The License of Victorian Novelists

Like his niece, Virginia Woolf, Stephen enjoyed the art of insult. “The License of Modern Novelists” introduced and developed themes in his general campaign against Dickens; the most sustained of his attacks came in the pages of the Saturday Review. When Little Dorrit reached the end of its run, Dickens announced that he “had never had so many readers” (6). In keeping with contemporary taste, the Saturday Review preferred his early work and responded to the announcement with a sneer. A writer for the journal—possibly Stephen—viewed Little Dorrit as a “long libel on [Dickens’s] own genius” and rued that “the world [was] surely grown a very dreary one.” “Fifteen or twenty years ago,” the public “revelled in the rich and abundant humour of Pickwick and Nickleby.” Now, however, “it [was] accused, by the person who should know best, of drinking far deeper, far longer, and far greedier draughts from Bleak House and Little Dorrit, which [had] the effervescence of a seidlitz powder.”Footnote ²¹ Seidlitz powder was a laxative.

As Edwin Eigner explains, Dickens was an easy target in a much broader feud between rival weeklies: the Saturday Review and the Leader were on opposite sides of the political spectrum and couldn’t agree what fiction was for.Footnote ²² The Circumlocution Office—the bureaucratic, nepotistic government that tangles up lives in Little Dorrit—lay at the heart of Stephen’s invective against creative “license.” To a certain extent, he was a man on the defensive: he suspected his own father had inspired the portrait of Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle.Footnote ²³ But he also was scared of the mob. He had a number of recurring criticisms: that Dickens’s brand of satire distorted the truth about British life and institutions; that this was “reckles[s],” because “thousands of feverish artisans” would “take such words in their natural and undiluted strength”; that Dickens was “utterly uninstructed” and thus unqualified to speak as he did; that he was, in Michael Slater’s phrase, guilty of “cultivating an opportunistic topicality.”Footnote ²⁴ All of these accusations reflected a fundamental uncertainty about the remit of literature, and how it was supposed to relate to the contexts from which it emerged. Stephen compared Dickens to a pâtissier who put all his efforts into crafting “gilt gingerbread caricatures” of the Lord Chief Justice. “There is no harm in being a pastrycook,” he stressed, but pastrycooks and novelists should think twice before they aired their opinions.Footnote ²⁵ His condescension toward self-taught writers and poorer readers, whom he considered passive and susceptible to misdirection, is obvious. As Dickens pointed out, reviewers such as Stephen were trying to claim a monopoly on public discourse: “To the Edinburgh Review should be reserved the settlement of all social and political questions, and the strangulation of all complainers.”Footnote ²⁶

Stephen thought he’d found a clear example of Dickensian license in Little Dorrit’s dénouement. While Dickens was persuasive in dismissing the charge, the novel is itself attuned to the liberties it takes. For Stephen, Dickens’s sense of entitlement was such that he pilfered from the news. The collapse of the Clennam house seemed to him nothing more than a deus ex machina: a betrayal of readerly trust, a dereliction of writerly responsibility. “Will Mr. Dickens assure us,” he challenged, “that the fall of the house in Tottenham-court-road was not a happy solution of a difficulty which he had not the skill to disentangle?”Footnote ²⁷ Dickens rolled up his sleeves. This wasn’t a sign of his “desperate Micawberism,” he said: authors couldn’t afford to be as freewheeling as the characters they created.Footnote ²⁸ Given the nature of a protracted serial run and the deadlines imposed by publishers, he continued, he had no option but to lay the groundwork for the collapse early on. He angrily explained that it had been foreshadowed from the novel’s opening chapters, and that “any man accustomed to the critical examination of a book” should have spotted it.Footnote ²⁹ Stephen, then, was simply a bad reader, and his accusation was even more galling because the Clennam house was meant to represent the opposite of “Micawberism”: namely, Dickens’s ability to plan a plotline carefully and to work at the level of allegory.

John Kucich was the first critic to identify the relationship between “restraint” and “excess” (which he also calls “energy” and “expenditure”) as a fundamental “dialectical human problem” in Dickens’s fiction.Footnote ³⁰ Little Dorrit uses the Clennam house to work through its own definitions of aesthetic excess and discipline. The house is a conscious exercise in overdetermination; as the chapters progress, Dickens tests how many meanings a building might hold. It offers multiple ways into the past: here, Mrs. Clennam contemplates atonement, Arthur confronts his trauma, Flora basks in nostalgia, and Rigaud expresses his modish sense of the picturesque.Footnote ³¹ Identified by F. S. Schwarzbach as a “tumbledown variant refractio[n] of the Blacking Warehouse,” the house also is a pocket of literary space into which Dickens bundles his private memories.Footnote ³² Its eventual collapse represents the ruin of not only the Clennams but Mr. Merdle (the sham financier) and Mr. Dorrit (whose “castle in the air” is stormed). At the same time, the collapse belongs to a gothic literary tradition represented by “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).Footnote ³³ At one level, then, the house implodes under its own signifying pressure.

The scene also is striking in its composition. It starts from a place of conspicuous restraint so that it might spin all the more spectacularly out of control:

It’s gone in five verbs, two pairs of which are tautologous (“heaved” and “surged,” “collapsed” and “fell”). Notwithstanding Dickens’s painterly evocation of the sunset and the druidic image of a “great pile of chimneys … left standing, like a tower in a whirlwind,” his language could come straight out of the newspapers describing real housing disasters. Soon, however, the scene swerves from the prosaic to the comic. It’s one of those moments where his writing suddenly becomes unruly:

The passage gets funnier and funnier even as it undercuts the terrible sublimity of the event, and it culminates in the bizarre detail about Flintwinch’s collarbone. George Orwell’s portrait of a Dickens “yield[ing] to temptation” captures what is going on here: pulling out moments in Dickens’s novels where his “imagination has overwhelmed him,” where he has been “tripped up by some seductive phrase,” Orwell famously concludes that “he is all fragments, all details—rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles.” Indeed, “the outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail”—this license, a style that doesn’t know where to stop, is what makes him Dickens.Footnote ³⁴

Orwell suggests that a dilapidated mansion is the perfect emblem of Dickens’s baroque, poorly structured fiction. Dickens seems to anticipate the analogy; what’s more, the fall of the Clennam house allows him to think about the nature of fiction-making itself. For Stephen—who, of course, would have hated Orwell as much as he hated Dickens—fiction was irresponsible, a “moral delinquency,” when it took what it found in the real world and twisted it into new shapes.Footnote ³⁵ Dickens, meanwhile, noticed that people made their own fictions every day, in the real world, whether they meant to or not. By adding the extra detail about Flintwinch’s collarbone, he charts the steps by which an event can morph into news, then, inexorably, into fiction. It’s as if the rumor of Flintwinch’s survival would be ludicrous were he just sitting around unscathed in the cellar, but his minor injury—a snapped twig—is what makes the whole thing completely plausible. The broken collarbone is the collective concession to common sense. Through the rescuers find nothing, it’s stubbornly “believ[ed]” and “known” that Flintwinch has been abandoned “somewhere among the London geological formation” (826–29). Dickens smudges the line between three epistemological categories—knowledge, belief, and invention—to probe how they intersect. Little Dorrit’s Londoners play fast and loose with the truth and are unwilling to heed the evidence when it arrives. Though this clinging onto ghoulish fantasy is a form of license, it creates social cohesion, Dickens suggests, and is important for the imaginative life of the city: the myth can last long after the physical rubble has been taken away.

