129論

文 【佳 作 論 文】

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”:
Scientific Entropy, Medical Epidemiology and the Miasmic Literary City
Neil AddisonI
On the 9th of June 1870, as he was crossing London’s Hyde Park, a young
Thomas Hardy saw the announcement of the death of Charles Dickens(Florence Hardy, Early Life 101). The event was carefully recorded in hisnotes by Hardy, and was much later included in The Life of Thomas Hardy.
The work of Dickens evidently made an impression on Hardy that lasted
well beyond his youth into old age; he owned the complete set of Lloyd’s
sixpenny Dickens (Millgate, Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice 317) while in a 1903
letter to an acquaintance, Hardy remarked “Dickens in his details of things” is“without a fellow, so special is his view” (Purdy and Millgate, Collected Letters:
II 81). Dickens’ personified depictions of the great metropolis, from the foggy
air to the ebb and flow of the Thames, created a unique image of the city as
protagonist. This bequeathed a formidable literary and psycho-geographicallegacy to later writers which functioned as both a key and a fetter. Hardy
was well aware of this powerful literary influence; according to the American
novelist Hamlin Garland’s account of a 1920s conversation with the Dorset
writer, an aged Hardy had remarked how “the “Dickens tradition” still broods
over London” and “our London novelists” (Gibson 197).
Dickens first established this tradition by capturing the excitement of
the city streets in a series of brief sketches (1833-36) finally collected in
one volume as Sketches by Boz in 1839. In the short piece “Shops and theirStudies in Victorian Culture, No. 16 (2018)

130

Neil Addison

Tennants,” (1836) for example, the young Dickens noted what “inexhaustible
food for speculation do the streets of London afford” (58). But Dickens’
London was also an entropic city, sickened by air-borne pollution such as
the miasmic air and the thick fog which Mr. Guppy in Bleak House (1853)
described as “a London particular” (51). Hardy was similarly familiar with thisparticular London, moving to the metropolis in 1862 and living and working
in the capital continuously until 1867. While Hardy is primarily thought of asa Dorset novelist, he was, like Dickens, keen to cultivate the image of himself
as a Londoner. He described his 1860s experiences of the city as one which“only a young man at large in the metropolis can get . . . knowing every street
and alley west of St Paul’s like a born Londoner, which he was often supposed
to be” (Florence Hardy, Early Life 82). This is reflected in several of his works;
many of the important scenes from his famous lost novel The Poor Man andthe Lady (1867) were according to The Life apparently set in London (Florence
Hardy, Early Life 82). Furthermore, his oeuvre contains two novels, The Handof Ethelberta (1876) and The Well-Beloved (1897), and two short stories, “How I
Built Myself a House” (1865) and “An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress”(1878) which are partly or chiefly located in the capital. In addition, 29 ofHardy’s poems were composed in London (Florence Hardy, Early Life 71), anda number of others used the capital as a setting.
From these works, and indeed the copious notes and references which
Hardy made, we can also detect the influence of the writings of Dickens.
This is not to say that Hardy’s works resemble Dickens’ novels, as they are
stylistically and thematically very different. But this discussion will addresssome of the particular London connections that do appear to exist between
Dickens and Hardy, despite the significant changes which took place across thecity during the 1860s, the decade which was Dickens’ last and Hardy’s first as
a writer. While Hardy’s work was chiefly published after the theory of miasma
had been largely rejected (Bingham et al. 387-93), his antagonistic London
fog resembled Dickens’ personified representation of the polluted air in Bleak
House. Further, while the novels of Dickens preceded William Thomson’s

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

131scientific theory of entropy (Smith and Wise 524), both writers offered similar
depictions of London as an environmentally decaying city. During Hardy’stime in London, however, the railway system was expanded to compete withthe omnibus (Inwood 547) and the Embankment (553), and the London
sewers (434) were constructed, while medical epidemiological practice was
gradually established, first by John Snow (Porter 412-13) and later by William
Farr (Halliday 1470-71). Thus this discussion will demonstrate how Hardy’s
literary city was also a London particular to him and his own time.
II
The novels and poetry of Thomas Hardy, which chiefly feature rural
shepherds, farmers and milkmaids, seem a world away from the urban
pandemonium of Dickens’ novels. Gabriel Oak, Eustacia Vye, Michael
Henchard, Tess Durbeyfield or Jude Fawley appear to owe little debt tothe likes of Mr. Jingle, Wilkins Micawber, Mrs. Gamp, Bill Sikes or Daniel
Quilp. Yet in Hardy’s early notes, some of his character sketches appear rather
Dickensian, and this may originate from his own experience of living in the
London of Dickens’ time. When Hardy arrived in the great metropolis on
April 17, 1862 he quickly found employment as an architect’s apprentice with
Sir Arthur Blomfield at Adelphi Terrace, just off the Strand (Florence Hardy,
Early Life 48). He occasionally took his lunch at Hungerford Market (55),
now the location of Charing Cross Station, and it is also here where Dickens
had labored as a child in Warren’s Blacking Warehouse (Wilson 52). Hardy’s
stay in the city coincided with Dickens’ series of London public readings,
and in an 1912 edition of the London periodical the Bookman, which wasthen celebrating the centenary of Dickens’ birth, Hardy writes “when a young
man in London I heard him read from his books” (Millgate, Thomas Hardy’s
Public Voice 328). He more specifically notes in The Life that in 1863, not longafter his arrival in the city, he “attended the later readings by Charles Dickens
at the Hanover Square Rooms” (Florence Hardy, Early Life 70). Dickens’Neil Addison132

