Open Houses
Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain
In the 1830s and '40s, a new preoccupation with the housing of the poor emerged in British print and visual culture. In response to cholera outbreaks, political unrest, and government initiatives, commentators evinced a keen desire to document housing conditions and agitate for housing reform. Consistently and strikingly, these efforts focused on opening the domestic interiors of the poor to public view. In Open Houses, Barbara Leckie addresses the massive body of print materials dedicated to convincing the reader of the wretchedness, unworthiness, and antipoetic quality of the living conditions of the poor and, accordingly, the urgent need for architectural reform. Putting these exposés into dialogue with the Victorian novel and the architectural idea (the manipulation of architecture and the built environment to produce certain effects), she illustrates the ways in which "looking into" the house animated new models for social critique and fictional form.
As housing conditions failed to improve despite the ubiquity of these documentary and fictional exposés, commentators became increasingly skeptical about the capacity of print to generate change. Focusing on Bleak House, Middlemarch, and The Princess Casamassima, Leckie argues that writers offered a persuasive counterargument for the novel's intervention in social debates. Open Houses returns the architectural idea to the central position it occupied in nineteenth-century England and reconfigures how we understand innovations in the genre of the novel, the agitation for social reform, and the contours of nineteenth-century modernity.
Reviews
“[Open Houses] is a book that should be read by everyone interested in the Victorian rage for reform, and not just the architectural sort…Leckie’s elegant analysis of works of fiction that tried a different route merits the close attention of a very broad audience.”
— Sara L. Maurer, University of Notre Dame, Nineteenth-Century Contexts
“Leckie makes a large and complex argument that encompasses the architectural idea in the nineteenth century and novelists who engaged that idea and transformed it by viewing architecture through a modernist lens, focusing on spatial relations and movement rather than only boundaries and containment. . . . The scope and ambition of Barbara Leckie’s work, with its excellent close readings and insights into the way housing of the poor enters nineteenth-century discourse and imaginative representations, make this a study with which readers can profitably engage.”
— Elizabeth Langland, Arizona State University, Journal of British Studies
“Barbara Leckie begins her elegantly written and thoroughly engrossing Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain with a deceptively simple proposal. While topics like sanitation reform and urban geography have tended to dominate the academic conversation about poverty and social reform in the mid nineteenth century, the analogous Victorian interest in architecture, especially architectural housing for the poor, has been significantly overlooked by critics. . . . Open Houses also offers a challenging intervention in debates about the aesthetic and cultural meanings of British Modernism. . . . This is an engaging model for scholarship, and certainly one that actively participates in several rich academic conversations without foreclosing any questions or forestalling any new debates. . . . Leckie’s fascinating book…crucially enables readers to make inquiries, and to connect existential anxieties with seemingly banal cultural preferences, under the constructive mechanism of the architectural idea.”
— Eileen Cleere, Southwestern University, Nineteenth Century Literature
“Part of what makes Open Houses consistently engaging and dynamic is both the dexterity with which Leckie loops between architectural spaces, documentary writing, and fictional narratives across the book and the remarkable clarity with which her individual chapters interlock to tell a history of problem solving worked out in terms of narrative strategy. . . . A journey into the interior of the house is always also a journey back to the exterior in Open Houses. One of the most powerful aspects of this book is Leckie’s readings of loops— spatial loops that led visitors to the Crystal Palace through a model dwelling, and through the model dwelling to a room filled with print accounts and designs of model dwellings, then back out to the Crystal Palace; narrative loops that spin the reader from the “interior of the interior,” the Growlery in Bleak House, to the dilapidation of Bleak House in Tom Jarndyce’s time, to Tom-All-Alone’s, to Esther’s Bleak House; conceptual and formal loops from porous, exposed material structures to print mediations and remediations of those structures (125). The finesse with which Leckie choreographs these analytical movements persuasively reinforces her argument about mediation. By activating the houses of the poor as they were understood in nineteenth-century Britain, Leckie makes an important and invigorating contribution to our understanding of the relationship between narrative forms, built environments, and ways of knowing.”
— Laura Strout, University of Michigan, Novel: A Forum on Fiction
“Barbara Leckie’s Open Houses is an original study that will make scholars reconsider the social and political investments of the nineteenth-century novel, as well as the evolution, in the period, of the novel form itself. This provocative and lucid book locates an unexpected dialogue between novels that have not been read, for the most part, for their concern for housing, and the profusion of mid-nineteenth-century nonfiction texts describing and re-envisioning the homes of the poor. . . . With breathtaking boldness, she attributes to novelists’ concern for housing their inclination to (1) rethink the genre of the novel in terms of form; (2) offer a subtle and compelling case for the novel as a work of architecture; and (3) offer a persuasive argument for the novel’s intervention in social debates (19). . . . The depth of her interdisciplinary erudition is on stunning display here.”
— Carolyn Betensky, University of Rhode Island, Studies in the Novel
“Leckie’s meticulously researched text is especially interested in the gaze—the fascinated, exploratory eye—and in how what was seen was framed to give impetus to architectural reform movements. . . . Writers increasingly evinced doubt about the exposé’s ability to generate change, and it is here that Leckie makes some of her most provocative claims, suggesting that the novel’s evolution may have been directly shaped by a growing loss of faith in the exposé’s potential: “frustrated by the lack of traction the documentary exposé approach was getting,” Leckie suggests, novelists began “to see their genre as offering an alternative approach to petitions for social reform” (18). . . . Leckie’s close readings are engaging and provocative, each seeking to pull out strands of thinking about housing reform that have escaped critical attention. . . . Reading the discourse surrounding poverty as startlingly generative, Leckie’s fascinating book shines new light on our understanding of the Victorian home.”
— Sarah Bilston, Trinity College, Victorian Studies
“Barbara Leckie’s Open Houses provides not only superb readings of recovered documentary and canonical literary sources, it also provides a model for scholarship rooted in politics. Leckie ends this important and impressive monograph with a call to re-examine our epistemological understanding of housing policies, especially for the poor, precisely because it is an epistemology ‘on which it is difficult to found a reliable politics’. . . . Instead of a politics and epistemology of ‘exposé’, Leckie’s study urges scholars, readers, and reform-minded individuals to ‘relax our hold on an epistemological model that seeks to uncover the truth and prise it free from its defining structures. In so doing, she argues, ‘the field will be inspired and animated’, but so too will we be able to ‘giv[e] shape [...] to how we imagine the future’. . . . If Barbara Leckie’s Open Houses is a sign of that inspiration, animation, and future, then our field will undoubtedly benefit from this important and impressive work.”
— Matthew Reznicek, Creighton University, Romance, Revolution & Reform