Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)

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

Overall

• meditation on commodification (Wegg's leg, the supply chain severing final product from what went into it) as an extension of Dickens's lifelong meditation on the use value of literature, the dignity of literature (vs. Thackeray in the 1850s)

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)
• commodities
  • objectification of everything
  • the subject is self aware, awareness of human object status (Bella comparing herself to spoons)
• is Wegg's leg a commodity?
  • epitome of a commodity fetish (abstracted from use value), or opposed
  • a literary man with a part made out of the same stuff (?)
  • buying his leg back
  • separating exchange value from use value
    • severing final product from what went into it (supply chain)