performances were known for their highly theatrical quality, during which thefamous author was given to dramatically imitate his characters’ facial features,
quirks and accents. It is interesting that the novelist heroine of Hardy’s The
Hand of Ethelberta, makes her living as a writer in London by giving dramatic
public readings of her work, and it appears likely, therefore, that Dickens’
public performances of his characters made an impression upon the young
Dorset writer.
An older Hardy partly conceded the influence of Dickens upon his own
writing. In his 1912 piece for the Bookman, Hardy further commented on thegreat writer’s legacy, initially stating “I do not know that my literary efforts
owed much to his influence” before then, rather tantalizingly conceding “No
doubt they owed something unconsciously” (Millgate, Thomas Hardy’s Public
Voice 328). This unconscious aspect cannot easily be located although Hardy
was very aware of the power of Dickens’ characterizations; he specifically cut
out and recorded in his notebooks an article taken from The Glasgow News,
31 Jan 1907, that observed how the coming to life of characters in works
by Shakespeare, Scott and Dickens occurred because a writer surrenders to“the magic power of the material in which he works,” leading to a character
coming “to play a part far more important than was first intended” (Björk
288). Some of Dickens’ most vivid and memorable characters are wily cockney
villains such as Grandfather Smallweed, Bill Sikes, Daniel Quilp and Fagin
who perpetuate cunning acts of skulduggery. While none of the Londoners
encountered in Hardy’s writing seem to directly resemble Dickens’ characters,in The Life one finds an account of William Tinsley, the Strand-based publisherof his first novel, the poorly selling Desperate Remedies (1871), which appears tocome straight out of a Dickens narrative. Hardy felt Tinsley had ill-used him,
having agreeing to publish the novel only on receipt of a 75 pounds advancefrom the Dorset author. Clearly very bitter about this experience, Hardy
seems rather in revenge to have turned the Hertfordshire-born publisher into a
cockney caricature. The Life tells how Hardy was approached by Tinsley on the
Strand in 1872 and asked to provide new material, the publisher exclaiming

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

133“Wot, now! Havent you anything written?” (Florence Hardy, Early Life 116)
When Hardy remonstrated with Tinsley regarding the poor sales of Desperate
Remedies, the publisher is recorded to have replied, “Pon my soul, Mr Hardy[. . .] you wouldn’t have got another man in London to print it! Oh, be hanged
if you would!” (116) Hardy’s depiction of Tinsley here rather reminds thereader of the wily Mr. Slum from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) who craftily
tries to persuade Mrs. Jarley to employ his services as an advertiser:‘I came here,’ said the military gentleman, turning to Mrs. Jarley, - ‘pon my souland honour I hardly know what I came here for. It would puzzle me to tell you,it would by Gad . . . By the way- any orders? Is there any little thing I can do foryou?’ (212)Just as his plots turn more towards tragedy than comedy, however, Hardy’s
characters are generally quite distinct from the type of figure encounteredin Dickens’ work. In terms of identifying a Dickensian influence in Hardy’s
writing, the unconscious aspect to which he refers can perhaps be encountered
more discretely in his treatment of the city itself.
III
The genesis of Hardy’s representation of the London fog appears to owe adebt to Dickens and this can be traced to the lingering influence of miasmic
theory. For many centuries, medical theory had attributed sicknesses andfevers to miasma (Porter 10), and the belief persisted during the first half ofthe nineteenth century that disease was caused by the inhalation of vitiated air(Halliday 1469). Edwin Chadwick misdiagnosed the miasma as the chief causeof cholera in his Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population ofGreat Britain in 1842, writing that “there is no one point on which medical
men are so clearly agreed, as on the connexion of exposure of persons to
the miasma from sewers, and of fever as a consequence” (371). The miasmic

Neil Addison

134

London air was also described by Dickens in Dombey and Son (1848) as “noxious
particles that rise from vitiated air” (647), being further referred to as “foulwith every impurity that is poisonous to health and life” (647). In the later
works of Dickens, such as Bleak House, the threatening air was more broadly
associated with the thick fog which hung over the city. For rural readers of
Dickens’ novels, such as the young Hardy, his malevolent depictions of the
foggy air would likely have established a particular set of visual expectations
about the metropolis.
While it is unclear when Hardy would have first encountered Dickens’
works, he may well have done so growing up in Higher Bockhampton
in Dorset. His mother Jemima was a voracious reader of classic andcontemporary books, and, according to The Life, from 8 years old Hardy was
already familiar with Dryden’s Virgil and Johnson’s Rasselas (Florence Hardy,
Early Life 21). At around this time Hardy first visited London with Jemima
on their way back from a family visit to Hertfordshire, briefly staying at The
Cross Keys, St. John Street, perhaps chosen because of its connection withthe poet Shelley. The inn, The Life tells us, was where “Shelley and Mary
Godwin had been accustomed to meet at weekends” (21). It is not difficult toimagine the works of Dickens finding their way into such a literate householdat around this time. What is more difficult to gauge is the impact that reading
Dickens’ novels for the first time must have had on rural readers that had
never visited the metropolis before, or those such as a young Hardy who
had done so only very briefly. While many writers through history haverelayed the excitement, pandemonium, squalor and vice of London, what
was significant about Dickens’ literary city was the means by which it wastransmitted to the public. Dickens’ novels, from The Pickwick Papers in 1837
to the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1870, were published during
what has been referred to as the “distribution revolution” (Lightman 30).
This revolution, the first phase of which took place from approximately 1830
to 1850, and which was characterized by the introduction and developmentof the Fourdrinier machine, industrial steam driven presses, case binding,Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