Rosemarie Bodenheimer has noted the frequency with which Dickens’s contemporary reviewers, including Stephen, seriously questioned his intellect, learning, and expertise. She explains that his fiction preempts and fends off these critiques: it actively explores states of ignorance and “knowingness,” asks questions about the different textures knowledge can take, and is “consistently interested in what … characters know and do not know.”Footnote ³⁶ Little Dorrit is astute about the reasons why somebody’s imagination might run away with them. Affery Flintwinch and Mr. and Mrs. Plornish are among Dickens’s many “imaginists”: characters who, as Garrett Stewart argues, “grow into imaginative parity with their creator.”Footnote ³⁷ Affery, Mrs. Clennam’s servant, is the only person to register the slow crumbling of the house; she regularly hears “rustling” and thudding, and feels “as if” she’s “touched by some awful hand” (196). Dickens needs to ready his readers for the dénouement, which means these episodes serve a basic narrative purpose—but he also finds, in his practical task, an opportunity to inhabit the psychology of a character who can no longer quite parse reality. Affery jumps to false conclusions about her universe. “Right in her facts” and “wrong in the theories she deduce[s] from them,” she is convinced that the house is haunted (828). She’s at once acutely perceptive, with the unique forms of spatial knowledge available to a servant, and trapped in a dream state. Her fears build and warp inside her because she has little contact with the outside world, lives in silence, and is gaslighted by her husband: Flintwinch refuses to listen to her, snatching her language and the experience it describes in order to use them as weapons against her. “If you don’t get tea pretty quick,” he threatens, “you’ll become sensible of a rustle and a touch that’ll send you flying to the other end of the kitchen” (203). “Are we to understand,” Stephen spluttered, “that all Affery’s horrors were meant to be resolved into the every-day phenomena of dry-rot?”Footnote ³⁸ The answer is yes—that’s the whole point. As Bodenheimer notes, Dickens didn’t believe in ghosts but was fascinated by “haunted minds.”Footnote ³⁹ Affery’s imagination spirals in this way because she has suffered neglect and abuse for decades. The Clennam house is disturbing because it merely has dry rot.

Mr. Plornish, a plasterer, experiences both the consolatory and the dangerous power of narrative. Given the task of fashioning the homes of strangers, he only can afford to live in a tenement, where he’s duped by an exploitative landlord. Plasterers smooth surfaces and create ornamental flourishes, and this captures the Plornish family’s approach to fantasy; it has an important role in making their lives bearable. When Mrs. Plornish opens a shop in Bleeding Heart Yard, she paints it to resemble a “perfect Pastoral” and christens it Happy Cottage: this “little fiction” is a “most wonderful deception” (600). Dickens is drawing attention to the fundamental question that fiction continually asks itself—how “deception[s]” can somehow be “wonderful.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Even as he explores the metaphorical potential of plaster, he plays with its literality. When Arthur first meets Mrs. Plornish, she asks if he’s there to offer her husband work; “if he had been in possession of any kind of tenement,” Arthur thinks, sadly, “he would have had it plastered a foot deep, rather than answer, No” (152). Soon after, Plornish “pick[s] a bit of lime out of his whisker” and “turn[s] it with his tongue like a sugar-plum” (154). Dickens pushes the material qualities of plaster as far as they will go—the first image asks us to picture something comically outsize, and the second, something tiny, carried about the body and sucked like a child’s sweet. What makes the images arresting is how gleefully Dickens pulls us between each extreme: it’s here, in this elasticity, that we discover the principles of imaginative freedom. But while story is a tool the Plornishes wield, it also can insinuate itself. The only time we see Plornish plying his trade, he’s caught up in a mass delusion that is “fanned” by the “mighty Barnacles” (597). As excitement about Merdle’s bank takes over London, Plornish

The plasterer declares his faith in Merdle from the rooftops, turning half-built houses into sites of public discourse. Because of his “share” in the building company, he’s a participant in the financial system and therefore feels able to speak with authority. But it is magical thinking, ultimately.

As one of Dickens’s most prominent representatives of the building trade, Plornish exposes the liberties nineteenth-century fiction can take when it tries to render laboring lives. Stephen had one grudging concession to make about Dickens’s work: he praised him for “describ[ing] English low life with infinite humour and fidelity, but without coarseness.” While this led to a “wish,” for Stephen, that “he had dealt as fairly and kindly with the upper classes of society,” it also raises aesthetic and ethical questions—about whether the lives of socially marginalized others can be “describe[d]” as neutrally as the word implies and, if so, what “fidelity” would look like; about the ways in which comic or “coarse” writing flattens people who live beyond the parameters of genre.Footnote ⁴¹ When Plornish tries to speak to Arthur about his troubles, he finds himself mangling his words and bumping up against the borders of his knowledge. The Bleeding Heart Yarders are “uncommon hard up,” but he “[can’t] say how it was.” Nor does he

It is Plornish’s “decided belief” that a person who “fe[els]” their poverty “know[s]” that they are poor: hunger and cold are an irrefutable reality, experienced in the body. Though he sets up a contrast between knowing and feeling, he eventually realizes that feeling is its own form of knowing.

