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

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.

The hostile environment

Pre-hospital care and emergency medicine in the hostile environment poses particular challenges for those providing care to the patient. This chapter covers hypothermia, cold injury, avalanche rescue, heat-related illness, drowning and near drowning, diving emergencies, and electrocution injury. For each environment, mechanisms, diagnosis, and management are listed.