135

cheaper postal reform, and the institution of the railway system, saw writers
able to reach a mass reading audience on a scale previously unimaginable (31).
Dickens’ representations of London would therefore have offered readers apowerful and striking series of contemporary literary images of the nation’s
capital.
Dickens’ novels seem directly relevant to the London newcomer; Murray
Baumgarten has observed that Dickens’ books often feature arrival scenes, inwhich characters such as David Copperfield, Arthur Clenam, or Pip disembark
in the city (220), and his readers also experience the same sense of arrival. Thissense is particularly articulated by the London fog, which serves in Dickens’
work as a unique city-based landmark. The term “London particular” wasnot coined by Dickens, its use preceding the publication of Bleak House by
over twenty five years (Taylor 22) but Mr. Guppy’s proud boast to the newly
arrived Esther Summerson that the fog was “about a London particular” (51)provides within the architecture of the narrative the sense of a psychologicaland geographical threshold being crossed. For the newcomer, and indeed thereader, this distinguished the foggy, opaque city experientially from the clarityof what had passed before. Further, Dickens’ fog as “London particular” hada duality of function, and did more than transform the psycho-geography ofthe narrative; it was also the carrier of sickness and disease. In 1849, shortly
after Dombey and Son was issued and three years before Bleak House was first
serialised, London was afflicted by a particularly serious outbreak of cholera,
which in the last three months of the year saw deaths total 12,847 (Barker andJackson 279). The erroneous connection between the noxious air and disease
was emphasised by Edwin Chadwick in 1842, his great report documenting“instances of disease and death occasioned by miasma” (375). During thefirst part of the nineteenth century, however, this image had already been
established by illustrators such as Robert Seymour, who initially worked withthe younger Dickens on an early version of The Pickwick Papers (Wilson 117).
In Seymour’s illustration “Cholera ‘Tramples the Victors & the Vanquishedboth’” (1833), the disease is drawn as a form of foggy, poisonous air, becomingNeil Addison136

a personified antagonist. Later, in an extraordinary passage from Dickens’ Bleak
House the fog also becomes actively malevolent, spreading pain, suffering andthe threat of death:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows;
fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and thewaterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog
on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lyingout on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on
the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancientGreenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem
and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his closecabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice
boy on deck. (13)Upon his arrival in London, Hardy’s impressions of the city seem to reflect
the descriptions that had flowed from Dickens’ pen; he pointedly observedin retrospect that “It was quite Dickens’ London in those days” (Millgate,
Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited 75). Similarly, Hardy’s early focus was thefog; working at Adelphi Terrace, Hardy’s views of the Thames were frequently
obscured by the ‘London particular’, so that in an 1863 communication to his
sister Mary he bemoaned how, “To-day has been wretched. It was almost pitch
dark in the middle of the day, and everything visible appeared of the colourof brown paper or pea soup” (Purdy and Millgate, Collected Letters: 1 3). The
fog was to remain a topic of Hardy’s fascination throughout the nineteenth
century, occupying several of his letters to acquaintances. Much later, in an1890 missive sent from his London club to his wife Emma, Hardy remarked
chiefly upon the fog, writing “It is dense as a wall & black as soot to-night”(224).
During Hardy’s time in London during the 1860s, however, the polluted
city air began to lose its reputation as the chief carrier of disease due to thedemise of miasma theory. One factor in its disappearance was a growing

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

137

awareness of how fog could occur naturally in areas that weren’t polluted suchas the countryside (Taylor 54), but the reemergence of cholera also played
an important role in this change in perception. In 1849 the surgeon Dr. John
Snow had published On the Mode of Communication of Cholera in which hedirectly questioned the theory of miasma, arguing that cholera could not be
spread via the polluted air because the disease affected the intestines rather
than the lungs (Porter 412-13). Snow’s idea that cholera was a water-borne
disease was at first ignored but gradually won converts; when the sickness
struck London again in 1866, while Hardy was working at Adelphi Terrace,
Snow’s idea was finally confirmed by William Farr, thus at last disproving
the long lingering theory of miasma (Bingham et al. 387-93). The foggy
air began to represent a less immediate and deadly threat, but in Hardy’s
work of this period and indeed much later one still finds fog personified ina rather Dickensian fashion as both urban signifier and malevolent, sinister
force. While living in Westbourne Park Villas, Bayswater, a western suburbof London, Hardy addressed the stifling fog in his 1866 poem “Dream of theCity Shopwoman,” finally published in Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922):
O God, that creatures framed to feel
A yearning nature’s strong appeal
Should writhe on this eternal wheel
In rayless grime; (Hardy, Complete Poetical Works: II 379, 25-28)

In the poem, which describes the frustrated rural dreams of city-dwelling
retailers, the fog functions like Dickens’ ‘London particular’ as a liminal
marker between the rural and urban worlds, but also as a harmful, oppressive
force. The shop woman of the poem’s title is thwarted in her dreams of escapeand imprisoned within the “rayless grime” (379, 28). Hardy here combines
two images of entrapment, the woman being metaphorically shackled to anindustrial wheel surrounded in thick fog, conveying the sense of hopelessimprisonment.

