its novelistic gaits reshape individual, retrospective, and self-directing capacity as collective, un-controlled, and void of agency in urban mobility and the novel’s form.