OMF II

For the second class on Our Mutual Friend I'd like to talk about the river, and about sexuality. On this latter, I'd point you towards Eve Sedgwick's famous book Between Men: English literature and male homosocial desire (Columbia University Press, 1985). Her category 'homosocial' to describe intense, eroticised but not necessarily fully sexual male-male relations is useful, and her reading of OMF is famous. Google books has some of this text available online -- though sadly not the specific Our Mutual Friend chapter! But see what she has to say about Edwin Drood, and other nineteenth-century texts, and see how persuaded you are. (You'll find reviews of Sedgwick's book here, and here.

J Hillis Miller's chapter on the novel in his older but still useful Charles Dickens: the World of His Novels (1958), 279ff., is very good too.