Plornish’s conversation with Arthur shuttles between matters of license and accountability. Dickens uses his character to voice ambitious ideas, but they’re still refracted through Plornish’s marked sense of his own ignorance:

Plornish doesn’t think it is “his place to find out” whom to “blame”—he sees it as license, as something that would take him above his station. The limitations of Dickens’s vision are evident here. In his universe, people like Plornish don’t understand the dark forces around them; nor do they have the power to organize or agitate. (Stephen Blackpool, for whom “’tis a muddle,” is another example.)Footnote ⁴² Plornish may “know” the Bleeding Heart Yarders “suffe[r],” but he doesn’t have the narrative sensibility to work out why things happen. Instead, it’s up to Arthur to identify cause and consequence and to set his friend’s experience in a broader context. In the process, however, Arthur turns him back into a statistic: he “wonder[s] … how many thousand Plornishes there might be within a day or two’s journey of the Circumlocution Office, playing sundry curious variations on the same tune” (158). These abrupt scalar shifts are common in Dickens’s fiction, especially at the ends of chapters; they highlight the ambiguous connections between individual, type, and mass in the literature of social critique.Footnote ⁴³

Readers of Dickens can’t decide whether Plornish is a lovable fool or an unwitting genius of political economy. Daniel M. Stout, for example, suggests he offers one of the most “incisive” discussions of accountability and critiques of liberalism in the novel.Footnote ⁴⁴ The source of this uncertainty probably lies in Plornish’s gnarled mode of speech. For Dickens, it was a duty, not an act of license, to write about the “many thousand Plornishes” around him and to put words into their mouths. In the act of imagining the plasterer, he both bestows a voice and appropriates it, amplifies it and distorts it for the sake of a smirk at the speaker’s expense. Similar tensions inform all realist writing, but Dickens is interesting because he’s perfectly happy to signal the appropriation. While it might look like an idiolect or sociolect, Plornish’s speech is both technically impossible—described as “prolix growling”—and peppered with Dickens’s own favorite linguistic tricks: syllepsis, scattershot capitalization, frequent repetitions. Dickens’s sentences take on Plornish’s cadences without seeming to realize it. This “quick-change ventriloquism,” to use Philip Horne’s phrase, is meant to emphasize rather than efface the presence of a narrator. Like the “suspended quotation” in the passage, where the deadpan narrative voice interrupts its own character midsentence, it draws attention to itself as mimicry.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Plornish ponders what he is equipped and authorized to say, he turns the question back on the literary form that accommodates him.

Though Dickens was determined to prove how painstakingly he had planned Little Dorrit’s dénouement, there were one too many continuities to juggle. When Mrs. Plornish first appears in the novel, her name is “Sally”; by the end, it’s changed to “Mary.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The mistake says something obvious about the flow of Dickens’s attention—Mrs. Plornish lacks personhood—but it also draws the Plornishes into a broader conversation about seriality. As Clare Pettitt observes, individual catastrophes can form a series, troubling our definitions of the “tragedy,” “disaster,” and “event.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Around ten years after Little Dorrit was published, a poor lodging house with negligent landlords fell in Ely Court, just off Bleeding Heart Yard.Footnote ⁴⁸ Did anyone think of the Plornishes? The Times reveals that readers definitely were using Little Dorrit to refract the world around them: an 1859 article about house collapses opens with a reference to the novel. But it then makes stranger use of Dickens. Terraced houses, the writer observes, are “like the famous cab horse in Pickwick, which was put with such very high wheels behind, and reined up so very tight in front, that, though he had hardly the capacity of standing, he was utterly unable to tumble down.”Footnote ⁴⁹ That’s why construction work on one rotten house would bring the next one down, and that’s how others propped themselves up. The image highlights both the bluntness of Stephen’s thinking about fiction and the flexibility of Dickens’s writing: it gave others the license to stretch, to think about social problems in unpredictable and imaginative ways.

The License of Modern Critics

A lawyer called Bar, who socializes in Mr. Merdle’s circle, speaks to everyone he meets as if they were a “juryman” he must “get … over.” He has a “light-comedy laugh for special jurymen”—the wealthy and powerful—“which [is] a very different thing from his low-comedy laugh for comic tradesmen on common juries” (585). Bar not only believes that “tradesmen” are participants in, and especially receptive to, popular forms of comedy—they are, themselves, “comic” in essence. Dickens might be acknowledging some of his own literary habits here. By making Bar one of his story spinners, he’s certainly drawing attention to the court as a narrative space: whether at a criminal trial or a coroner’s inquest, it is the jury’s place to arrive at the truth by absorbing stories and deciding how they cohere. For Jan-Melissa Schramm, eyewitness testimony has a particularly complex function in this storytelling framework because it is a “means of proof”—a form of evidence—“not simply … a subjective and unfalsifiable account of an individual’s ‘life.’”Footnote ⁵⁰ It’s one reminder that the records of the Tottenham Court Road inquest are difficult materials with which to work and ask for careful handling. In the testimony of witnesses and the bereaved, we find tiny moments of self-narration that reveal something about the shape of a nineteenth-century life: that of a laborer, cook, clerk, housekeeper, or salesperson. But this form of narration occurred under specific circumstances and was meant to serve a particular end; its structure and usefulness were determined by the court, not the narrator. Our attempts to learn about the dead and to reconstruct something of their lives raise practical and ethical challenges. There are irregularities in the evidence, gaps into which the imagination pours; what might seem like an extrapolation turns out to be mere speculation. To a certain extent, Dickens’s feud with Stephen can be viewed as a minor quirk in a wider, darker tale; while the two sparred, they muffled the voices of those who faced the very worst consequences of London’s growth. At the same time, however, Stephen’s need to win an argument has seen him open a door into urban history. By interrogating the meaning of narrative “license,” these writers help us frame and understand our own acts of storytelling.

Public tragedies are difficult to parse. How do we remember those who die? What does it mean to write about them, to either follow or resist the urge to make them novelistic? Assumptions are made about their lives, relationships, and identities, both at the time and from a distance. Because they seem simultaneously legible and mysterious, they become sites of projection. Their bodies are discussed in detail; reporters mishear, misprint, and brusquely correct their names; we perpetuate those mistakes. They are defined by the terrible things that have happened to them and the futures they could have had. It surely is right to identify some of these historical impulses—and to check our own—when we turn to Tottenham Court Road. That might mean restoring some sense of the dead before the tragedy, gleaning who they were, remembering that they moved through the world without knowing what was coming. It seems equally right to pull the story away from Dickens and Stephen. But it’s all too easy to correct for one form of license with another—to replicate, for example, Dickens’s largely unreflective desire to speak for those who have suffered. What’s most useful, in Dickens, is his determination to take our drive toward fiction seriously; indeed, he suggests it is imaginative work that makes certain forms of understanding possible.

