Barbara Leckie's Open Houses takes its inception from a recognition that nineteenth-century writers, especially those writing between the 1830s and 1880s, demonstrated a distinct and new fascination with the housing of the poor, and particularly in describing these abodes in a way that brought a reader inside them. Leckie focuses on the considerable print culture—both documentary and novelistic—whose goal it was to convince readers not only that the housing was wretched and unlivable but also that it required urgent architectural reform, a conviction that coincided with the emergence of architecture as a profession and with the idea that architecture itself was a defining category of analysis for personal, social, political, and national formations. In short, these writers shared a belief that the built environment could be manipulated to effect social control and social improvement. A primary aim of Leckie in this study is to “bring this outpouring of print on housing of the poor into dialogue with architecture, the novel, and nineteenth-century modernity” (6) and to illustrate how debates over housing suggested new models for social critique that developed hand in hand with new forms for the novel.

In the first half of the book, Leckie examines documentary accounts dedicated to housing of the poor and their failures to effect the changes that reformers had imagined. In a chapter on Edwin Chadwick's Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Poor (1842), Leckie reorients a critical perspective that has focused largely on what she terms the “sanitary idea” to what is often overlooked in Chadwick's report, that is, its “architectural idea.” Although Chadwick is credited with bringing about sanitary reforms, a “sewers-and-drains agenda” (98), his grasp of architecture and housing reform, both central and sidelined in his report, has not been fully appreciated.

The importance of looking into the house, underlined by Chadwick's report, intensified in the years that followed. But now, the architectural idea and the shaping force of the house on the poor could not be so readily sidelined by sanitary preoccupations. Nonetheless, the failure of these print mediations to generate meaningful reform culminated in a loss of confidence in documentary reportage to produce results.

Charting this erosion of the bond between exposé and amelioration leads to the book's second section, wherein Leckie focuses on the “novelistic idea,” which she describes as a different way of knowing, distinct from both the sanitary idea and the architectural idea. Novelistic representation opens up a space for mediation between what is represented and the nature of representation itself. I am reminded of the narrator's meditation on reality in George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859)—a “faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind”—which points to the gap between the thing itself and its formal representation. Does this gap, Leckie asks, enable the novel as a genre to generate the reform that eludes other print exposés and, on the other hand, does representation and the mental transformation it entails complicate the novel's own commitment to realism?

In a series of fascinating readings of three novels—Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852), George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872), and Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886)—Leckie foregrounds both the centrality of architecture and its interaction with the novel's own architecture to ensure that the complicated, interconnected story of housing the poor must be heard. These readings situate representations of home and house in the novel as an important part of a story of nineteenth-century modernity. Through their engagement with housing of the poor, the novels themselves take on architectural forms that are new and fascinating, and, in the process, the genre of the novel is itself transformed.

In sum, Leckie makes a large and complex argument that encompasses the architectural idea in the nineteenth century and novelists who engaged that idea and transformed it by viewing architecture through a modernist lens, focusing on spatial relations and movement rather than only boundaries and containment. She contributes much to our understanding of documentarians of poor housing like Chadwick and major novelists who follow, themselves committed to a practice that effects action. But the causal relationship between the former and the latter that Leckie develops, built on the architectural idea, can seem forced at times.

Furthermore, Leckie does not discuss architectural reform projects that might be illuminated by her analysis. For instance, the failure Leckie posits of these documentary accounts to spur reform lead me to ask how nineteenth-century innovators like Titus Salt, who developed an entire model village in West Yorkshire named Saltaire in 1851—an innovation emulated by other planners—would fit into this story of architecture and poverty. In an ambitious venture into urban planning, Salt created an environment for his workers of solid stone houses, wash houses with tap water, a hospital, library, church, institutes, parks, schools, and almshouses—a world starkly at odds with the slums in which other mill workers at the time were living in nearby cities like Manchester. To be sure, Saltaire had its own distinctive architecture: a ban on public houses and a built-in social policing of the workers through a warden's house at the top of a hill to surveil community inhabitants. But it represents another significant, albeit limited in scope, dimension to the architectural idea in nineteenth-century England. Other examples might be cited.

Such questions aside, the scope and ambition of Barbara Leckie's work, with its excellent close readings and insights into the way housing of the poor enters nineteenth-century discourse and imaginative representations, make this a study with which readers can profitably engage.