Talking Politics Political Discussion Networks and the New American Electorate

When Dickens was nineteen years old, he wrote a poem for Maria Beadnell, the young woman he wished to marry. The poem imagined Maria as a welcoming landlady offering lodgings to let. Almost forty years later, Dickens died, leaving his final novel unfinished - in its last scene, another landlady sets breakfast down for her enigmatic lodger. These kinds of characters are everywhere in Dickens's writing. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World explores the significance of tenancy in his fiction.

In nineteenth century Britain the vast majority of people rented, rather than owned, their homes. Instead of keeping to themselves, they shared space - renting, lodging, taking lodgers in, or simply living side-by-side in a crowded modern city. Charles Dickens explored both the chaos and the unexpected harmony to be found in rented spaces, the? loneliness and sociability, the interactions between cohabitants, the complex gender dynamics at play, and the relationship between space and money. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction demonstrates that a cosy, secluded home life was beyond the reach of most Victorian Londoners, and considers Dickens's nuanced conception of domesticity. Tenancy maintained an enduring hold upon his imagination, giving him new stories to tell and offering him a set of models to think about authorship. He celebrated the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, and detective plots take place behind their doors. Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction: The Lodger World wedges these doors open.

Taylor N. Carlson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work focuses on political communication, political psychology, and race/ethnicity in American Politics. Specifically, she is interested in understanding the content and consequences of interpersonal political communication.

Marisa Abrajano is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research examines the political behavior of racial and ethnic minorities in the United Sates, with a particular focus on Latinos.

Lisa Garc?a Bedolla is Vice Provost of Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of political inequalities in the United States.

Introduction
1: Building a Career: From sketches to dombey
2: 'To Let To Let To Let': The Bildungsroman6R and the Spatial Imagination
3: 'The Property of 1851': The Great Exhibition and the Business of Hospitality
Interlude: Londoners maritimized
4: 'Is This an Hotel? Are There Thieves in the House?': The Spatial Contexts of Crime
5: How to Live Together: Collaborative Fiction
Coda: Taking Leave