How close can we get to nineteenth-century lives—especially those that were difficult or, in Ciara Breathnach’s designation, just “ordinary”?Footnote ⁵¹ What does it mean to listen in at the moment somebody’s life turns extraordinary, in desperation and crisis? The survivors of the disaster, the six who died, the people who identified them, and various witnesses appear in a range of documents: the coroner’s register, newspaper reports, census returns, marriage records. Formal records, often placed in combination, do offer a sense of a life, Breathnach says—but at the same time, they represent encounters with the machinery of the state. Those are the encounters that are preserved in the archives.Footnote ⁵² Sometimes, the records don’t align neatly. Ann Driscoll, who died on Tottenham Court Road, was listed as twenty-six years of age in the coroner’s register; this puts her 1851 census entry out by three years. The register itself gives scant detail, as its primary function was to determine the coroner’s fee; it is jarring to see neat columns of pounds, shillings, and pence, and of miles traveled, next to the names of people who have died before their time.Footnote ⁵³ We can’t say something truly definitive about them when the information is so fragmentary and arbitrary (census returns, for example, log somebody’s whereabouts on a single day at ten-year intervals). The nature of this archive is such that it generates question after question. It seems better to articulate these questions—to allow for the place of the imagination in historiographical writing, to test where to spin and when to stop—than to make a bullish claim to knowledge.

As the Tottenham Court Road inquest progressed, testimonies were elicited, then circulated by reporters. Breathnach and Vicky Holmes have written about the use of coroners’ records as historical evidence, weighing up their value as a source of working-class “ego-documents.” For Breathnach, the voices in coronial court records may be “mediated” but are still “clear.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For Holmes, too, this material offers insights into lived experience. At the same time, however, she finds compromised privacy: while coroners, jurors, and legislators scrutinized people in poverty, newspapers sensationalized their tragedies for predominantly middle-class readers.Footnote ⁵⁵ An important pair of essays by Carolyn Steedman not only enables us to contextualize these ideas but also encourages us to temper any broad conclusions we might draw from working-class self-narration. Steedman discusses the centrality of “enforced narratives” in the administration of the Poor Law. In the eighteenth century, the magistrate—the “necessary and involuntary story-taker”—would extract short oral autobiographies from those in need; he made decisions about relief after hearing these stories. For Steedman, “the assumption of the modern ‘autobiographical turn,’ that there exists and has existed an urge to tell the self,” is “very little help” when stories are “shaped and articulated through legal processes.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Her observations are valuable when it comes to Tottenham Court Road. Three wives, a brother, a sister, and a colleague were called to identify the dead and to confirm when their final meetings took place. Only the Times logged this part of the inquest in any detail, which makes it difficult to cross-reference the evidence across sources; it also suggests their testimony wasn’t considered especially important. As Steedman finds in the “enforced narratives” with which she is concerned, we can “hear the legally required questions” that “structure” their testimony: for example, each witness clearly was asked whether the dead ever had feared for their safety on-site.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is difficult to think this is what Emma and Joseph Taylor were discussing in any organized way as he lay in hospital, dying in agony at twenty-six.Footnote ⁵⁸ Read as autobiography, the six statements offer the very briefest glimpses into poor lives shared—but they weren’t offered entirely freely, and they remind us how little we can know. To borrow Steedman’s terms, they trouble the assumption that a “story of the self” is “the same thing as the life lived.”Footnote ⁵⁹ They also underline the serious ethical complexity of our engagement with historical disasters. The Times reported each family member’s speech rather than transcribing it, leaving emotion, inflection, and the uniqueness of the human voice unrecorded. How did their grief and shock play out, in and beyond the coroner’s court? Grief soaks up and bleeds into other emotions; it comes and goes and suddenly returns over time; to some extent, it exists beyond language. While loss is a private experience, with its own particular textures and intensities, theirs had a public life. The jury wanted to know what their loss revealed about the world in which they lived; to a certain extent, this also is our concern. But their clipped, curated testimony ultimately works as a reminder: asking what their loss reveals is very different from assuming what it meant. Taking that imaginative leap would be a liberty.

Thomas Hughes, head of the carpet department at Maple & Co., survived the disaster. He was both the first recorded person to put his experience into words and the last to see Ann Driscoll, John Garnett, and Richard Turner alive. His statement to reporters is of obvious critical value: it was offered on Saturday afternoon, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse, and described what it was like to be inside the buildings that morning. As he was talking to the press, he was interrupted by his “little shaggy brown terrier dog,” who “came in covered with mud, and expressed the usual symptoms of delight at having found a lost friend.” They’d become separated when Hughes ran from the building; he heard his dog “howl piteously, and believed he was buried in the ruins, as he had not seen him till that moment.” First published in the Observer on Sunday, his account appeared across several other newspapers on Monday, with cuts and variations. The sound of knocking woke him up, he said. Wanting to investigate the construction works, he made his way through the building, “call[ing] upon some of the young men to rise.” Over the next hour, he encountered three people who would soon be dead: his memory preserves a sense of their vitality and, indeed, of their reality. First, he saw Ann, the cook, “with a broom in her hand, sweeping out the young men’s breakfast room on the second floor of the house numbered 146.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Six years earlier, the census had placed an “Ann Driskell” just around the corner, at 8 University Street. She was working as a general servant for an elderly widow, Ann Readwin, originally from a market town in Gloucestershire, and her unmarried daughter, Katherine, a daily governess. As Kathryn Hughes explains, “daily” or “visiting” governesses often were from lower-middle-class backgrounds and “represented a second-rate category of governesses.”Footnote ⁶¹ This helps us form a picture of No. 8, which seems to have been modest and respectable. Few of its residents were native Londoners; Ann herself was born in Cork, one of many Irish immigrants to come to the city during the decades of destitution and famine. She was the only servant in the house.Footnote ⁶² We can’t know when or why she left the Readwins, but moving to Maple & Co. was probably a step up: as a cook at a commercial establishment, she would have had greater autonomy, a circumscribed set of responsibilities, and a higher wage. Here, she had help and company. At the inquest, her sister, called “Adey” or “Abby” across the newspapers, said they had last met the previous Sunday.Footnote ⁶³ What did the Driscoll sisters talk about, do, and see on London’s day of rest and worship? To imagine this day is to recalibrate our sense of the story—because while the circumstances surrounding Ann’s death mattered, her unremarkable days mattered too.

