Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)
From Commonplace Book
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Pub. 1865. Ed. Adrian Poole. Penguin: World's Classics, 1997. Print.
Contents
Overall
General
Theme Tracking
Reading/Writing
Materiality
Shakespeare References
Seminar Notes 5/16 (Taylor Anthroposcene)
- Tension between particulars and overarching geography
- Pairings with Bleak House
- system novels: large scale entities (Dombey too) - in this case, the economy
- Central character is London
- large scale corresponds with our focus on large scale human agency and the apprehension of one character (or one reader)
- moving away from focus on human characters
- divide btwn human, animal, and object troubled [cf. Taylor 2016 for more]
- the trauma of Staplehurst train accident as he was writing OMF: extratextual crisis reverberating in the novel
- which number?
- "In these times of ours"
- written during the Thames embankment (pre embankment setting - the waterfront culture of the Hexams destroyed)
- also in the anthroposcene
- jump from East London slum to West End Veneerings
- Veneerings part of new economy of finance
- Ch 3: Lightwood and Wrayburn going back W to E
- "Two Londons": cab ride stitching them together
- Franco Moretti: Map of Euro Novel
- "Two Londons": cab ride stitching them together
- moral and literal sewage: dust is partly shit
- How are all these ostensibly different existences connected?
- geography, class, santitation, meterological maps - reading strategy
- this is actually a really tightly constructed novel (unlike the sprawling BH)
- geography, class, santitation, meterological maps - reading strategy