Literary Mapping: Dickens and the Dynamics of Place

Along with a large collection of nineteenth-century maps of London and topographical materials, The Museum of London (MoL) holds a series of 41 watercolours painted 1860-1870 by J.L. Stewart of 'real places' in Dickens's novels. The Bishopsgate Institute holds a further 60 Victorian watercolours of Dickensian places. Other holdings at MoL include paintings, panoramas, and stereographic images; the covers and illustrations of the serial parts of Dickens's novels; later book-edition illustrations; the archives of Dickensian tourism at MoL (and at the Dickens House Museum), including plans of 'Dickens Walks' and Victorian 'Dickens' souvenirs. MoL also holds significant theatrical collections and large collections of photographs of London. To mark the bicentenary of Dickens's birth in 2012, a major exhibition will run at MoL from December 2011-June 2012, with an international tour to follow. The student would use the exhibition as a significant research resource for thinking about the continuing fascination with the geography of Dickens's London. S/he would be involved in creating a 'Dickens Walk' for the exhibition, also delivered through an phone app, and in running and presenting at events connected to it, as well as in detailed evaluation of its visitor response.
Applications will be invited which address some or all of the following research questions:
Was Dickens the only author whose work was mapped so closely to the 'real' during -and after - his lifetime? (comparators could be Scott, Hardy, Wordsworth)
How does the map of Dickens's places change over the nineteenth century?
How does an ever more pervasive print culture generate new ideas of 'place' and create specific 'places'?
How does the representation of place in 'fact-based' articles in Household Words and All the Year Round compare to Dickens's versions in the novels? (Significant places might include: Newgate, bridges, coaching inns, law courts, London churchyards, the City, and what Dickens called 'fairy land': the places of entertainment and theatre).
How did Dickens's own travels affect his construction of the provincial and the global? (Locations which might be considered include: the cities of Boston in the US; Paris; Rome and its ruins, Rochester, Preston, Broadstairs).
How did Dickens's texts themselves travel? How did his American and/or colonial readers in his lifetime interpret his sense of place?
What was the impact of photography, and -later- film, on the poetics of place and particularly of London? Conversely, what was Dickens's influence on filmic 'placing' - in the early films of Griffith and Eisenstein, for example?
What happens to place when it becomes distanced in time? How do we reconstruct Dickens's places today?
What have been the effects of the heritage industry and mass culture on Dickens's work?
There has been much debate about 'place' as historically contingent process in recent years. The thesis will engage with work generated by scholars of geography, history, literature and art, such as David Harvey; Nigel Thrift, Derek Gregory; Henri Lefebvre; Raymond Williams, Lynda Nead and Franco Moretti.
The student would have a hot desk space at MoL and access to all the graduate-student facilities at KCL. S/he would spend at least one day every week at MoL, and often more, particularly during the first year, in the run-up to and during the 2012 Dickens exhibition which will stimulate and feedback into the initial research. In years two and three the student will add value to the documentation around MoL's Dickens-related collections, in the light of his/her doctoral research, and will choose and curate a group of objects for an on-line exhibition in year 3 in line with the MoL's ongoing research strategy. Academic supervisions would be supplemented by meetings at least every two months between Werner, Pettitt and the stu

Dickens is exceptional as a literary figure who continues to excite immense international interest and his bicentenary in 2012 will generate considerable media attention. Both Werner and Pettitt are experienced in giving media interviews and dealing with the press (Pettitt was interviewed on Radio 4's Today Programme, among others, about her last book; and Werner regularly speaks to the press) and are well-placed to capitalise on these opportunities, and maximise the media exposure of both the exhibition and the connected research at MoL.

Pettitt is planning a new undergraduate course on 'Dickens and London' inspired by this project. The beneficiaries of the collaboration will include but will also extend well beyond students (UG/PG) and academic staff at KCL and Museum staff at MoL. They will include a wide variety of museum/exhibition visitors, both 'real' and on-line, such as school children, adult learners, academics and journalists, and we expect international impact, both through tourists attending the exhibition and its supporting events, and, in the longer term, through hits on the legacy 'Dickens exhibit' website.

The student will also be involved in organising and presenting at a series of exhibition-related events, some at the MoL and some at KCL which will be free and open to the public. KCL has a new partnership with Cheltenham Literary Festival so a Dickens event could appear on the 2012 Festival programme too.

'Literary Mapping: Dickens and the Dynamics of Place' will provide new insights into London's past, helping to inform the public histories presented by the Museum in its displays, online and through other outputs. The Museum recently created one of the most successful phone apps interpreting London's historic topography (Streetmuseum), and the student will be well placed to build on this and help the Museum deliver another innovative resource that will reveal the London of Charles Dickens to the general public. Considering the worldwide interest in the works of Dickens, such a resource is likely to have a broad appeal both to national and international visitors as well as those who live and work in the capital, and the intention is to deliver it in a range of languages. It will impact on the Museum's marketing campaign in drawing people to the exhibition (the target has been set at 100,000 visitors between December 2011 and June 2012). It will have a financial impact by increasing revenue for the Museum and other related attractions and sites across London.

The student's work will demonstrate the potential of the Museum's collections as a research resource and add value to the Museum's existing body of knowledge about its collections. The delivery of an online exhibition around the Museum's Dickens-related collections will create a further publicly accessible output and contribute to the Museum's reputation as a national and international resource on London and, in this case, specifically about literary London in the nineteenth century. It will also form part of the MoL's ongoing commitment to defining itself as a rich research resource both for scholars and for the public.

Crucially, though, the impact of this project will not be only 'one way' - pushing outwards from the MoL towards the public. It will also close the loop and feed back the responses and ideas of the public into MoL's on-line displays. The student will have the opportunity to do this both through devising creative ways of eliciting reactions and responses at the exhibition from different constituencies of visitors, and through the detailed evaluation of this visitor response, and its use in considering the meanings of 'Dickens' to different interest-groups.

This innovative collaboration between curatorial and academic specialists has the potential to deliver both a highly stimulating doctoral apprenticeship, and