Neil Addison

138

Hardy’s London fog is more actively personified in the much later 1899
poem “A Wife in London,” published in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901),
where his personal experience of the city appears to merge with the type ofanthropomorphic foggy air encountered in Bleak House. In the first stanza ofthe poem Hardy constructs an image of the city as a malevolent character thathas entrapped a war widow:
She sits in the tawny vapour
That the Thames-side lanes have uprolled,
Behind whose webby fold on fold
Like a waning taper
The street-lamp glimmers cold. (Hardy, Complete Poetical Works: I 123, 1-5)This is partly drawn from Hardy’s own experience of London, as from 187879 he lived in Arundel Terrace, Tooting with Emma (Florence Hardy, Early
Life 157-70), and their abode overlooked a corner street lamp. This may
possibly have been the subject of the poem “Beyond the Last Lamp (Near
Tooting Common),” published in Satires of Circumstance (1914). Here Hardy’s
narrator describes a wet and bitter evening in London, “While rain, with eve
in partnership, / Descended darkly, drip, drip, drip” (Hardy, Complete Poetical
Works: II 20, 1-2) and ruminates upon the purpose of two vaguely glimpsed
shapes. Hardy’s narrator passes a dimly lit couple loitering “Beyond thelast lone lamp” (3), and the lamp is more briefly referenced in “A Wife in
London.” The descriptions of the street lamp “Like a waning taper” (4), reflect
his poetry notebook entries from this time, as he describes “Going downstairs
with taper” and spotting “a lamp” (Dalziel and Millgate 8) through his partlyopened curtains. But through personification the city is also described assurrounded by a “tawny vapour” (123, 1) which has been actively “uprolled”
by the “Thames-side lanes” (2), becoming an animated extension of London’smalevolence, and bearing comparison with Dickens’ descriptions of anantagonistic fog in Bleak House.

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

139

IV
Dickens city is often represented as an unsustainable, entropic
environment, the seemingly illimitable chimneys of London producing
smoke and soot which cause environmental contamination. Just as the livesof Dickens’ characters are often stunted by their toxic environment, the city’s
trees become entrapped and poisoned by the systemic pollution emanated by
the metropolis. Similarly, one of Hardy’s more pessimistic poems, “To A Treein London”, concerns the contamination of London’s natural organisms by
the city’s smoke fumes. This may be partly attributable to the emergence ofthe theory of entropy; William Thomson’s 1862 paper “The Age of the Sun’s
Heat,” (Smith and Wise 524) perpetuated the belief that “the sun is one hugeglowing coal, a mere incandescent liquid mass cooling” (Morton 26). Yet
while some of Hardy’s more pessimistic works can be connected to the theoryof entropy, his literary focus on London as a decaying, polluted city can also
be partly attributed to the earlier influence of Dickens.
Thomson’s seminal 1862 paper affirmed that while the total amountof energy in a system would stay the same, heat would inevitably get lost,
leading in the case of the sun to a gradual wearing out. This new belief inultimate entropy and solar termination led to a series of concerns during theVictorian era regarding the dissipation of energy (Dale 229), and contributed“considerably to widespread anxieties of fin de siècle, fin du globe” (Gold 290).
Certainly, by the time that Hardy was engaged upon his later works, the ideaof biological degeneration, a by-product of Neo-Darwinian thought andentropic theory, was a prevalent literary theme, and several scholars haveidentified Hardy’s treatment of biological atrophy in his novels and poetry(Ebbatson 1; Morton 86). Further, Angelique Richardson specifically connects
this to Hardy’s representations of the metropolis:
For Hardy, London is a hotbed of environmental gloom . . . Through thisemphasis on the environment Hardy embraces the central tenet of Darwinism,

Neil Addison140

the interrelation of individual and environment, and, ultimately, thesubordination of species to their surroundings. (167)

Dickens’ descriptions of decay, which precede the emergence of Hardy’s
scientific and biological influences, interestingly appear to resemble the latter
writer’s own descriptions. In Dickens’ Bleak House, London can be seen as
an entropic city, slowly suffocating itself and gradually dying. In tracing therelationship between scientific entropy and nineteenth century-literature,
Barri J. Gold has recently argued that Dickens’ novel “describes a landscapedominated by entropic decay at every scale” (292). Yet it was published before
the process of entropy was named in 1859 or Thomson’s paper in 1862 (Smithand Wise 524). Further, it preceded Darwin’s On The Origin of Species (1859),
which raised the troubling prospect of species extinction, but Dickens’ darkly
imaginative descriptions in Bleak House, such as the “death of the sun” and the
apocalyptic image of the “megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling likean elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill” (13) seem to remarkably anticipate themore public articulation of entropy that was to follow during the second halfof the nineteenth century.
In particular, Dickens employed descriptions of sick or dying organisms toemphasize the city-borne decay in his novels. In Our Mutual Friend (1865) the
narration described “A grey, dusty withered evening in London city” where “theCity grit gets into the hair and eyes and skin and when the fallen leaves of the
few unhappy trees grind down in corners under wheels of wind” (393). Bothflora and humans are at the mercy of the same pollution here; the dying leaves
are synonymous with the dirty condition of the London inhabitants, as bothare afflicted by the grit in the city air. In the earlier Dombey and Son Dickens
focused on the source of this atrophy, describing Mr Dombey’s house, whichlooks upon “a graveled yard, where two gaunt trees, with blackened trunks andbranches, rattled rather than rustled, their leaves were so smoke dried” (21).
Much later, although the actual composition date is unclear, Hardy publishedthe poem “To A Tree in London” in Winter Words (1928), which used

