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The introduction establishes the historical, cultural and theoretical contexts and frameworks that guide the monograph. While the aim of this study is to engage with and entertain the illuminating possibilities of Casement’s notoriously amorphous legacy, rather than attempt to assert any definitive biographical narrative, tracing the contours of Casement’s extraordinary life is necessary if we are to fully appreciate the complex contradictions that shaped Casement’s existence. To this end, a concise but thorough overview of Casement’s life is offered in the first part of the introduction in order to lay important foundations for the project’s literary discussion and analysis.

The brief epilogue to this volume offers some concluding thoughts on the process by which the Arabian Nights was absorbed into British literature and culture. It then identifies the emergence of a new vision of these tales in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, which celebrated the transformation of the magical metropolis into a dynamic space of magic and mystery that supposedly far excelled its Eastern counterparts. The increasing permeability of national boundaries, coupled with an increasingly global commodity culture in late-Victorian London, intensified fantasies of the modern city as a place of adventure, with a now internalised, potent Oriental presence. In many ways, this centre of commerce, industry and science became that fantastic, unpredictable and ever-alluring space of a new Arabian Nights.

Sentimental obituaries published after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 remark that phrases and characters from his fiction “[mingle] with our daily converse and our daily life” (Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun. 1870, p. 4). This is certainly true. However, the convivial tone of this eulogy obscures how literary afterlives were appropriated to argue for material changes to London’s built environment, the effects of which were often misaligned with Dickens’s broadly humanitarian ethos. For example, tropes, extracts, and characters from his novels were mobilised to advocate the demolition of insanitary and overcrowded slum areas, but such modernisations were rarely accompanied by the building of new housing for the displaced population. The introduction to Dickens and Demolition introduces these central concerns of the book: to trace Dickensian afterlives across multiple media and fora; to examine what role these afterlives played in urban development discourses; and to argue that fiction was part of the dialectical relations between past, present and future, through which London’s modernisation was conceived and represented. The chapter also introduces key terminology, such as remediation, appropriation, and adaptation.

For readers who are unfamiliar with the historical contexts underpinning London’s improvement in the mid-nineteenth century, Chapter 1 offers an account of the processes and problems of improvement during Dickens’s lifetime. Addressing the fragmentation of the built environment and the diverse actors and institutions who commented on and influenced metropolitan developments, it suggests that the haphazard nature of improvement in the mid-nineteenth century dovetailed generatively with Dickens’s style and popularity, and that this enabled his works to be used effectively to promote urban change. Far from suggesting that people credulously accepted Dickens’s descriptions as “realistic” accounts of contemporary London conditions, however, this chapter (and, indeed, the book as a whole) argues that mid-nineteenth-century users of Dickens treated his novels as a store of widely known imagery that could be superimposed on to the urban environment. Afterlives were self-consciously curated to enable discussion about large and complex social problems, to make users’ critiques more pointed and memorable, or to curate legible representations of the city.

Field Lane was envisioned as a nexus of crime, overcrowding, foreignness, social unrest and insanitary conditions in representations of the district in multiple media and contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. In London more widely, these anxieties helped to shape how improvements were conceived, and which places were targeted for demolition. This chapter presents evidence that the improvements promised by advocates of Field Lane’s redevelopment were repeatedly articulated and conceptualised through references to Oliver Twist. For example, by emphasising its association with Fagin and Bill Sikes to draw attention to the slum as a dangerous locale. Focusing on appropriations of Dickens’s works in newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary debates, the chapter traces a proliferation of Dickensian afterlives in commentaries on Field Lane’s improvement before, during and after its demolition. Of course, as is the case with all the afterlives analysed in this book, the novel was variously appropriated, even when users commented on the same site or descriptive passage. However, it is in this instability that we can see how Dickensian afterlives were put to work in arguments for Field Lane’s demolition. His fiction provided a mobile and rhetorically effective vocabulary, which was easily manipulated to serve numerous interests.

This chapter argues that we can track Dickensian afterlives in both the cultural processes by which cultural memories of Jacob’s Island have been constructed, and the processes that drove its material destruction earlier in the nineteenth century. Linked to outbreaks of cholera in the 1830s and 1840s, the slum was widely treated as a symbol which could help to galvanize metropolitan sanitary reform. Dickens’s representation of the site in Oliver Twist was repeatedly brought into these debates. The author was deeply invested in efforts to improve London’s sanitation, and like other commentators he returned to his early novel to support his campaigns. Both Dickens and other commentators presented Oliver Twist as an urgent call for contemporary reform; however, the novel’s afterlives soon changed in tone. As early as the 1870s, press commentators responded to the area’s physical alteration and evoked Oliver Twist as a record of a bygone city. By the 1880s, artists and writers nostalgically reimagined Dickens’s account of the site in an urban picturesque aesthetic. Today, Dickens is part of a heritage trail in the district, even though his representation also played a part in the demolition of Jacob’s Island.

The Coda offers a reprise of the book’s the central arguments. Namely, that Dickens’s legacies can be traced in surprising, physical effects in London’s built environment. By exploring polymodal afterlives of his fiction over which he had no control, as well as his interventions in contemporary urban issues, Dickens and Demolition proposes that the impact of literary works lingers in the world around us in ways of which we may not always be conscious. Indeed, Dickensian afterlives are traceable in demolitions that have erased areas of Old London from the capital. The Coda restates that the potential of Dickensian afterlives to effect public debate and physical spaces in this manner was enabled by a particular set of circumstances, which were already being reformed during Dickens’s lifetime. Nevertheless, questions are raised about other authors, cities and countries.