Earthly intermundia: office space in the works of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens's literary preoccupation with bureaucracy reflects its ascendant, but often contradictory, position in Victorian society. Exclusive, disordered, and in parts archaic - but at the same time increasingly pervasive, and visibly cohering into a recognisably modern form - bureaucratic organisation became a major (albeit neither infallible, nor uncontested) phenomenon in fiction during this period as much as in real life. In this article I explore such portrayals by focusing on Dickens's aesthetic of the ostensible centre of bureaucratic power, the office itself, as a space. By rooting his ironical and often paradoxical uses of this setting within the broader crises of social knowledge and materiality that underlay nineteenth-century bureaucratisation, I argue that the Dickensian office, between The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House, performs a range of functions directly linked to its multifaceted condition of interstiality. These interstices are literal, in the office's capacity as a physical intermediary, but also social, conceptual, and in terms of literary form.