Our Mutual Friend

This coming Monday for the first of our two Our Mutual Friend sessions, and there are a couple of contexts I'd like to discuss in class. In the first instance it would be interesting to see whether we think 'the dustheaps' (or waste more generally) functions as effectively as a governing metaphor in this novel, the way 'prisons' did in Dorrit, and 'the law' (or 'fog and mud') did in Bleak House.

There are a number of good readings of waste in OMF: Nancy Aycock Metz's 'The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend' (Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 34:1 (1979), 59-72) for one. Following the swampy path, Howard W. Fulweiler's essay '"A Dismal Swamp": Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend' (Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49:1 (1994), 50-74) argues for the novel as a distinctively post-Darwinian text:

Abstract: Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), 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.

Personally I have my doubts; although Darwin's book was a major event in nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural life (and still has the power to shake the world, even today). On the other hand, Daniel P. Scoggin thinks it's all about vampires: 'A Speculative Resurrection: Death, Money, and the Vampiric Economy of Our Mutual Friend', Victorian Literature and Culture, 30:1 (2002), 99-125. Which appeals to me rather more.

Natalie Leeder on Dorrit

In ‘Little Dorrit’s London: Babylon Revisited’, Nancy Aycok Metz argues that Little Dorrit acts as a response to the changing shape of London in the mid-nineteenth century. Whilst she acknowledges that such an interest in the transitory nature of the metropolis is nothing new in Dickens’ work, she maintains that in Little Dorrit he visits the theme with a deeper critical eye and seriousness.

Aycok Metz suggest that the novel engages with contemporary archaeological discourses which were brought to the public eye; in 1951 Household Words told ‘The Story of Giovanni Belzoni’, and that same year Austen Henry Layard returned to England. The images of ruined civilizations touched the romantic imagination, and there was a vogue of landscape images of London as a ruin. Aycok Metz emphasises the depiction of the ruined city in Little Dorrit, which she argues ‘sometimes reads like a museum guide to “lost” London’.

In this it differs from the immediacy of the descriptions in Dickens’ other novels; Little Dorrit plays with distance. Aycok Metz uses Mrs Clennam’s house as an example of the temporal confusion of the novel, as architecture serves to remind us of the past: it is an ‘anomaly’ among the changing metropolis as it clings to a long gone stability.

Aycok Metz argues that this distance is particularly relevant from a readerly perspective; removed by time, we are forced away from any sense of integration. We must share the detached consciousness of the characters as they ‘camp out on the ruins of the past’. Clennam walks down empty streets, reminiscent of a lost civilization, which parallels the depopulation of the city (whilst the slums continued to grow). This contrasts to Dickens’ usual portrayal of the crowds of London, and such journeys as Oliver, Snagsby and Florence take through the metropolis.

Another historical influence Aycok Metz draws attention to is the improvements in London from 1847-54, such as the railways, a new sewer system and slum clearance. The visible ruin and upheaval is reflected in the ruins of Little Dorrit. The Italian episodes in the novel serve to further this image, as they provide a reminder of the fate of Rome, hinting at London’s own destiny.

Aycok Metz argues that Clennam attempts to confront the past that is ever present in his surroundings, but struggles with its fragmented and empty nature: ‘discontinuity rules’. His experience of it as such is reflected in the more minor characters such as Flora. They are forced to return to the past. To conclude, Aycok Metz draws upon Dickens’s own experience of return as he revisits the prison ‘so closely associated with his own early and intense pain’.

Ultimately, Aycok Metz’s reading of Little Dorrit is an interesting insight into Dickens’ world and its discourses. However, it seems to fall short of any deep analysis of the novel. There is little in the essay that could be disputed as such, but it never seems to go far enough to truly penetrate Little Dorrit’s London.

New term: Dorrit

You'll probably have already heard that teaching has been cancelled for tomorrow (Monday 11th January) on account of the inclement weather. We'll start with Little Dorrit next week (18th) instead, and roll the course through to reading week.

What I'd mostly like to talk about, in that session, is prisons, and the consistently worked-through thematic of imprisonment in the novel. This is a mainstream critical perspective on the novel that takes its cue from an essay written half a century ago by the American critic Lionel Trilling. Trilling was commissioned to write the introduction to the Oxford Illustrated Dickens ed of Dorrit; the essay was later reprinted in The Kenyon Review Vol. 15, No. 4 (Autumn, 1953), pp. 577-590 (click that link and you’ll find the whole essay):

The subject of Little Dorrit is borne in upon us by the informing symbol, or emblem, of the book, which is the prison. The story opens in a prison in Marseilles. It goes on to the Marshalsea, which in effect it never leaves. The second of the two parts of the novel begins in what we are urged to think of as a sort of prison, the monastery of the Great St Bernard. The Circumlocution Office is the prison of the creative mind of England. Mr Merdle is shown habitually holding himself by the wrist, taking himself into custody, and in scores of ways the theme of incarceration is carried out, persons and classes being imprisoned by their notions of predestined fate or of religious duty, or by their occupations, their life-schemes, their ideas of themselves, their very habits of language.

Symbolic or emblematic devices are used by Dickens to one degree or another in several of the novels of his late period, but nowehere to such good effect as in Little Dorrit. The fog of Bleak House, the dustheap and the river of Our Mutual Friend are very striking, but they scarcely equal the force of the prison image which dominates Little Dorrit. This is because the prison is an actuality before it is ever a symbol; its connection with the will is real, it is the practical instrument for the negation of man’s will which the will of society has contrived.

Trilling later added a footnote: ‘Since writing this I have had to revise my idea of the actuality of the symbols of Our Mutual Friend. Professor Johnson’s biography of Dickens taught me much about the nature of dustheaps, including their monetary value, which was very large … I never quite believed that Dickens was telling the literal truth about this. From Professor Dodd’s The Age of Paradox I have learned to what an extent the Thames was visible the sewer of London, of how pressing was the problem of sewage in the city as Dickens knew it, of how present to the mind was the sensible and even the tangible evidence that the problem was not being solved. The moral disgust of the book is thus seen to be quite adequately comprehended by the symbols which are used to represent it.’ [AR]