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

141

strikingly similar imagery. The piece depicts a tree trapped and polluted by thedirt of the city, and Hardy’s poetic narrator describes:
Smoke like earth whereon to feed. . . .
Thus, black, blind,
You have opined
Nothing of your brightest kind; (Hardy, Complete Poetical Works: III 203-4, 18-21)

The source of this “smoke-like earth” and indeed most of the city’s pollution
was caused by the many coal fires burning in the kitchens and living roomsof the city’s dwellers (Taylor 51), which, in Bleak House, produces “smoke
lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle” (13). Rather
like Thomson’s entropic theory of the sun, while coal provided London’senergy it would ultimately prove unsustainable and burn out. The city’s
chimneys and factories would need constant replenishment to avoid runningout of fuel. In doing so, as shown in Bleak House, the vast amount of smoke
produced would directly pollute the surrounding environs, contaminating its
denizens.
Similarly, Hardy’s first published work, the 1865 short comic vignette“How I Built Myself a House,” published in the Edinburgh-based Chambers
Journal, can be described as rather Dickensian in its depictions of coal fumes
and smoke. Like his “Dream of the City Shopwoman,” this early work was
written when Hardy was living at Westbourne Park Villas, and in the story hedescribes a similarly appointed dwelling, his narrator relaying details of “thesort of house called a Highly-Desirable Semi-detached Villa” (16). Hardy’s
narrator visits Mr. Penny, a London merchant who faintly reminds the readerof a Dickensian tradesman on the make, and orders a house that is then builtwith a dysfunctional “study fire” (22) producing smoke that fails to ascend. In
personified style the polluting smoke particles are sent “curling into the room”(22) to assail the homeowners, and are reminiscent of the passage from Martin
Chuzzlewit (1844) where the city smoke is described as akin to the ghostly air

Neil Addison142of Tom Pinch’s Temple quarters, having “thickened round and round him”(582). The story also appears metaphorical; through its dependence on coal
Hardy’s home, like Dickens’ London in Bleak House, proves to be an entropic
environment, self-polluting its own inhabitants.
V
While Hardy’s descriptions of the city’s fog and smoke may well owe adebt to Dickens’ style, they were also influenced by his experiences of thedramatic changes that London underwent during the 1860s. Such changes werepartly initiated by governmental select committees in order to combat thetroubling urban pollution and sickness (Inwood 526), and one of the mostdramatic developments was the construction of the city’s railway system. Thiswas initiated in 1836, but during the 1860s when Hardy was living in London
it was greatly extended (547). Dickens had previously addressed the comingof the railway system in Dombey and Son (1848) and showed the effect thatwitnessing these mighty vehicles would have had upon the public. In thenovel he represents trains as akin to fiery monsters in descriptions reminiscentof J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway (1844).
In the following passage an onrushing locomotive takes on the form of anindustrial sublime, and is shown through the eyes of the terrified Mr. Carker,
who describes:
a trembling of the ground, and quick vibration in his ears; a distant shriek; adull light advancing, quickly changed to two red eyes, and a fierce fire, dropping
glowing coals; an irresistible bearing on of a great roaring and dilating mass; ahigh wind, and a rattle. (776)

By Hardy’s time the British public had become more accustomed to such
scenes, and this growing familiarity is reflected in his narrative focus whichcenters less upon the train as phenomena and more upon its role as social

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

143

nexus. The exact London station which the young Hardy disembarked fromin 1862, nervously clutching a return rail ticket, is not mentioned in The Life
(Florence Hardy, Early Life 46), although in Hardy’s The Well-Beloved Jocelyn
Pierson and Marcia Bencomb are shown embarking upon a similar train
journey to the city. The railway line is described as having “only recently been
opened” and Jocelyn, fearing that the intimacy of the trip should end, dreads
reaching its destination, “the great London station” (25). Dickens’ descriptionsof an industrial sublime are absent in The Well-Beloved, and the image ofdevilish, fiery machinery is replaced by the quiet privacy of a railway carriage,
with Hardy’s narrative focusing on the interplay between its inhabitants.
The construction of the London railway system involved the demolition ofaround 800 acres of residential property, leading to enormous changes acrossthe city (Inwood 526). The densely populated London of Dickens’ novels,with its slums and rookeries, was transformed into a more commerciallyorganized world of offices, warehouses and banks (527). The developmentof Hardy’s own literary voice can be traced to the changing London of thisperiod, and especially connected to the construction of St Pancras station
which took place between the years 1863-66 (Barker and Jackson 322-23).
Prior to the establishment of its station, St Pancras had been chiefly notablefor its large cemetery, and in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) it serves as
the location for the funeral of Roger Cly. The cemetery also features in thenovel as the sinister location of a grave robbing, as the watching Mr. Jeremiah
Cruncher prepares to go “a fishing” (151). Later, under the cover of darkness,
Cruncher is followed to the cemetery entrance by his curious and naive son,who, gazing inside, “made out the three fishermen creeping through some rank
grass! and all the gravestones in the churchyard” (153-54). The graverobbers
draw the coffin up, Dickens describing how “their bent figures were strained,
as if by a weight. By slow degrees the weight broke away the earth upon it,
and came to the surface” (154). Six years later during the construction of the
new St Pancras station, Hardy was personally responsible for the removal oftombs from the site, yet unlike Mr. Cruncher he was no grave robber. Hardy

