Our Mutual Friend

This chapter situates Our Mutual Friend at the intersection of nineteenth-century projects of culture: the antiquarian, pedagogical, and anthropological. Silas Wegg and the doll’s dressmaker, Jenny Wren, represent competing versions of the novel’s imaginative sources in popular culture, attached to successive historical stages. Wegg is a corrupt avatar of the Romantic ballad revival, with its commitments to antiquarian nationalism and a degenerationist cultural history. Jenny personifies a communal heritage of folktales, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes, absorbed organically in childhood, anticipating the anthropological claim on these materials, in the decades after Dickens’s death, as relics of a universal ‘savage mind’. Our Mutual Friend resists both programmes, the anthropological as well as the antiquarian, in counterpoint to its well-studied critique of the acquisition of culture through formal schooling.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Dickens’s last and incomplete novel has generated a remarkable number of theories regarding the missing end. This chapter explores the ways in which responses to the novel have evolved, dividing them broadly into four groups: the opportunists, the detectives, the academics, and the irreverent. It explores the solutions for their implicit criticism regarding how The Mystery of Edwin Drood should be interpreted, examining the conflicting ideas which have arisen about what genre the book falls into, or what other works it most closely resembles. It closes with a call to recognize and celebrate the comedy in Edwin Drood as a necessary balance to the prolonged morbid fascination with the final book of Dickens.

Little Dorrit

By dwelling first on the ‘faults’, then on the ‘excellencies’ remarked by reviewers and critics of Little Dorrit, this chapter also traces the history of that novel’s critical reception as it evolved from a close focus on contemporary politics and economics toward a study of the writer’s Hogarthian skill at building a visual satire. Subsequently the characters’ psychology as well as Dickens’s became the object of critical enquiry. When visual studies brought to the fore the import of perception and its narrative function, another area of investigation opened, in this chapter specifically connected with, and culturally encoded in, the technique of the stereoscope and the scientific notion of the binocularity of vision. Implemented by Dickens in the construction of Little Dorrit, this notion allows for a further critical reading of the novel as lieu de mémoire where real and imagined imprisonments, inscribed in history, also conjure the scene where cultural memory rewrites individual and collective identity in the present.

Dickens’s Visual Mediations

By shifting the theoretical ground from questions of surveillance, adaptation, and illustration to questions of information, mediation, and storage, this chapter generates new ways of thinking about Dickens’s experimental and conceptual engagement with the new visual media such as photography and panoramas that were gradually transforming how people read, saw, and imagined the world around them. Drawing on Hablot Knight Browne’s iconic illustrations for Bleak House, Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit as exemplary instances of Dickens’s visual conception of the mediation of his writing, this chapter offers a new approach to the ways in which these memorable images circulated, and still do circulate, within complex global information networks.

Drinking in Dickens

This chapter traces two distinct and diametrically opposed attitudes to drink in the Dickens canon that find their way into both the novels and the journalism. The first, associated with Dickens’s comic characters and with the spirit of conviviality, sees drink as a positive social force binding people and groups together, while the second sees drink in what we would now think of as the idiom of alcoholism, leading to violence, alienation, and death. Drawing from studies of narrative, and on scholarship about addiction, this chapter argues that the coexistence of euphoric and dysphoric drunkenness cannot entirely be explained by recourse to opinions held by a biographical Dickens—to ideas for example of ambivalence or even paradox. Instead, it maintains that Dickens’s comic and tragic or serious drunks are embedded in different relations of cause and effect, and different narrative temporalities, logic, and genres. The chapter examines these different rhetorics of drinking in essays from Household Words and in two novels from different stages in Dickens’s career, The Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield.

Class and its Distinctions

Dickens employs a range of class discourses to imagine possibilities of social being defined in terms of middle-class selfhood. This self seeks social inclusion represented as the achievement of the status of the gentleman or gentlewoman. The nineteenth-century shift of gentility from inborn quality to a quality of character that is earned through self-making in turn raises the possibility of mere self-invention and along with it the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others. This problematic accounts for the repeated plot structure in which a protagonist is excluded from genteel society and can only re-enter it through earning his or her way in the world. In the late novels, Dickens focuses in particular on the way in which the desire for social inclusion is generated by gestures of exclusion and thus questions gentility as a viable category for defining social being.

History and Change

This chapter questions the view that Dickens took little interest in history and remained ignorant of the challenge of writing about the past. Following John Forster’s dismissal of A Child’s History of England as ‘that little book’, which ‘cannot be said to have quite hit the mark’, A Child’s History, Barnaby Rudge, and A Tale of Two Cities have received often unsympathetic treatment, particularly with respect to the way the past is used in his two historical novels. Read within the context of ideas about history advocated by Carlyle and Macaulay in the 1830s, this chapter contends that fresh light can be shed on Dickens’s awareness of historiography and on his familiarity with an invigorated approach to the discipline advocated by the two most prominent historians of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Dickens, Industry, and Technology

This chapter discusses Dickens’s treatment of industry, technology, and invention, forces that were reshaping not only the culture, economics, and geography but also the texture of daily life in nineteenth-century Britain. While the growth of London and other cities demanded innovations in sanitation and public health, revolutionary technologies in transport and communication reshaped the very experience of space and time. Some of Dickens’s most vocal contemporaries saw machinery and factory production as embodying the evils of the age, but Dickens approached technology with a more hopeful sense of its ability to magnify human power, to provoke dreams and wonder, and ultimately perhaps to offer a kind of spiritual meaning. Dickens expresses this rich vision in a range of works, from novels and stories to the essays he wrote and commissioned for his journals.

The Trouble with Angels

Dickens’s celebration of other-worldly or childlike femininity, with its corollary anathema of ‘fallen’ women, has often seemed the quintessence of a fabled Victorian repression, which obscures or radically simplifies the unsettling energies of erotic life. Yet Dickens’s fiction acknowledges the power of those energies in its incessant preoccupation with the management of sexual desire. Gender norms in Dickens’s world are largely articulated through the management of desire, which also underwrites moral hierarchies that are frequently aligned with hierarchies of social class. But there is a powerful, gendered asymmetry in Dickens’s representation of sexual discipline. Inverting long-standing gender norms, the idealized woman of Victorian domestic ideology is a figure of selfless, nurturing sympathy, whose instinctive modesty and restraint are a foil to more aggressive, self-interested masculine desire, which must be controlled by strength of will. Thus while representations of femininity in Dickens tend to be shaped by stark sexual dichotomies—the virtuous and the ‘fallen’—masculinity depends on self-discipline that is articulated through a variety of psychic regimens, which are inflected by, and in turn articulate, more intricate social hierarchies. This chapter focuses on three novels from different stages of Dickens’s career—The Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, and Our Mutual Friend—to bring home something of the range in his characterization of sexuality and sexual discipline, but also the consistency with which masculine self-discipline serves as a marker of class standing. That standing is ratified in the relative assurance with which a character masters his unruly desires—desires thrown into relief by contrasting models of femininity.

Dickens’s Language

Several of Dickens’s plots, from The Pickwick Papers on, turn on linguistic miscommunications, converting into a catalyst of the narrative the inherent instability of language, which the prose itself both diligently resists and playfully exploits. This chapter considers Dickens’s use of language across his writing career in the context of its propensity, as Dickens conceived it, to generate confusion or misunderstanding, whether through false usage or from intrinsic ambiguities. It considers puns, animisms, syllepsis, and the dislocation of pronouns from their antecedents in relation to local effects and to larger understandings of language as representative of a more general malaise.