The Roaring Streets: Dickensian London in the Pages of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was a keen preserver of some Victorian values, and among these the art of Charles Dickens, with his representation of London, its voices, sounds, music and noises. Dickens’s Little Dorrit and its closing sentence opens up my critical track by suggesting that Woolf’s reconstruction of the past must give to Victorian sounds a role that is neither ancillary nor merely impressionistic. This article focuses on Woolf’s portrayal of Victorian urban life in her fiction, especially in The Years (1937), where London sounds are everywhere present and deployed to create the polyphony—an exciting cacophony in modernist terms—of the great city. In Woolf’s fiction sounds are meant to convey symbolic meanings, to bring myth to the foreground, while also adding to the realism of the text. Sounds function like the many voices of an organ—the baroque instrument par excellence—suggesting at once order and chaos, norm and transgression: they frame representation and yet also break the frame by directly affecting the reader. This effect of discordia concors as acoustic experience is implemented within the verbal context, emphasizing the dialogic relationship between the source of sound, its reception, and the performative function sounds obtain within the texture of The Years.