Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)

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Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Pub. 1865. Ed. Adrian Poole. Penguin: World's Classics, 1997. Print.

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
    • 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)