On his way downstairs, Hughes next passed the carpenters Richard Turner and John Garnett, “who were at the time working at their bench on the second floor.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In the marriage records and census, John is listed as a cabinet maker; his skills were adaptable to the kinds of work needed by Maple’s builders. John’s wife, Sarah, was called to give evidence. The couple had married in the parish of Deptford St. Nicholas in the summer of 1848. John, the son of a licensed victualler (or publican), was born in Worcestershire; Sarah Murphy was a farmer’s daughter and signed the register with an X. Soon after their wedding, they moved north and west, from the shipbuilding yards to 15 Little Albany Street, near Regent’s Park. In 1851 the Garnetts’ neighbors at No. 15 included laborers and laundresses; they were still in these lodgings when John died, which suggests some measure of stability.Footnote ⁶⁵ He was now thirty-five years old. He made a request of Sarah as he left for Tottenham Court Road that morning—that she “put his gluepot on the fire, as he should be home about 4 o’clock.”Footnote ⁶⁶ It must have been one of the last things he said to her—practical, maybe a bit rushed. The pot of glue, which had to be melted slowly over the course of the day to reach its best strength, would not be needed. When did Sarah remove it from the heat? It might be tempting to keep going, to borrow from Dickens’s toolkit and write Sarah into a melodrama or a sentimental set-piece. But it would be an act of license.

While firsthand accounts of the disaster were useful at the time and continue to serve us now, we don’t know how Hughes carried the pressure of narration. He stood and watched the works for a couple of minutes. “I never apprehended any danger,” he told the inquest, with clear disbelief; “I was walking about the place and on the rafters without the least apprehension of danger.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Everything happened very quickly. Someone “called out, ‘see how the dust is coming from that wall—I don’t like that.’” Then, “instantly after the same man exclaimed, ‘run, Mr. Hughes! Run for your life; the wall is coming down!’” Hughes’s “fright and alarm … were so great that he did not know what to do,” but he collected himself and, after “follow[ing] the other men out,” returned to the ruin; he “lent his aid to rescue the females.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Journalists were fascinated by the ruin and noted material traces of the dead in the debris, which prompted certain kinds of imaginative, philosophical, and political thinking. The Times described the scene, with its juxtaposition of the apocalyptic and the quotidian:

Ann’s everyday routines were exposed to the street. Temporal lines caught on broken bricks and tangled together: amidst the devastation of the present were fragments of the past, or of an alternative reality in which nothing had happened at all. The fire, kettle, and teapot were suspended in time, waiting for the cook who was due to attend them. Did Hughes take any of these details in? We all have private landmarks in our familiar environments—things that hook our attention for some reason (or no logical reason), that take on particular meanings and come together to make up a lifeworld. Passersby might have read the ruin as a terrifying spectacle or tableau. For a survivor, however, it would have been an intensely violent defamiliarization.

According to the Observer, “when discovered [Ann] had a knife grasped firmly in her hand, as if about to perform some culinary operation.”Footnote ⁷⁰ These unfinished tasks would have made her loss seem all the starker. They also suggested to the world that she was completely, almost conspicuously unextraordinary: killed in the act of making breakfast. “Against another section of the same wall,” the Times continued, “there was a rack, and upon this rack hung certain articles of clothing.”Footnote ⁷¹ They belonged to Frederick Byng, who slept near the top of the house. The writer tried to imagine Frederick’s last moments:

Though the “perhaps” in this sentence is easy to miss, it marks the writer’s drift toward fiction. Readers were asked to picture a young man who felt safe and warm, and who was waking himself up reluctantly. Comfort and vulnerability, however, were two sides of the same coin; when a laborer came back into the ruin and found Frederick’s body, he was still under his sheet and blanket.Footnote ⁷³

The Times saw Frederick as an everyman, but the category of the “everyman” is itself a fiction. Like Ann and Joseph, he was twenty-six years old, and he was the chief clerk at Maple & Co. He was identified by his brother, William, whom he’d last met on Brook (or Brooke) Street, Holborn, two Thursdays previously.Footnote ⁷⁴ A year before the collapse, a Brooke Street garret had been memorialized in Henry Wallis’s Death of Chatterton (1856), which depicted it as a place of Romantic squalor; an 1871 article in All the Year Round described a “dim … quiet, sordid, and dirty” alley, full of “the usual petty trades.”Footnote ⁷⁵ We can’t know what the Byngs were doing in this grubby, culturally resonant patch of London. But Kelly’s Directory lists a carpet warehouse called Meeting & Co. here, and it’s possible they were visiting it.Footnote ⁷⁶ William, who was ten years older than Frederick, was “out of business” at the time of the inquest, and based in Canterbury.Footnote ⁷⁷ This was where the Byngs were from; according to the 1841 census, which placed young Frederick on Northgate Street, their father was a carpenter.Footnote ⁷⁸ William started working for John Maple and James Cook very soon after the company was established: he told the inquest that “he had himself lived with Mr. Maple for 14 years and a month, and had actually resided in the house for 12 years.” He’d left only a year ago. Frederick, meanwhile, had moved back and forth, quitting “the situation about last Christmas, and return[ing] to it again on Easter Monday last,” less than a month before the collapse. ^{Footnote 79} William Byng’s and John Maple’s professional lives were woven together, so much so that Frederick came to the business, too. If William provided Frederick with a “character,” he would have claimed an understanding of his brother—sanding rough edges—whether or not he knew him especially well. Which of Frederick’s qualities might he have mentioned? How did he feel when he heard the job had killed him?

For the Times, the visible signs of Ann and Frederick were unsettling because their lives seemed so recognizable. “The sufferers were doing precisely what we and ours might have been doing at the time they came to so tragical an end,” the journalist mused; Joseph Taylor, dying in hospital, “might have been one’s-self.”Footnote ⁸⁰ It was a powerful exercise in hypothetical thinking: one of several that put the journalist’s and reader’s imaginations to the test. Ann, the “luckless servant,” had been at work on the same floor as Mrs. Christmas, the housekeeper. For the Observer, Mrs. Christmas’s story was “truly miraculous”: she was “dusting the piano, with which she was carried away, and, falling in the hollow between the piano and a beam, she escaped with a slight graze of the legs.”Footnote ⁸¹ The piano formed a space in which somebody could nestle, as if it were a hand cupped around a moth. The language of contingency appeared across both newspapers; while neither made the connection explicit, there’s a sense that the “luckless” Ann and the “miraculous” Mrs. Christmas were to be understood as foils. By drawing attention to the strange play of circumstances that determined who died and who survived, writers shocked their readers into picturing how easily this might happen to them; they leveraged the imagination to make policy recommendations. While the journalists’ sentiments along this vein remained general—there, but for the grace of God, go I—William Byng’s must have been visceral. Four years after the disaster, he was living in Leamington Spa with his wife, young son, servant, and members of their extended family: an unmarried sister and his brother- and sister-in-law. They had a drapery and millinery business together.Footnote ⁸² Tottenham Court Road might have seemed a thousand miles away from William’s new home, or it might have seemed like it was right there, on the other side of the front door—never really left behind.