Neil Addison144

was employed by Sir Arthur Blomfield in the winter of 1865 to disinter old
graves from St Pancras churchyard. The space was needed to make way for
one of the new railway lines, and while removing a number of corpses heencircled an ash tree with the excess gravestones (Florence Hardy, Early Life
58-59). The same tree quite possibly features in “Neutral Tones,” a poem notpublished until 1898 in Wessex Poems but composed in 1867. The piece likely
concerns Hardy’s relationship with a lady’s maid called Eliza Nichols that
occurred in London around 1863-67 (Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography 81).
The tree is used to symbolize the end of the affair, and Hardy’s narrator tells
us that “a few leaves lay on the starving sod; / — They had fallen from an ash,
and were gray” (Hardy, Complete Poetical Works: I 13, 3-4). Ash relates to theChristian festival of repentance and the remembrance of corporeal death, but
the St Pancras tree and its associations with the gravestone circle would havebeen fresh and resonant in Hardy’s mind when he was searching for a bleak
metaphor to emphasize the death of a relationship.
Hardy’s experience in removing corpses is very likely to have influenced
the later poem “The Levelled Churchyard,” published in Poems of the Past and
the Present (1901) but composed in 1882. In the poem the voices of the deadcall out to those that pass by:“O passenger, pray list and catchOur sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!
“We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,‘I know not which I am!’
“The wicked people have annexed
The verses on the good;
A roaring drunkard sports the text

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

145

Teetotal Tommy should!
“Where we are huddled none can trace,
And if our names remain,
They pave some path or porch or place
Where we have never lain!
“Here’s not a modest maiden elf
But dreads the final Trumpet,
Lest half of her should rise herself,
And half some sturdy strumpet!
“From restorations of Thy fane,
From smoothings of Thy sward,
From zealous Churchmen’s pick and plane,
Deliver us O Lord! Amen!” (Hardy, Complete Poetical Works: I 196-97, 1-24)

In this poem there is no mention of the St Pancras ash tree, but Hardy’s
ring of gravestones that encircled it appear to be referenced in the lines“this jumbled patch / Of wrenched memorial stones” (3-4). The poem
also addresses other events that took place while Hardy was working at thecemetery. The experience often saw Hardy working late into the night witha team of navies to exhume skeletons and The Life describes how “Hardy
supervised these mournful processions when present, with what thoughts may
be imagined” (Florence Hardy, Early Life 59). During these nocturnal shifts
bodies lifted from the graves were occasionally mixed up and in some cases
went astray (58-59), and the effect of these events may have helped influence
the more ironical and macabre aspects of Hardy’s literary voice.
This sense of the macabre is in particular evidenced in the blackly comic“The Levelled Churchyard,” where the good and pious are intermixed withthe bodies of the profane. A “modest maiden elf” (Hardy, Complete Poetical
Works: I 196-97, 17) is corporeally fused with a “strumpet” (20), while a “roaring
drunkard” usurps the plot of “Teetotal Tommy” (11-12), ironically placingNeil Addison146

the ascension of the worthy in jeopardy while at the same time enhancing
the chances of the heathen entering heaven. The narrator’s tone, however,with its facetious descriptions of “human jam” (6), appears less appalled
than darkly amused. This tone bears some similarity to Dickens’ grotesquedescriptions of Mr. Cruncher’s “fishing,” but Hardy’s mood of black humor
is further accentuated by the way in which the poem takes the form of amock church hymn. This distinguishes his work from the more piously moral
novels of Dickens, Hardy’s poem culminating with the final lines “Fromzealous Churchmen’s pick and plane / Deliver us O Lord! Amen!” (24) Thus
we can here see Hardy’s macabre experiences of London underpinning thedevelopment of a dark and ironic style very much his own.
VI
Hardy’s treatment of the city’s pollution is ultimately particular to his
own age; and this appears singularly so in his representation of the Thames,
which through the establishment of medical epidemiological practice came tobe seen as the cause of cholera (Bingham et al. 387-393). Dickens had earlier
connected the noxious and sickly river metaphorically to the fallen womenof the city in David Copperfield (1850), Martha the prostitute described as“part of the refuse that it had cast out, and left to corruption and decay”(687). Later, the “Fog up the river . . . fog down the river” in Bleak House wasused as a vehicle for the widespread transference of riverside pollution. This
was then further developed in Our Mutual Friend, where the great river, themutual lifeblood of all Londoners, both connects and separates the worldsof the rich and the poor through its tidal flows. Gaffer Hexam, the boatman,is grotesquely symbolic of these connections; like the tides he floats between
these worlds, making his living by scavenging coins from the corpses of thosethat have fallen into the river:
The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

