Our Mutual Friend (Dickens, 1865)

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

• Serialized 5/1864-11/1865
• Good for: theory of print culture; commodities; metonymic association method of realism;

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, i.e., Pendennis (Thackeray, 1850))
  • not an allegory for print but a theory of commodities and fetishism that's Dickensian not Marxian or Freudian and the ways we can use Dicken's own media theory to look at print culture

General

• 20 description of the dinner party guests in the mirror: description through a manufactured object
• 24 Poole notes that "dust" was as capacious then as "waste" is now and significantly refuses to be fixed here or in Mayhew.
• 40 Reginald Wilfer a clerk - track clerks - paperwork
  • 91 taxonomy of Lightwood's clerks: "Strict system?" "By which he probably meant that his mind would have been shattered to pieces without this fiction of an occupation," i.e. Keeping the register of appts
• 76: "the tidal swell...so her thoughts startled her" the river breaks down inside/outside boundaries through physical and figuratively work repeatedly

Theme Tracking

Reading/Writing

• 27 Veneerings' "bran new books in bran new bindings liberally gilded"
  • 28 contrast with Charley Hexam whose ""awakened curiosity...went below the binding"
• 32 illiterate hexam's collection of handbills about drowned people papering the wall
  • he knows the paper by its newness, prefigured Boffin's book
• police station as monastery
• 40 print and oral transmission of the Harmon Murder like the tide
• 57 Boffin to Wegg "A literary man - with a wooden leg - and all Print open to him!"
  • verbs associated with print and reading: "collaring and throwing," "shoveling and shifting"
• 59 "decline and fall off the rooshan empire"

Materiality

• 13 contrast "no need to be precise" about the year with the specificity of the stone and iron bridges
  • the whole opening passage is interesting: material signifiers do not allow the narrator to describe the Hexams' purpose, he must reply on narration. The objects are precise but what they mean isn't
  • 17 contrast with the Veneerings who have a direct correspondence with their bran-new furniture
• 37 materiality rooted in deep geological time
  • atmosphere of environmental change/disaster 80
• 83 Mr Venus's shop

Shakespeare References

• 16 Rough Riderhood's "has a dead man any use for money" distantly echoes Falstaff on honor in Henry IV Pt 1

Waste/Filth

• 30 "down by where accumulated scum of humanity seemed to be washed from higher grounds, like so much moral sewage" toward the river
• 107 "Down with the dust, Bof-fin!" - ed glosses this as "show us your money," so there's even a direct slippage between waste and capital here

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
  • 1. 16
• "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 (also Roger Chartier TDS Seminar/Lecture)
  • moral and literal sewage: dust is partly shit
  • How are all these ostensibly different existences connected?
    • geography, class, sanitation, 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 (see Commodities)
  • 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)
• Dickens and Marx are writing about the same synchronic place (London 1860s)
  • all these commodities abstracted from original purpose and Wegg can't afford his own leg (alienated labor)
    • commodification of labor - purchasing of life
  • or the opposite: scalar shift in how visible some of these things are - Wegg and his leg are reunited
    • if it's compensating for a lack it's Freudian fetishism - recovering manhood and gentility
    • magical quality in either case (Freudian or Marxist)
  • if it's not exchangeable it's not a commodity - Wegg wants his leg not a leg (presto-chango into a better leg)
    • the truly commoditized consciousness wouldn't want to see the difference: would Wegg know the difference?
• Worth being careful about using Marx to explain Dickens: parts don't fit
  • they may not agree on the same phenomena
  • we read theory as mobile and literature as local: why not use Dickens as a theory of commodities and objects, Marx as a novelist?
  • Dickens much more into stuff than Marx, messy particularity troubling theory - intractable materiality
• Figuring humans as animals (Jenny Wren, etc) playing with figuration's unstable relationship to the referent - literalized metaphors
  • what's literal about figurative language?
  • "a big ass poem": it's the play that's important
• The sense of Dickens being interested in the same things as Jane Bennett and (?) Connolly
  • emergent patterns intersecting
  • new materialist turn
• if one of the concerns is social stratification, does the aesthetic of overabundance cutting across become a problem? Flattening social distinctions?
  • does interconnection imply sameness?
  • in the scene with Tulliver and the Mill there's a serious engagement with difference, but you take anything seriously in Dickens at your peril (?)
  • they're all in London, but not in the same way
• What does Dickens think of wealth? He bites into capitalist economy but this had more ads than any other book he'd written
  • it sucks to be poor, but ethically and politically it's harder to say how he feels about wealth
  • to what degree is the economy presented as natural or not? Where are the places where it maps out double internality (Jason Moore) - capital consuming nature, nature consuming capital
    • people used Darwin to naturalize capital