It’s possible to build a story around the Londoners whose lives were changed or cut short on Tottenham Court Road. Can we ever really avoid making free with these lives? Given the nature of the evidence, acts of imaginative license are inevitable; indeed, they can offer us important ways into the past. At the same time, not all firsthand narratives were unambivalently shared, and our own narrative processes can put people into boxes. Narratives of disaster, for example, generate character tropes: Thomas Hughes was the emblematic or representative survivor, someone who became a mouthpiece for firsthand experience, while Mrs. Christmas was the one who so nearly could have died. Did survival give them the license to live differently, more freely—or did it create an emotional and psychological obligation, a responsibility to the dead? Frederick Byng, Ann Driscoll, John Garnett, James Kivil, Joseph Taylor, and Richard Turner were now victims: six of the many Londoners killed in house collapses. Taken together, these people accrue considerable meaning. Considering them collectively is, of course, extremely valuable from a political perspective—but the social outrages they represent in death can start to overshadow who they may have been in life, and as individuals. Thomas Hughes, however, knew Ann and Frederick. He might have heard John and Richard talking on their bench as they worked; their bodies were found draped over each other. Four days later, he’d have to tell his story again at the Lord Wellington pub, in a room that smelled of stale ale. There, at the inquest, the barrister representing Richard Hunter and his builders would interrogate him about alterations to Maple’s property; the coroner would interject on his behalf, stating that he did not “think it necessary to trouble Mr. Hughes with any technical terms.”Footnote ⁸³ For now, though, it was time to scoop up his terrier and make his way through the crowd.

Nobody’s Fault?

Noticing the way her husband holds himself, Mrs. Merdle reproaches him for bringing his “business cares” home: “You couldn’t be more occupied with your day’s calculations and combinations … if you were a carpenter.” In Merdle’s reply—“I shouldn’t so much mind being a carpenter”—is an assumption that a carpenter’s “cares” are far less complex than his (419–20). Merdle, a financial fraudster, is “a down-looking man”: his acquaintances realize that “no one ha[s] ever been able to catch his eye,” and he moves around his mansion “look[ing] intently at all the carpets” (742, 421). For Dickens, this is one of the everyday gestures of guilt, and he says no more about it; after the tragedy at Tottenham Court Road, the irresponsible practices sustaining the sale of “carpets” and furnishings suddenly became clear. Clearer, too, were the “cares” of carpenters—of William Inwood, who had to “cut away” the “piece of timber” lying on Joseph Taylor; of Joseph, who died in perilous working conditions; of his father, in charge of the build, who watched the houses fall. “Knowing my own son and 19 of my men were on the premises,” he said, “I was much amazed and alarmed.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Though Dickens abandoned his original title for Little Dorrit, “Nobody’s Fault,” the novel remains very interested in accountability. According to Elaine Hadley, Dickens responded to the midcentury problem of accountability by developing a rhetorical shorthand: frustrated by a world where apparently “Nobody” could be blamed, he demanded that “Somebody” step up. Daniel M. Stout offers a different perspective. By “pair[ing]” the Circumlocution Office with the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, Little Dorrit reveals “the meaninglessness of a world without responsibility and the meaninglessness of a world with nothing but.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The Clennam house plays a central role in the novel’s moral landscape: while Mrs. Clennam’s obsessive thoughts about retribution and atonement swirl through its rooms, it eventually rouses itself to life and metes out its own form of justice. On Tottenham Court Road, of course, the collapse was the injustice: not an act of God. As the novel and the inquest dovetailed, they confirmed both how important it was to apportion blame for London’s ills and how difficult it was to do so. The Times asked a seemingly straightforward set of questions: “Where, then, is the fault? On whose shoulders should the blame be cast?”Footnote ⁸⁶ But answering them was challenging in 1857, and becomes even more so with time. While the jury was able to find an immediate cause, both the inquest and its aftermath revealed how many unpindownable, intersecting problems made housing disasters an inevitability; they also demonstrated the varying degrees to which individuals were able to stand up for themselves in public. Novels and courtrooms conceive of themselves as instruments of accountability—and so, too, might forms of historiographical work that trace the causes of past outrages. We want to think we’re more knowing from this distance, that we’ll be able to weave a neat story and pinpoint the person or system to blame. But we go into the task with responsibilities of our own: not least toward the people whose lives, actions, thoughts, and motivations will always remain just out of reach.

It took over a day to find James Kivil, a twenty-nine-year-old bricklayer’s laborer. One of the team on Hunter’s premises (where Robert Johnson was the builder in charge), James had crossed into Maple’s through a hole in the party wall between Nos. 147 and 148. He was identified by Alfred Barnes, the bricklayer for whom he’d been working. James had been “preparing some compo,” or a cement mixture, and went to the basement. “The last time” Barnes “saw him alive was when he (Kivil) was coming up the ladder, between the joists of the ground-floor, with a pail of water.”Footnote ⁸⁷ James remains a shadow. He was unmarried and seems to have had no immediate family, which means the inquest reports offer no sense of his life beyond Tottenham Court Road. This also makes it impossible to locate him with certainty in the census returns, though he may be the “James Kivill” on New Peter Street, Westminster, in 1851. He is listed as a plasterer, living with his mother, Ann, a laundress born in Ireland.Footnote ⁸⁸ Who knew and cared for him? Who was he? All we have is the briefest description of his final moments and movements; all we can say is that he was working. As a bricklayer’s laborer, he would have been near the bottom of the hierarchy on site. Testimony from Joseph Taylor Sr.’s men drew the court’s attention back to Barnes and his colleagues: Joseph White and somebody called Jones. Working from Maple’s side, they were cutting two holes in the party wall in order that it might be “underpinned”—a process of strengthening a building from underneath by replacing old brick with new. On the last day of the inquest, it was “proved conclusively” that a heavy crowbar had been used instead of a brick chisel; this mishandling of tools, coupled with the size of the holes, brought the three buildings down.Footnote ⁸⁹ Barnes’s place in the story is therefore complicated: his testimony offers our only real glimpse of James in life, but he also was implicated in James’s death.

