ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Charles Dickens's navigation of corporate space, and the way in which corporate space challenged the meaning-making apparatus of the novel itself. As an impersonal vehicle for transacting business beyond the boundaries of a knowable community, the incorporated joint-stock company collaborated in the incomplete and fitful disentanglement of business from personal relationships, personal character, and personal responsibility. Corporate space – or architecture financed and managed by joint-stock companies – marked a decisive break from the small-scale, local, and domestic architectural forms of an earlier business paradigm. Corporate spaces furnished the Victorian corporation with a concrete form and identity. In turn, Victorian culture apprehended the corporation through the architectural spaces it built. Dickens offers two contradictory endings for Bounderby, Inc. On the one hand, Bounderby's humanity is stabilized: he is revealed to have a past and to fit into a web of familial relationships; his mechanical self-descriptions are revealed to be bluster.
