The neighborhood was a dreary one at that time—as oppressive, sad, and solitary by night as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcasses of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving bells, windmill sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which—having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather—they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery works upon the riverside arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, the rags of last year’s handbills, offering rewards for drowned men, fluttering above the high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb tide.
The books of Charles Dickens brim with finely wrought characters—to read David Copperfield is to make several new friends and one or two nemeses—but this particular passage from Copperfield is remarkable for its dearth of human beings. Yet the portraitist in Dickens can’t help but to personify the scene: houses have carcasses, wooden piles grow a substance like green hair, and rusty objects were vainly trying to hide themselves. The narrator deduces human history from visible artifacts: without conducting any interviews, he can tell that the houses were inauspiciously begun and never finished, and those rusty objects were accumulated by some speculator. Dickens has already betrayed his interest in people.
The passage’s main achievement, though, is to connect decay with industry by juxtaposing images. Nominally, we are presented with a neighborhood and a factory. But “the neighborhood” is a misnomer—it consists of a prison and a sort of graveyard for rotting houses, “rusty iron monsters,” and “drowned men.” We are left to infer that the factory is to blame, as it disturbs “everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke,” apparently the factory’s flagship product. A century after Copperfield, Joseph Schumpeter described the “creative destruction” of capitalism, but Dickens here shows us capitalism’s unredeemed destruction: abandoned houses, decaying wares (left by a “speculator”), and unidentified slush, ooze, sickly substance, and slimy gaps. The market may have a solution for every problem (”…last year’s handbills, offering rewards for drowned men”), but this passage displays, without overt commentary, capitalism’s grotesque aspect.
Further reading: David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