An immediate cause of a disaster, however, is seldom its only cause, and we can push the timeline further and further back: to the moment the notices of works were delivered in early April, triggering a messy inspection process; or to the fire at Hunter’s, which destroyed his premises and encouraged both businessmen to renovate; or even further, to the planning and development of the terrace itself. The matter of blame, and of causality more generally, becomes murkier when we start to ask how these events related to one another. The newspapers’ instinct was to cast suspicion on Hunter and Maple, who were labeled as “rival dealers” intent on “extend[ing] their dominion.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Thomas Marsh Nelson, an architect brought in by the coroner as an impartial expert, didn’t see any evidence of wrongdoing on their part. But any decision to cut corners would have been catastrophic, since witnesses revealed that the buildings were rotten. Ellis Baker (one of Taylor’s carpenters) noted they were made of bricks that “crumble[d] in the hand”; Nelson, meanwhile, cautioned jurors about the poor quality of housing constructed under all three Building Acts from 1774.Footnote ⁹¹ Though the eastern terraces on Tottenham Court Road were quite new, he said, they already were falling apart: “It is an act which legalizes bad building.”Footnote ⁹² This sense of an imperfect bureaucracy, still working itself out, was especially apparent on the second day of the inquest. While most newspapers condensed their testimony, the Builder quoted three key witnesses verbatim: Henry Baker, the district surveyor for St. Pancras; Charles Reeves, the surveyor for the police; and Henry Caiger, his assistant.Footnote ⁹³ Originally appointed by magistrates, then—following the passing of an updated act in 1855—either confirmed in their posts or selected by the new Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW), district surveyors oversaw construction in the areas to which they were assigned. At a time when London was growing, their job was to hold builders to account and to ensure they complied with the act. But their responsibilities shifted when they found a “dangerous structure.” In these cases, they were to report the issue to the police commissioners, who took things from there.Footnote ⁹⁴ Baker, alarmed by the condition of the party wall between 147 and 148, judged it should be taken down and rebuilt—but neither Maple nor Hunter seemed willing to accept responsibility for it. Questioned directly by Baker at the inquest, Maple said he couldn’t “recollect your telling me … that you were determined to have the wall down.” Maple had met Hunter the same night he saw Baker. “On [Hunter’s] saying that he was afraid the party wall must come down,” Maple testified, “I said in a jocular way, ‘Oh, if you keep within the police notice you can’t go far wrong. You can use the old bricks, and it will only cost about a sovereign.’”Footnote ⁹⁵ Perhaps this “jocularity” explains how Maple spoke to David Redding, Hunter’s surveyor, who also warned him “the wall was defective.” “You are defective,” Maple allegedly replied; “Mr. Baker is defective, and I am defective.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Maple was widely praised for launching a subscription to help the bereaved families, but it was a belated form of care. In his advice to Hunter, he seemed to play Baker off against the police; these ambiguous lines of authority were much discussed at the inquest. Writing to the editor of the Times, Baker vowed that he “had done everything in order to obtain the condemnation of the whole wall.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The police certificate, however, only told Hunter’s builders to underpin: to “make good” the wall “where bulged and defective” and “where disturbed by the removal of the chimney breasts.” (Baker stated he had not sanctioned their removal.) Messages passed between parties in ways that were confusing rather than clarifying. Baker, for example, expressed his frustration at being denied sight of the police certificate until the night before the tragedy; Charles Reeves countered that it was the builder’s job to “furnish [him] with that information.” When Henry Caiger was asked for his opinion, he all but declined to give it. “After what he had heard in evidence,” the Daily News reported, “he did not attribute blame to any one in particular.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Was he saying it was nobody’s or everybody’s fault? Was he saying it was his fault? Thomas Marsh Nelson tried to analyze this situation, and his report was printed in full in the papers. It seemed “absurd” to him that the MBW had no responsibility for “dangerous structures.” This caused “great jealousy on the part of the district surveyors,” even as the commissioners of police and sewers “dislike[d] the duties imposed upon them by the Act.” For Nelson, the role of district surveyor was no longer fit for purpose; he believed that Baker shouldered significant responsibility for the disaster. Given the volume of housing that needed attention and the vastness of St. Pancras, he didn’t think there was any way Baker could have conducted a “proper survey” of the buildings. London’s districts had been sketched when it was a sleepier place; their boundaries, and the numbers of surveyors employed, urgently needed to be reconsidered.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Times, reflecting on Nelson’s report, put this bluntly: “It is the system which is at fault, not the man.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

But just as the dust seemed to settle, the winds picked up again. Baker refused to let Nelson have the last word and defended himself robustly before a range of audiences. His correspondence appeared in the Builder, which backed him as an individual and spoke for district surveyors in general. Its stance is unsurprising, since its editor was a district surveyor himself. Letters and leaders lamented the fact that, “when an old house tumbles down, the newspapers immediately throw the blame on the district surveyor”—who had “no power,” legally, to “interfere to prevent such a disaster.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Baker described Nelson as his “intemperate opponent,” challenged his statistics, and attempted to paint a more accurate picture of construction in St. Pancras.Footnote ¹⁰² For the Builder, the police were the weak link: it seemed obvious that district surveyors should receive a copy of their certificates. But these offices, and Caiger’s in particular, were overstretched.Footnote ¹⁰³ Caiger was given “miserable remuneration … by the Government for carrying on this onerous duty” (that is, inspecting “dangerous structures”). As for notices, he had “as many as seventy at one time in arrear; although he ha[d] devoted on the average no less than sixteen hours per diem.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Builder recommended that district surveyors have full control of “dangerous structures” in return for proper fees. In other words, it both absolved Baker of blame—he was one of their own—and argued that the profession should be trusted with greater responsibility.

Like Dickens, Baker reacted viscerally to criticism from a public figure who questioned his expertise and the profession he represented—and, like Dickens, he seemed to completely believe that the story was about him. It’s impossible to say who, of Baker and Nelson, was right. The only thing that is palpable is how utterly confident each man was in his rightness. Baker pointed out that he hadn’t chosen to hire a lawyer for the inquest: “So conscious did [he] feel of having performed [his] duty, fully and actively,” that he spoke for himself. When a “brother surveyor” offered to testify for him, Baker told him it wouldn’t be necessary, though he would “not soon forget” his “kindness”:

