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Stephanie Polsky, Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London, Alresford, Zone Books, 2015; £17.99 paperback
As I write this, the BBC has just concluded its new drama Dickensian, a spectacular costume mash-up in which Tony Jordan has re-imagined Dickens's fictional universe as a kind of Victorian EastEnders. In the show, over forty of Dickens's iconic characters inhabit the same street and are enmeshed in the same whodunit plot about the murder of greedy moneylender Jacob Marley. The ease with which Jordan has moved from a soap opera born in the midst of neoliberal Thatcherism to the world of Dickens's oeuvre is testament to the deep connections we can find between Dickens's London and our own - connections that Stephanie Polsky pursues in Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London. In this book, Polsky joins a growing wave of thinkers who posit that we can best understand our neoliberal and postmodern present by scrutinising the liberal modernity that marked Victoria's reign. Polsky is up front about her participation in the 'trend towards neo-Victorianism,' a trend that she argues 'impacts all of our debates related to economic crisis, globalisation, consumerism, social justice, neoliberalism, and neocolonial warfare' (p3). Ignoble Displacement reads Dickens's fictions as providing us with a resonant narrative description of the liberal political economy that continues to inform the ideology and policies of Britain's Conservative government today.
Polsky's book offers four extraordinarily long, wide-ranging, and often meandering chapters, which variously read London's housing crisis, contemporary finance capitalism, imperial labor, and neoliberal empire in relation to Dickens's novels Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Nicholas Nickleby, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and A Christmas Carol. Her first chapter, '"Tomorrow" and Yesterday: The Peculiar British Property of Domestic Dispossession,' concerns issues of insecure housing both in Dickens's London and ours. Chapter two, 'Bank Draft: The Winds of Change in Little Dorrit's Domestic Economy,' reads Little Dorrit as providing an early view into how 'neoliberal policy has fractured the sovereignty of the state' (p131). Chapter three, 'Cosmopolitan Fortunes: Imperial Labour and Metropolitan Wealth in Dickens's Great Expectations,' considers the intersections of the category of the 'gentleman' with workingclass, criminal, colonial, and slave forms of labour in Dickens's novel and...