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.