147

watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slighthead-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed
his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as hewatched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dreador horror. (13)Such tidal interconnections thus function in a similar fashion to Dickens’
airborne fog in Bleak House, and, like the earlier novel, are achieved toillustrate a moral point which, as Michelle Allen notes, illustrates how “filthy
material conditions reflect a perilous social condition” (501). Yet, while Our
Mutual Friend was written during the early 1860s, it rather surprisingly fails tomention the two major riverside projects that dominated the capital during
this period: the construction of the Thames Embankment, which ran from
1864-70 (Inwood 553), and the London sewers, which were completed in 1868(434). This may well reflect the fact that by the time Dickens came to write
Our Mutual Friend he was no longer resident in London, although he would
almost certainly have been aware of both projects, and likely seen actual
evidence of their construction when commuting into the city to perform
readings or organize the publication of his works.
By this time Hardy was a working Londoner, and during his early days
while employed at Adelphi Terrace the construction of Joseph Bazalgette’s
sewers were already well under way (Inwood 434). The planning scheme had
been in effect forced into action by the noxious fumes emanating from theThames in 1858 known as the Great Stink (Taylor 59). Hardy specificallymentions this project and the great need for it in his notes from this time,
describing how, “the stench from the mud at low water increased, theMetropolitan main-drainage system not having been yet constructed” (Florence
Hardy, Early Life 70). Prior to this Dickens’ putrid river was chiefly used as amoral analogy for London’s social ills, but by 1866 William Farr, following
the earlier work of Dr. John Snow, realized that it presented a problem forcitizens that far exceeded its noxious odors; it was the chief cause of the city’sNeil Addison

148

cholera outbreaks (Bingham et al. 387-393). Londoners began to fear exposure
to the river’s waters in untreated form, their worries about its unedifying stink
replaced by a much greater concern over its role in producing the deadly
water-borne disease. Hardy clearly shows this public awareness of the dangersof the Thames in a passage from The Hand of Ethelberta, in a description that
juxtaposes the charm of the London riverside at night with its more sinisterrisks. These contrasts are seen through the eyes of the newcomer Picotee,
who arrives in London at dusk, crosses Westminster Bridge, and notices the
behavior of the pedestrians:
The lights along the riverside towards Charing Cross sent an inverted palisadeof gleaming swords down into the shaking water, and the pavement ticked tothe touch of pedestrians’ feet, most of whom tripped along as if walking only topractice a favourite quick step, and held handkerchiefs to their mouths to strain
off the river mist from their lungs. (139)This public fear over the safety of the river also reflects Hardy’s own personal
experience; working next to the Thames near Charing Cross, in almost exactly
the same location described in his novel, his health drastically deteriorated.
The Life tells how the seriousness of his illness caused his employer Blomfield
to urge him to quit the capital, which he finally did in 1867, returning to his
native Dorset to convalesce (Florence Hardy, Early Life 70-71). Just as theThames had weakened him, it was the waters at Weymouth that fully revived
him. In 1869 he became a resident of the town, bathing in the ocean every
morning, so that “after the enervation of London, this tonic existence by thesea seemed ideal, and that physically he went back ten years in his age” (84).
VII
If London had been the cause of Thomas Hardy’s sickness it was ultimately
the source of his success, just as it was the lifeblood of Charles Dickens’ fame.

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

149

Once recovered, Hardy returned to the city in the 1870s and, following his
chance encounter with Tinsley on the Strand, finally mustered the resolve
to confront the wily publisher at his offices and renegotiate terms moreshrewdly so that he would retain the rights to his next composition (Florence
Hardy, Early Life 118). Interestingly, as The Life relays how negotiations
turned to Hardy’s advantage, the defeated Tinsley’s characterization in thesepassages becomes less Dickensian. Hardy’s descriptions of his nemesis’ voice
and register begin to convey a more gentlemanly tone (118). Hardy’s next
publication with Tinsley’s company was Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), andthis came to the attention of Leslie Stephen, the editor of the London Cornhill
Magazine (125). Within two years the success of the Cornhill’s serialized Farfrom the Madding Crowd (1874) had all-but secured Hardy’s literary reputation,
thanks chiefly to his chance Strand encounter with Tinsley. In this sense,
Hardy’s success can be seen as resembling the kind of Dickensian plot device
in which unforeseen good fortune and happenstance plays a key role in theascent of the London hero. Further, although his fiction was to chiefly shift
its focus towards Dorset, Hardy enjoyed a close relationship with the city of
London for the rest of his life. He enjoyed the membership of several London
clubs, regularly attending the Saville, the Rabelais and the Athenaeum, and was
generally keen to cultivate the image of himself as an urban, urbane Londonerwell into old age. In an unsigned article in the London Standard, 2 June 1910,
published in honor of his seventieth birthday, and most likely dictated by
Hardy himself, he is described as:
an interesting and interested figure, passing through the London streets on his
way to the Athenaeum club, ‘doing’ picture galleries with conscientious care,
and attending service at St Paul’s Cathedral, or some of the city churches.
(Millgate, Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice 313)

It seems appropriate, therefore, that while the heart of Thomas Hardy wasburied at St Michael’s Churchyard, Dorset, his body was laid at Poets Corner,

