ancient cities

218 Disability and the City
Kennington Toll Gate. When Dickens died 58
years later in 1870, the gates and city wall had been
pulled down and built on, and London turned into
a sprawling monumental city, transformed by the
Industrial Revolution, especially the railroad and
entrepreneurial capitalism as well as the British
imperial venture, into the first world-city.
During Dickens’s lifetime, London was more
excavated, more cut about, more rebuilt, and more
extended than at any time in its previous history. A
huge sewer system had been built by 1853, when
Bleak House was published, and a viaduct had
been completed that brought clean drinking water
to all parts of the city, thus ridding it of the fear of
cholera and typhus, which had plagued it for centuries.
Victoria Station and Euston Station had
become the termini of the railroad, effectively
bringing the commerce of the world and its people
into the city. The underground was under construction
by 1864 when Dickens completed Our Mutual
Friend, and the Thames, relieved now of carrying
the city’s waste to the sea, had been organized into
a pleasing promenade via the great Embankment
projects. Spacious boulevards now graced the city,
among them Victoria Street, Garrick Street, and the
newly extended Oxford Street. Now there were
four times as many streets and roads in London as
when Dickens had arrived in the city with his parents
at the age of 11. The remaining fragments of
the city gates were now surrounded by universes of
urban activity rather than the rural countryside.
Dickens was acclaimed in his time as an accurate
recorder of economic, social, and cultural conditions.
He was also a social reformer who explored
the impact of past conditions on the present. His
evocation of the workhouse, for example, in Oliver
Twist, recorded the misery of the poor and outcast
at a moment when reform had already changed
some of the worst conditions. But the emotional
impact of the novel led to further efforts at remediation.
And the workhouse as the place where the poor
and destitute were warehoused remained as a central
theme in the last novel he completed, Our Mutual
Friend, which was published in 1864, six years
before his death. Yet his vision of Victorian England
always implied the possibility of social, economic,
and culture improvement, and of change directed
toward greater sympathy and understanding.
In his fiction Dickens records and responds to
an era of unprecedented rapid and radical social
change, which he sought to influence and shape.
According to F. S. Schwarzbach, for Dickens, this
magical place evoked the “attraction of repulsion”
for it was “such a gritty city; such a hopeless city
. . . ; such a beleaguered city” as Bleak House renders
it a waste and wasteland, and yet also a
celebration “of the city as the most impressive
embodiment of change,” increasingly the dominant
fact of modern life.
Murray Baumgarten
See also London, United Kingdom; Manchester, United
Kingdom; Tenement
Further Readings
Forster, John. 1872. The Life of Charles Dickens. Vol. 1.
Philadelphia: Lippincott.
Schwarzbach, F. S. 1979. Dickens and the City. London:
Athlone Press.
Disability a n D t h e ci t y
Disability is a diverse lived experience that is frequently
shaped by barriers and exclusions in the
context of the city. Definitions of disability that
stress the way in which the organization of society
serves to disadvantage people by a devaluation of
the disabled body shed particular light on the barriers
that shape disabled people’s access to urban
spaces and participation in city life. Inaccessible
buildings and transport, or unclear signage, are
some of the more obvious manifestations of these
barriers. Disabled people and disability groups
are, however, increasingly challenging and influencing
urban policy processes and decisions about
urban space. The experience of disability therefore
illuminates processes of social division, exclusion,
and resistance which are manifest in, and
shape, the urban environment.
Definitions of Disability
Definitions of disability have tended to revolve
around two different conceptual starting points,
expressed as the medical and social models of
disability. The former equates disability with a
biological impairment or condition that needs to
be treated or cured if the individual is to function