Architecture

This chapter considers Dickens’s ambiguous and shifting use of architecture, beginning from Joe’s remark in Great Expectations (1860–61) that the pictures of a blacking warehouse he has visited in London are ‘drawd too architectooralooral’. In spiralling into repetition and meaninglessness, Joe’s term ‘architectooralooral’ acts as a key to a strain of ‘anti-architecture’ in Dickens’s work, which takes various forms. This tendency is explored with particular reference to ornamentality, the domestic and picturesque, Dickens’s satirising of architects in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44), and his description of Venice in Pictures from Italy (1846). In the latter case, Dickens’s account is compared with passages from Ruskin’s contemporaneous Stones of Venice (1851–53). The chapter ranges across Dickens’s works, while also touching on significant historical developments of the period, such as the ‘battle of styles’ between Classical and Gothic design, and the growing schism between architects and engineers.