The City as Character in Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

The representation of the city as a character in its own right, with its own rhythms, moralities, and absurdities, is a persistent feature of urban fiction across centuries, and a comparison of Teju Cole's Lagos in Every Day Is for the Thief and Charles Dickens's London in Bleak House illuminates how writers use the city to critique systemic institutional failure. This study examined how both texts construct urban spaces as expressions of corruption, bureaucratic dysfunction, and social indifference. A narratological methodology supported by urban theory and postcolonial criticism was applied. Cole's essayistic narrator returns to Lagos after years abroad and documents the city's systems of petty corruption, infrastructural decay, and vibrant cultural energy, while Dickens uses the fog-bound, labyrinthine London court of Chancery as a symbol of institutional parasitism and class injustice. Both texts depict cities that consume their inhabitants through bureaucratic delay and normalised dishonesty. The analysis revealed that both authors employ a detached yet emotionally present narrative voice that allows them to observe urban dysfunction without surrendering to despair. However, Cole's formally hybrid text blends photography, memoir, and fiction in ways that reflect Lagos's layered modernity, while Dickens employs satirical omniscience. The study concludes that the city novel as a genre transcends historical period and makes a compelling case for reading Cole alongside the Victorian social novel tradition in Nigerian undergraduate literature programmes, particularly at universities in the South West.

Keywords: urban fiction, city novel, Teju Cole, Dickens, postcolonial Lagos