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This chapter moves from the prostitute woman to the milieu of which she was a part. It asks whether prostitutes represented, as many historians have argued, a marginalized and relatively invisible section of German society. It investigates with whom prostitutes interacted, and the nature of the economic and personal relationships in which they participated. Where did prostitutes live and work? Whom did they solicit and why? Did they do business with any other notable characters and, if so, whom? All of these questions seek a better understanding of where prostitutes fitted within German society and what that reveals about the workings of urban society more generally.

This chapter recounts how Fyodor Dostoevsky was decidedly not on the straight and steady path that Pushkin and Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy appeared to travel to glory and fame in 1846 and 1847. It elaborates Dostoevsky's feelings of going off the rails in literature and life when he published The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Landlady, and A Novel in Nine Letters after he released Poor Folk. It also describes the disturbed and deranged characters, complex and convoluted plots, and winding and windy prose of Dostoevsky's four works that caused former admirers and fans to lose faith in him and look elsewhere for solutions to national problems. The chapter speculates about scenarios of what would have happened if Dostoevsky had handled the success of Poor Folk in a more humble and judicious way.

This chapter centers on Fyodor Dostoevsky's final break with Vissarion Belinsky and his circle, as well as his increasing struggles to stay afloat, internally and externally. It provides a unifying analysis of the novels The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Landlady, and A Novel in Nine Letters, which Dostoevsky wrote in 1847. It also explains how the lead characters in Dostoevsky's novels confused readers with timeworn portrayals of mania and madness, roguery, and romance that related little to contemporary life. The chapter explains The Double, Mr. Prokharchin, The Landlady, and A Novel in Nine Letters as a significant exercise in which Dostoevsky probed minds, hearts, and souls to understand human faults and failings. It talks about Dostoevsky's assertion that his four works did not portray political, social, and economic injustices that wreaked havoc on society, but rather the psychological and spiritual traumas of individuals that eroded humankind.

Decrying suburbia at the fin de siècle placed a speaker in a long literary and cultural tradition; Gissing, Wells, Bennett, and Forster inherited images and terms of culturally and aesthetically arid, bourgeois suburbia that had been in circulation for decades. The stereotyping of suburbia in the early to mid-Victorian years was one way of attempting to limit the increasing cultural force of the middle classes: the image of the dull, identikit suburb was a stereotype employed in the service of an aristocratic ideology that emerged at a time of upper-class retreat.

Novels set in suburban locales represent a world in flux. Beneath the shifting sands of social mobility run thick strands of apparently common knowledge that reassure readers of continuity with the past and the existence of enduring values. These values—such as suspicion of suburban homes’ commodity status, the charge of vulgar furnishing—undoubtedly express suspicion of the new masses. But they also form a means of fostering connections, shared perspectives, in a time of dizzying change.

The pragmatic local management of out-of-wedlock pregnancy also relied on the paid work of landladies, midwives, and wet-nurses who made the smooth and even respectable handing of single parenthood possible. Some landladies specialized in short-term rentals to young expectant mothers for whom they provided pre- and post-natal care and arranged midwives and wet-nurses. Young men who did not or could not marry could save their reputations by meeting their paternal responsibilities—renting such a room, being present at the baby’s baptism, and taking custody of the newborn in arrangements that closely replicated what a paternity suit award would usually involve. Midwives also served as medico-legal experts who were gatekeepers to paternity suits as they had to confirm the alleged pregnancy for the courts.

This chapter uses as its main source the Annuity Tax Roll for Edinburgh, which lists every landlord, tenant, and property in Edinburgh in 1635. It considers the presence of women in the tax roll both as landladies and tenants, and therefore explores economic issues such as women's control of property, and social issues such as spinster-clustering. It also uses debt litigation to explore the issue of landlord-tenant relationships, not just in Edinburgh, but also in Haddington, Linlithgow, and Dundee. From there, the chapter examines the control of monetary property, through the practice of moneylending, which also had a clear status element, and the control of small property, through cases of pawnbroking.

The Introduction offers a preliminary discussion of what Charles Dickens calls the ‘lodger world’, and it establishes the book’s main lines of argument. It explains that tenancy, an economic transaction realized in space, was a central aspect of everyday life in the nineteenth century. An overwhelming majority of Victorians did not own their homes outright. Instead, they were tenants: while single families could take entire houses on lease, lodgers lived in rooms overseen by landladies, and these many kinds of rented space captured Dickens’s imagination. The pervasive need to rent in the period encourages a reassessment of middle-class domestic ideology. The Introduction surveys the history of the property market, reviews Dickens’s active participation in rental culture throughout his life, and describes a number of his creative relationships. It considers the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, and ultimately sets up a link between rented space, narrative, and genre in Dickens’s thinking.

This chapter discusses Dickens’s journalism and fiction of the 1830s and 1840s, and identifies the features of his urban style. It places his writing on tenancy in the context of comic theatre: namely, an influential tradition of lodging-house farce. The chapter surveys a number of plays and identifies the conventions of lodging-house farce, and it explores how Dickens adapts these materials to paint a vivid picture of life in London lodgings. The two-dimensional characters of the farce universe offer Dickens a reference point for theorizing the ‘flattening’ of identity in the city’s rented spaces. Dickens is especially interested in the landlady as a comic trope, social reality, and important figure in women’s history. Both the landlady and her lodgers provide Dickens with a set of tools to contemplate the nature of nineteenth-century authorship and readership: the lodging house, he discovers, is a literary space, and his early writing is witty and metafictional.