A waste of money? Recycling and the economy of Our Mutual Friend

New Comparison

Volumn 35-36, Issue , 2002, Pages 131-143

  Sicher, Efraim ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33947203860     PISSN: 09505814     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), p. 176
2. MARC SHELL, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 1-4
3. see also SHELL, "The Issue of Representation," in The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 53-74
4. The ethical value of words from Adam Smith to the Marquis de Sade, as well as literary examples from Daniel Defoe and Harriet Martineau, are clearly relevant to an economic model of self and society; yet, although the economic ideas disseminated in literature have been much studied, there are vast methodological differences between various approaches ("Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction," pp. 3-50)
5. See also JOHN VERNON, Money and Fiction: Literary Realism in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)
6. ANDREW MILLER, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
7. See the discussion of Dickens' resistance to commodification in chapter two of EFRAIM SICHER, Rereading the City/Rereading Dickens: Representation, the Novel, and Urban Realism (New York: AMS Press, 2003)
8. HARRY STONE has commented that this theme of "money cannot buy love" was much imitated in the nineteenth century and is found also in Silas Marner. See "The Novel as Fairy-Tale," in Charles Dickens: New Perspectives, ed. Wendall S. Johnson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), pp. 51-82 (p. 53). However, Dickens has succeeded in pinpointing the cruelty of economic determinism
9. W. D. SNODGRASS has related a psychoanalytical interpretation of the story to Lawrence's observations on pornography, suggesting the exact nature of Paul's secret within his secret ("A Rocking Horse: Symbol, Pattern, Way to Live", The Hudson Review 9 (1958), pp. 191-200)
10. Silas Marner's self-enclosed gold worship has also been described as onanistic in JEFF NUNOKAWA, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)
11. On Dombey's "colonization" of the female body see chapter two of SICHER, Rereading the City
12. JOHN FORSTER, The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Dent, revised edition 1969), Vol. I, p. 16
13. ALEXANDER WELSH attempts in The City of Dickens (Oxford University Press, 1971) to distinguish Dickens from a Protestant business ethics, which only further confuses the habits and beliefs of the man with the ideology which the novelist is selling
14. On the association of dust with both money and excrement in the public mind, see HARVEY SUCKSMLTH, "The Dust-Heaps in Our Mutual Friend", Essays in Criticism 23 (1973), pp. 206-12
15. HENRY MAYHEW, London Labour and the London Poor (1861-2; reprinted London: Frank Cass, 1967), Vol. II, pp. 170-1
16. For a survey of the trope of circulation, see DAVID TROTTER, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens, and the Economies of the Novel (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988)
17. Dickens may have borrowed from Mayhew (see HARLAND S. NELSON, "Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor", Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20: 3 (1965), pp. 207-22). But the influence also worked in the other direction, and Mayhew recycled descriptions by Dickens in London Labour and the London Poor
18. The differences between the two authors are quite apparent when Dickens has harsh words for the watermen and dredgermen as criminal outcasts of the river in "Down With the Tide" (Household Words, 5 February 1853)
19. Household Words, 13 July 1850. This article also circulated widely in the American press
20. JOEL J. BRATTIN has adduced evidence from the manuscript and proofs of Dickens' novel to support the influence of Horne's article, arguing that Boffin is opposed to the corrupt Wegg as an agent of conversion, an alchemy resisted by the English aversion to change ("Constancy, Change and the Dust Mounds of Our Mutual Friend', Dickens Quarterly 19, I (2002), pp. 23-30)
21. In 1842, Edwin Chadwick had also drawn favourable comparison with Paris, but feared the "chiffonniers" as a dangerous rabble of troublemakers, who might spark a revolution like the radical chartists in England. See The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, ed. M. W. Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965), pp. 162-3
22. KATE FLINT relates dust particles to Victorian concepts of dirt and aesthetic beauty at the end of the century and extrapolates these to the ubiquitous dust-mounds of Our Mutual Friend and contemporary journalism ("'The Mote Within the Eye': Dust and Victorian Vision", in Rethinking Victorian Culture, ed. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 46-62)
23. As for the trope of dust as bearer of disease, at the time of writing of Our Mutual Friend, bacterial theory was not generally known and the reigning miasmic dogma attributed contagion to inhalation of noxious gases which "excited" the fever. See also CAROLYN STEEDMAN, Dust: the Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), pp. 157-170
24. Quoted in HUMPHRY HOUSE, The Dickens World, second edition (Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 73 (emphasis in the original)
25. In having Dickens subscribe to a Marxist analysis of reification by capitalism, John Romano similarly fails to recognize that Dickens' attack is directed at reification by theory itself: see Dickens and Reality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 128
26. See STEPHEN HALLIDAY, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital (London: Sutton, 1999)
27. DAVID TROTTER examines the trope of circulation in Bleak House but regards it as exhausted in the 1860s, when Our Mutual Friend was published (Circulation, pp. 133-6)