Proto-Reading and the Positing of Character in Our Mutual Friend

2021 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Kevin Ohi
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Near Drowning ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Recursive Structures ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
As If ◽  
Mutual Friend ◽  
The Way

The openings of Dickens’s novels schematically isolate the elements that will form the texts: beginning with the “two figures” of the novel’s opening, this chapter examines the positing of character in Our Mutual Friend. It traces the novel’s fascination with proto-, incomplete, or newly emerging persons: the partial assembly of skeletons, the emergence of the nouveau riche or of “made” men, the awakening to consciousness after a near-drowning, the looming of forms that might be (but that are not yet) human out of the darkness or at the borders of perception. The novel repeatedly produces scenarios where recursive structures of gazing (fond spouses attending to their spouses’ looks, a daughter watching to see what her father sees) as if produce faces that loom out of the void. It also repeatedly dramatizes forms of reading that aren’t literally reading: Silas Wegg teaching Boffin to “decline and fall”; Lizzie Hexham seeing stories in the fire; Charlie Hexham looking at the spines of books; Gaffer “reading” posters illegible to him, and so on. The novel’s concern with incipient forms and, as it were, proto-reading, indexes the way its major and minor plots and subplots are structured by an overarching concern with inception.

"A Dismal Swamp": Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend

1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard W. Fulweiler
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Dismal Swamp ◽  
Human World ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species, is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.

DICKENS'S “JEWISH QUESTION”: PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Epstein Nord
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Amy Levy ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Great Writer ◽  
Mutual Friend

The story – we might almost saylegend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah inOur Mutual Frienda benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen ofOliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

Our Mutual Friend

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Dickens
Keyword(s):  
Individual Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Financial Speculation ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The City ◽  
Mutual Friend

Following his father's death John Harmon returns to London to claim his inheritance, but he finds he is eligible only if he marries Bella Wilfur. To observe her character he assumes another identity and secures work with his father's foreman, Mr Boffin, who is also Bella's guardian. Disguise and concealment play an important role in the novel and individual identity is examined within the wider setting of London life: in the 1860s the city was aflame with spiralling financial speculation while thousands of homeless scratched a living from the detritus of the more fortunate-indeed John Harmon's father has amassed his wealth by recycling waste. This edition includes extensive explanatory notes and significant manuscript variants.

JASPER PACKLEMERTON, VICTORIAN FREAK

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-232
Author(s):  
Kelly Hager
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Mutual Friend

ONE OF THEOED'S DEFINITIONSof the word “freak” is that of a freak of nature, “a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” The freak of nature I wish to focus on in this essay is marriage, and specifically, marriage as it is “exhibited” in Dickens's novelThe Old Curiosity Shop(1840–41). To refer to marriage in a Victorian novel as a freak of nature is perhaps surprising. To refer to the sacred institution as freakish in a Dickens novel may seem to border on heresy. After all, Dickens is the self-appointed novelist of hearth and home, the creator of conservative domestic plots that celebrate marriage as the institution that establishes closure for the novel and for the society it represents. Despite this apparent conservatism and despite our vague sense that most marriages in Dickens are as happy as David and Agnes's, Esther and Allen Woodcourt's, Biddy and Joe's, it is in fact the case that in all his novels, fromThe Pickwick PaperstoOur Mutual Friend, Dickens is fascinated–in a multiplicity of ways both large and small, in a manner that is alternately comic, tragic, melodramatic, ironic–with marriage's discontents. In fact, the disintegration of the institution is one of the things that Dickens makes fictions from, giving the failure of marriage a surprisingly high degree of visibility and presenting the breaking of the matrimonial bond with remarkable clarity and persistence. Dickens novels are full of wives who leave their husbands (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind), breach of promise suits (inPickwickandOur Mutual Friendmost famously) and characters who try to find legal ways of escaping their marriages (Stephen Blackpool, Betsey Trotwood,Nickleby's Madame Mantalini). This essay, then, is an analysis of how Dickens undermines the institution early in his career, and of how the comic and grotesque display of the body, the sprawling, teeming physical surfaces ofThe Old Curiosity Shop, both conceal and reveal a story of marital skepticism.

The Movement of History in Our Mutual Friend

PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Author(s):  
William J. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
Mutual Friend

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.

Dmenisions of Human Behavior in The Novel “The Foreigner” By Arun Joshi

IJOHMN ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Abhishek Verma
Keyword(s):  
Human Behavior ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Poor People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
As If ◽  
Available Resources

In the modern age of globalization and modernization, people have become selfish and self-centered.  Feeling of sympathy and kindness towards poor people have almost bolted from the hearts of those who have richly available resources.  They leave needy people running behind their luxurious chauffer-driven cars.  Poor and marginalized people keep shouting for help for their dear ones but upper class people trying to show as if they did not hear any long distant sound crept into their eardrums.  This trauma, agony, pain and sufferings is explored in the novel, The Foreigner.

Diligent Notes on Laziness: Oblomov, Lenin and the Capitalization of Laziness

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-258
Keyword(s):  
Psychiatric Hospital ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Work Analysis ◽  
Main Obstacle ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Russian Linguistic ◽  
The Way

The essay investigates the phenomenon of laziness by first analyzing the opposition between laziness and the good. Both utility and the good make reference to labor. This opposition between labor and laziness is pivotal in Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov’s famous novel written in 1859. It marks a radical transition from a feudal paradigm to a capitalistic one. The two main characters in the novel are Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a Russian, and Andrey Ivanovich Stolz, a German, who together seem to personify the contradiction between laziness and labor. But the purpose of the essay is to deconstruct that opposition. In this connection, one can cite Kazimir Malevich, who maintained that laziness is the Mother of Perfection and is always unconsciously inherent in the conscious intent to work. Analysis of the Latin concepts of otium and negotium indicates that the laziness/labor opposition may be deconstructed as a dialectic between labor and its opposite. In other words, laziness does not stand in contradiction to labor but is instead its inseparable dialectical other. In the last part of the essay, the article considers the thinking of Anatoly Peregud, a poet who spent almost all his life in a psychiatric hospital. According to Peregud, Lenin derived his pseudonym from the Russian linguistic root “len” (laziness) in order to make laziness central to communism. For his part, Lenin saw Oblomov as an emblem of the main obstacle standing in the way of communism.

The Castle of Otranto

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horace Walpole
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
English Novel ◽  
Game Changer ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Grotesque

‘Look, my lord! See heaven itself declares against your impious intentions’ The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the darkest Middle Ages, the novel tells of Manfred, prince of Otranto, whose fear of an ancient prophecy sets him on a course of destruction. After the grotesque death of his only son, Conrad, on his wedding day, Manfred determines to marry the bride–to–be. The virgin Isabella flees through a castle riddled with secret passages. Chilling coincidences, ghostly visitations, arcane revelations, and violent combat combine in a heady mix that terrified the novel's first readers. In this new edition Nick Groom examines the reasons for its extraordinary impact and the Gothic culture from which it sprang. The Castle of Otranto was a game-changer, and Walpole the writer who paved the way for modern horror exponents.

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