In 1858 Walter Bagehot, finance writer and editor of The Economist, published a review essay on Charles Dickens. In it he writes:

Bagehot argues here that Dickens's strength is in representing the discontinuity of modern urban life: the clashing juxtapositions, and the odd simultaneity of unrelated events in every second of the urban clock. This temporality of the “disconnected” (“we pass a corner and we are in a changed world”) is what Walter Benjamin refers to in the famous formulation “homogeneous, empty time,” the time of the newspaper, the telegraph, the crowd, a time that attenuates the telos of the Christian calendar. But for Bagehot this discontinuity of simultaneous lives is merely a semblance, a surface effect that belies a hidden order. The “disconnectedness” of events and objects in Dickens becomes, as Bagehot's argument in the review develops, not a condition of history but rather a quirk of Dickens's imagination itself, a symptom of his “irregular genius” (CD 80). Thus the seeming disunity of the city is “advantageous” to Dickens's “irregular” mind.