Spell Checks

"Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I begin with the question this essay is designed to answer: how do we read cities? Of course, an attentive reader may wish to object. Which cities? Why read? Who is "we"? In fact, those questions are buried in the original one; I will suggest some ways they can be exhumed, and applied to some nineteenth-century texts. Before doing so, I want to stress that the same issues underlie contemporary urbanology, if I can use a fancy word for a commonplace activity. How often do we explain that "I'm a city person," or boast of our "city smarts"? It is not only New Yorkers who refer to home base as The City, to suggest not merely that there can be no other but that all others must be understood in terms of that Neoplatonic model—to which few measure up. If there is a city "look," is there not also a city looking, a glance by which one urbanite surveys, acknowledges, and then promptly ignores another? Even if there is not, do we not (like Bloom in the butcher's shop) imagine there is? Populated cities populate our consciousness, and our self-consciousness. The very habit of generalizing urban experience, our urban experience, is one of the ways "we" define identity in a culture preoccupied by the erosion of self in mass society. Perhaps the question

should have been, not how, but why do we read cities? If so, one answer could be that we read them to show that we still can read—that is, that we can read—that there are still "we's" to do the reading.

But there still may be objections to that last word: why reading? One answer has to do with the rise of discursiveness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more specifically with the concurrent interrelation of increasing literacy and increasing urbanization, the former skill increasingly necessary for the latter process and increasingly implicated in the growing complexity of life it involves. Remember Nicholas Nickleby surveying help-wanted placards at the General Agency Office; as any member of the MLA can attest, even job searching requires special tactics. Henry Mayhew begins London Labour and the London Poor with a quasi-anthropological account of his subjects as the last descendants of primitive nomadic tribes. But his four volumes of dense prose and statistics suggest that they could just as easily be characterized as hunters and gatherers of information, not unlike himself. The urban process makes data processors of us all. The city demands special skills, including the mastery of specialized languages. In Dickens's first urban novel, Oliver Twist makes this discovery at the city limits when he encounters the Artful Dodger and his "flash" vocabulary. Every successful Dickensian hero learns a similar lesson—not mastering the language of the streets but mastering the streets like a language, and mastering language as part of the education that guarantees increased mobility through and within the city. This explains one connection between Pip's education and his oarsmanship, tokens of his increasingly swift progress across the urban map. It helps explain another distinction between his literate mobility and the rootedness of Joe Gargery, who comes up to London only on urgent missions, and whose incapacity for such adventure is signaled early by his rough, simplistic progress among lexical landmarks. For Joe, reading is an exercise in deciphering print to yield up letters, searching for crude versions of his own name and in the process reducing it from three letters to two. Pip in London expands himself and his prospects, acquiring a new "Handel" (the name bestowed by his cultured friend, Herbert Pocket) that carries him beyond the palindromic circularity of his own first reading of himself. He gains a more complex verbal identity—a six-letter name that like narration links different "characters," one requiring an ability to reimagine the self through witty allusion and familiarity with the civilized arts.

But not without a struggle. As the irony of the Dickensian title forewarns us, the balloon of hope must be punctured, and just as Pip seems prepared to rise with it high above his past. The vertical-spatial meta-

phor is very much a part of the rising and falling action of the novel, especially in the telling chapter when Pip's expectations reach the end of what Dickens calls their second "stage" and he hears a "footstep on the stair" leading up to his chambers. In the figure of Magwitch, Pip confronts his lowly origins and the chief figure of his nightmares, an image of his past and a dimension of an identity he had struggled to escape. But this return of the repressed is also an encounter with someone we could call, more simply, a figure from the streets, one whose power of impressing himself on the imagination derives to some degree from his being simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown, a fragment of childhood memory now merged with the urban uncanny. As he first surveys his benefactor in this second encounter, Pip can only describe him in relation to recognizable types, what George Cruikshank called in a volume of drawings "London Characters." The description focuses on general impressions, skin color and clothes, the stuff of caricature. "Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was substantially dressed, but roughly; like a voyager by sea." Later, as Magwitch sleeps, Pip wonders whether, or how often, he had encountered him before: "I began either to imagine or recall that I had had mysterious warnings of this man's approach. That, for weeks gone by, I had passed faces in the streets which I had thought like his. That, these likenesses had grown more numerous, as he, coming over the sea, had drawn nearer."^[1] This Nabokovian linkage of memory and hallucination also suggests the necessary mechanisms of Pip's recently urbanized gaze—the instinctive resort to stereotypes, the compulsive creation of distance. The clue to the process resides in those odd verb tenses. How could it have been possible, in the few weeks before he reencountered Magwitch, for Pip to have "passed faces in the streets" which he "had thought like his"? Not insofar as Pip was explicitly recalling the memory of this or any particular man. Rather, because the likeness he remarks on here is generalized. Meeting Magwitch in his chambers, Pip sees not an individual but a type, a type of the same sort one sees—or thinks one sees—in sizing up the random figures encountered in the daily hustle of urban life. City seeing always requires a quick and comprehensive transformation of people into Others, into forms that are simultaneously more recognizable and more anonymous than they might have been otherwise, into what Pip calls "faces in the streets." What Pip remembers seeing is himself not seeing, not seeing in response to the seen unseeable quality of the figures who surround us in the density of city streets. And how can we see clearly, in an individuated way, when doing so only defines our proximity to those others, only suggests that as ur-

banites we are street figures too? Random faces, random names—persons impersonal, like figures of speech—whiches (as Joe Gargery might say), in every sense (and spelling) of the word. At the crisis of his expectations—and this is what makes it a crisis—one of these figures climbs out of anonymity and threatens to reclaim Pip, not merely for the past and his own repressed memories, but for the streets he thought he had kept at a distance.