The lines between disagreement and personal affront seemed to blur. This reached new levels when a deputation from the Association of District Surveyors approached the MBW at its weekly meeting. On the back of the tragedy, the group requested an inquiry into their approach to “dangerous structures” so they might clear their reputations. The MBW was fulsome in its support and expressed sympathy for “their case of considerable moral grievance.” But it stopped short of arranging the inquiry.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It was only twelve years later, in 1869, that the Building Act was amended to give the MBW oversight for “dangerous structures,” leaving the police to their other business.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Because he answered to the state, Baker has left a trail across the nineteenth century. In 1825 he sent two notes to the Times, addressed to the magistrates of Middlesex. The first solicited their support at the election of the district surveyor for St. Pancras, pledging he would perform his duties “with diligence and integrity”; the second, published just after his election, “repeat[ed]” his “assurances.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ So far, so deferential—but a quarter sessions report in the Morning Chronicle reveals how bumpy the road to the surveyorship was. Not only was the vote tight; twenty-two magistrates signed a letter in protest because Baker’s “friends” had paid the incumbent a staggering 2,000l. to resign. This meant he couldn’t “be deemed a ‘discreet and fit person’ for the office.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He was in his early twenties. In 1843 he had his feet under the table, but the law was about to change. An updated Building Act was making its way through Parliament with a clause requiring surveyors’ returns. These documented new buildings, their “rate” or class, and the fees paid to the surveyor for construction and alterations. A collection of ten-year returns to the Middlesex clerk of the peace, many with covering notes apologizing for delays or incomplete information, includes a packet from Baker’s office. In small, tidy handwriting—the most legible in the pile—Baker explains why he, too, is running behind. Later he encloses a return; finally, he submits a new one, the first evidently having been deemed unsatisfactory.Footnote ¹¹⁰ There’s only so much to be gleaned about Baker from these scraps of text; it isn’t a self that appears. But there’s the presence of a hand moving across a page and down a column of figures. From there, it’s easy to imagine the hand beckoning, pulling at a sleeve, taking us by the arm. Before we know it, we’ve accepted Baker as our guide through this history, simply because he feels real.

Who does somebody become when they have their back to the wall? In the Builder, Baker reached for Shakespeare in order to be satirical. When he described “calumny … ‘strut[ting] and fret[ting] its hour upon the stage,’” he was (mis)quoting Macbeth’s “Tomorrow” speech; the implication was that his detractors, one of whom “[threw] about his ink-bottle in a most reckless manner,” were “idiot[s],” telling “tale[s] … full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Revising his opinion of Captain Scott’s Patent Cement, which he’d initially criticized at the Institute of British Architects, he squeezed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice together: “Snug the joiner bought it because it was cheap,” he wrote, “and small blame to him for that, although ‘it was not in the bond.’” (It’s an allusion to Shakespeare’s comic band of “rude mechanicals”—Snug, Quince, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and Starveling—and to Shylock—who picks over the precise terms of his loan to Bassanio and Antonio.) Snug’s “helpmates,” however, had ignored the guidelines for using the cement, mixing it with more sand than was safe so that the purchase might go further: Baker explained that the clerk of works and foreman at Hunter’s premises, John Moore and Sparrow Harrison, had played a significant part in the tragedy. He rued the “blame” cast on the cement manufacturers, since “the mischief solely [arose] from the ignoble practices of a cutting builder.”Footnote ¹¹¹ The most striking thing here is not Baker’s diagnosis, but his rhetoric. The allusions to Shakespeare don’t really fit together, don’t even make much sense; the only legible reference is to Snug, which, in its snideness, saw Baker put laborers in their place. He seemed to draw as stark a distinction as possible between himself—a district surveyor with architectural training, capable of using Shakespeare for the sake of using Shakespeare—and the ignorant, manipulable laborers with whom he was in daily contact.

For Baker, the actions of Hunter’s “cutting builder[s]” exemplified unsafe practice in an industry driven by profit; they hewed brick and slashed costs. Meanwhile, Nelson suggested it wasn’t just about individual practice but the standards to which builders were asked to work. Thus, in the words of the Times, “the poor labourers … were in about as safe a position as though they had been employed on excavations in the crater of a volcano in eruption time.”Footnote ¹¹² The image was especially apt because tensions had been rumbling on-site. William Inwood, working for Johnson, recalled seeing supporting “shores” removed at the front of Maple’s house, and “told one of Mr. Taylor’s men it was a wrong thing to take [them] away.” The laborer “replied, ‘Hold your tongue; say no more about it.’”Footnote ¹¹³ Samuel Cann (a laborer) and Charles Hiatt and Charles Royer (carpenters) worked for Taylor and described the hostility with which Johnson’s men received their warnings about the doomed party wall: from Alfred Barnes’s unruffled “all right, mate,” to “jeering,” “mind your own business,” “go to h—.” Royer’s words were reported differently across newspapers. “If you don’t mind what you are about,” he seems to have said, “you will have the place about your ears, and then you will be sorry.” But was it “if you don’t mind what you are about” or “if you do not take care”? “About your ears” or “about your head”? The quotations are consistent in sense, but these variations draw attention to the inherent instability of all the evidence.Footnote ¹¹⁴ If we don’t know who said what, we can’t know what really happened; we shouldn’t, then, presume where guilt might sit. We, too, might want to hold ourselves to account.

Saturday morning—just after seven o’clock. Such was the force with which Johnson’s men struck the wall that Royer’s scaffold “shook,” and he ran. The houses collapsed before he reached the other side of the road. Seven workers deposed they had seen somebody with a large crowbar, and, while Jones and Alfred Barnes swore they’d used chisels and hammers, Jones was questioned closely:

The failings of Shakespeare’s Snug are linguistic: because he can’t remember a playscript, he takes the part of a lion, which only has to make a noise. We might turn to historical archives in search of the “real” voices of the building trade. Such a voice would, we hope, do something to offset the liberties of literature—the comic and melodramatic caricatures, the ventriloquism. Jones, however, didn’t want to speak. Though there may have been conversation on Tottenham Court Road, the records have mainly preserved competing injunctions to silence. This hostility wouldn’t have come from nowhere: it suggests that employment was precarious, work happened at speed, and building sites were inhospitable, extremely dangerous places. It is possible to remain clear-eyed about the role Barnes, Jones, and Joseph White played in the collapse, while also asking what led to the moment a dusty hand picked up a crowbar and pounded a rotten wall. Nobody in charge knew what the other team was doing, putting everybody at risk. When Cann was asked, “Do you not think it would have been desirable to shore up the wall before cutting the holes?” he replied, “The fact is, we working men are not allowed to think.” The crowd laughed. “If our masters think a thing right, and tell us to do it,” he elaborated, “we must obey.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

To whom are we responsible when we write about the past? What does that accountability look like? Being circumspect, perhaps, about the nature of historical judgments and the conclusions we draw from them. Unlike Baker, who had the ear of the powerful and numerous means by which to reach the public, the laborers on Tottenham Court Road had no opportunity to keep worrying at the story. Baker was able to cultivate a rhetorical style; his writing was published and has survived. But Jones’s hesitation also is expressive. In that economical “well” and “just” is an obvious desire to keep White out of trouble. There are many potential reasons: personal loyalty, a more detached solidarity, his sense of the insecurity of his own position. It could have been guilt or something else entirely. Like grief, guilt can be expressed and apportioned in the open, but it is privately felt. It was Joseph White who pulled Frederick Byng’s body out of the ruins.