150

Neil Addison

Westminster Abbey (Florence Hardy, Early Life 267). Directly next to Hardy’s
grave is the tomb of Charles Dickens, and the two great Victorian novelists
now lie side-by-side. This is symbolically appropriate, as in reading examplesof Hardy’s London writings we can find discernable traces of Dickens’
influence. Dickens’ specific narrative representations of London, including
his ‘London Particular’, made an impression upon Hardy. Yet these literaryinfluences were also merged with Hardy’s own experiences, as a number ofgreat changes occurred during his time in London. During the 1860s Hardy
witnessed the extension of the city railway system and the construction of
the sewers and the Embankment, while, through the identification of cholera
as a water-borne disease, he would also have been aware of the establishmentof medical epidemiology. While the works of Dickens and Hardy are quite
different, their literature is also connected by some similar aspects which are
specific to the Victorian London of their time. Discovering these London
connections helps aid a study of Hardy’s early development as a writer whilefurther illustrating the intense power of Dickens’ particular narrative legacy.
WORKS CITED
Allen, Michelle. “A More Expansive Reach: The Geography of the Thames in Our
Mutual Friend.” Dickens and the City, edited by Jeremy Tambling. Ashgate
Publishing, 2012. pp. 497-528.
Barker, Felix, and Peter Jackson. London: 2000 Years of a City and its People. Cassell,
1983.
Baumgarten, Murray. “Reading Dickens Writing London.” Partial Answers: Journal of
Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 9, no 2, 2011, pp. 219-231. Project Muse, doi.
org/10.1353/pan.2011.0020.
Bingham, P., et al. “John Snow, William Farr and the 1849 Outbreak of Cholera that
Affected London: A Reworking of the Data Highlights the Importance of The
Water Supply.” Journal of the Royal Institute of Public Health, vol. 118, 2004, pp.
387-94. ResearchGate, doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2004.05.007.
Björk, Lennart A., editor. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy: Volume 2.
Macmillan, 1985.

Dickens, Hardy and “a London Particular”

151

Chadwick, Edwin. Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Gt.
Britain, edited by M. W. Flinn. 1842. Edinburgh at the UP, 1965.
Dale, Peter Allen. In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art and Society in the VictorianAge. U of Wisconsin P, 1989.
Dalziel, Pamela, and Michael Millgate, editors, Thomas Hardy’s ‘Poetical Matter
Notebook’. Oxford UP, 2009.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Penguin Books, 1996.
―. David Copperfield. 1850. Penguin Books, 2004.
―. Dombey and Son. 1848. Oxford UP, 1989.
―. Martin Chuzzlewit. 1844. Penguin Books, 1999.
―. The Old Curiosity Shop. 1841. Oxford UP, 1989.
―. Our Mutual Friend. 1865. Oxford UP, 1989.
―. Sketches by Boz. 1836. Wordsworth Editions, 1999.
―. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859. Oxford UP, 1989.
Ebbatson, Roger. The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence. Harvester P, 1982.
Gibson, James. Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections. MacMillan P, 1999.
Gold, Barri, J. “Thermodynamics.” The Routledge Research Companion to NineteenthCentury British Literature and Science, edited by John Holmes and Sharon Ruston.
Routledge, 2017. pp. 286-99.
Halliday, Stephen. “Death and Miasma in Victorian London: An Obstinate
Belief.” BMJ, vol. 323, 2001, pp. 1469-71. ResearchGate, doi.org/10.1136/
bmj.323.7327.1469.
Hardy, Florence Emily. The Early Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840-1891. MacMillan, 1928.
―. The Later Years of Thomas Hardy: 1892-1928. MacMillan, 1930.
Hardy, Thomas. The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy: I, edited by SamuelHynes. Oxford UP, 1984.
―. The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy: II, edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford UP, 1984.
―. The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy: III, edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford UP, 1984.
―. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. 1876. AMS P, 1984.
―. How I Built Myself a House.” 1865. The Excluded and Collaborative Stories,
edited by Pamela Dalziel. Oxford UP, 1992. pp. 16-23.
―. The Well-Beloved. 1897. Wordsworth Classics, 2000.
Inwood, Stephen. A History of London. 1998. Macmillan, 2000.
Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences.
2007. U of Chicago P, 2010.

152

Neil Addison

Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. Oxford UP, 1982.
―. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford UP, 2004.
―, editor. Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice: The Essays, Speeches and Miscellaneous Prose.
Oxford at the Clarendon P, 2001.
Morton, Peter. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1900.
Routledge, 1984.
Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from
Antiquity to the Present. HarperCollins, 1997.
Purdy, Richard Little, and Michael Millgate, editors. The Collected Letters of Thomas
Hardy: Volume One 1840-1892. Oxford at the Clarendon P, 1978.
―, editors. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy: Volume Two 1893-1901. Oxford
at the Clarendon P, 1980.
Richardson, Angelique. “Hardy and Science: A Chapter of Accidents.” Palgrave
Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies, edited by Philip Mallet. Palgrave Macmillan,
2004. pp. 156-80.
Schwarzbach, F. S. Dickens and the City. University of London: Athlone P, 1979.
Seymour, Robert. “Cholera ‘Tramples the Victors & the Vanquished Both.’” 1833.
U.S National Library of Medicine Digital Collections. N.d. http://resource.nlm.nih.
gov/101393375.
Smith, Crosbie, and M. Norton Wise. Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord
Kelvin. Cambridge UP, 1989.
Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from
Dickens to Woolf. U of Virginia P, 2016.
Wilson, Angus. The World of Charles Dickens. Penguin Books, 1970.
―Associate Professor, Japan Women’s University