Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Stauffer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Ancient Egypt ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Egyptian Archaeology ◽  
Mutual Friend

AbstractIn his journalism and novels (particularlyBleak HouseandOur Mutual Friend), Charles Dickens presents London as a writer’s necropolis, a city of disintegrating paper and dead letters, a failed archival space. This essay examines a nexus of images in Dickens’ work – involving dust, Egyptian ruins and mummies, and paper – as revealing characteristic Victorian concerns regarding the changing status of paper and the archive. With reference to developments in papermaking technologies and the beginnings of Egyptian archaeology, I demonstrate some of the ways that nineteenth-century authors were newly troubled by the archival as such. Dickens is particularly haunted by an urban vision of paper as everywhere and everywhere turning into blank, wasting forms. I connect this phenomenon to the British reception of the material legacies of ancient Egypt, particularly the mummified dead. The Victorian era was the great age of paper, as technological developments transformed the industry and multiplied its productivity many times over. Read in the context of these changes, and in relation to Egyptology (that other burgeoning industry of records and remains), the work of Dickens reflects deep anxieties regarding the whelming flood of precariously fragile paper—anxieties that have a center in the necropolitan library.

Our Mutual Friend

2018 ◽  
pp. 284-298
Author(s):  
Ian Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Formal Schooling ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Savage Mind ◽  
Mutual Friend

This chapter situates Our Mutual Friend at the intersection of nineteenth-century projects of culture: the antiquarian, pedagogical, and anthropological. Silas Wegg and the doll’s dressmaker, Jenny Wren, represent competing versions of the novel’s imaginative sources in popular culture, attached to successive historical stages. Wegg is a corrupt avatar of the Romantic ballad revival, with its commitments to antiquarian nationalism and a degenerationist cultural history. Jenny personifies a communal heritage of folktales, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes, absorbed organically in childhood, anticipating the anthropological claim on these materials, in the decades after Dickens’s death, as relics of a universal ‘savage mind’. Our Mutual Friend resists both programmes, the anthropological as well as the antiquarian, in counterpoint to its well-studied critique of the acquisition of culture through formal schooling.

Reading the Body in Dickens’s Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 275-292
Author(s):  
Zeynep Harputlu Shah
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Infant Deaths ◽  
Bleak House ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Physical Degradation ◽  
Mutual Friend ◽  
The Grotesque ◽  
Grotesque Body

This article examines the ways in which the Victorian body and identity were being transformed in the mid-nineteenth century and identifies three distinctive ways the biological and normative boundaries of the body were violated as represented in Dickens’s fiction: the grotesque body, the vulnerable body and the dead body. In this sense, Dickens’s Bleak House (1851-53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) present creative and challenging literary responses to the Victorian body abjected through deprivation, physical vulnerability and death. In the novels, the grotesque body challenges the abject via a tragicomic and hybrid representation of the body and of character. Regarding the vulnerable body, the study elaborates on a body “out-of-control”, threatening the boundaries between the object and the subject, inside and outside, by holding a liminal state through ill-health, excessive labour, starvation and physical degradation. Finally, it is argued that there was an intimate and abject relationship between the living and the dead bodies in the capital, beside prevalent infant deaths, high mortality rates, diseased bodies and overflowing graveyards in the city.

DICKENS'S “JEWISH QUESTION”: PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Epstein Nord
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Amy Levy ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Great Writer ◽  
Mutual Friend

The story – we might almost saylegend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah inOur Mutual Frienda benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen ofOliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

THE DOLLS’ DRESSMAKER RE(AD)DRESSED: JENNY WREN'S CRITIQUE OF CHILDHOOD, FEMININITY, AND APPEARANCE

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-490 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Moore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Philosophical Critique ◽  
Initial Assumption ◽  
True Description ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Mutual Friend ◽  
Wealthy Women

Of all Dickens's eccentric children – whose numbers include the Artful Dodger, Paul Dombey, Little Nell, and Smike – none, perhaps, is more peculiarly “old-fashioned” than Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). From her first appearance, Jenny exhibits a strange indeterminacy: A parlour door within a small entry stood open, and disclosed a child – a dwarf – a girl – a something – sitting on a little low old-fashioned arm-chair, which had a kind of little working bench before it.“I can't get up,” said the child, “because my back's bad, and my legs are queer. But I'm the person of the house.” (222; bk. 2, ch.1) This description of Jenny cannot settle. The initial assumption that she is a child is placed in doubt as she becomes, in quick succession, a “dwarf,” a “girl,” a “something.” It is left to her to define how she should be perceived, but the phrase she chooses – “the person of the house” – only compounds the confusion. Throughout this article I follow the spirit of this passage. Rather than pursuing a “true” description of Jenny Wren, I offer a reading that puts her indeterminacy centre-stage, along with her job as a “dolls’ dressmaker” for wealthy women. In her appearance, her work, and her language, I argue, Jenny calls into question how gender and child/adult identities are constructed in nineteenth-century society, both in her own working-class milieu, where she is taunted by local children (224; bk. 2, ch. 1), and in the fashionable upper- and middle-class world to whose whims she caters. In addition, I draw upon Thomas Carlyle's novel Sartor Resartus (1833-34) and the work of Walter Benjamin to suggest that Jenny's satirical and playful use of words constitutes a philosophical critique of the mutability of appearance in mid-nineteenth-century modernity.

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