CATHERINE WATERS. Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words.

Abstract

This in-depth study of Dickens's Household Words examines the ways in which the imaginative non-fictional writing appearing in that weekly periodical engages with Victorian commodity culture broadly defined. Referring to hundreds of Household Words articles (with a welcome emphasis on contributors other than Dickens, such as Henry Morley and George Sala), scores of secondary sources, and dozens of other Victorian periodicals, Waters locates her argument in relation to important work on Victorian material culture by critics like Elaine Freedgood, Regina Gagnier, Andrew Miller, and Thomas Richards in order to claim that ‘the shifting relationship between people and things’ is ‘a distinguishing feature of Household Words's engagement with a developing commodity culture’ (p. 156). Waters looks at Household Words articles in which things are given biographies and the lives of people are shaped by their made environment, claiming that the instabilities and ambiguities of attitude towards Victorian ‘commodity culture’ she finds in them is both a product of more general Victorian anxieties about commodification and of the ‘dialogic effect’ produced by the multiple minds and hands involved in the production of almost any periodical. The larger arguments on which the book relies, as Waters shows through her extensive citation of relevant criticism, have been made before; what is new and exciting here is the intensive focus on non-fictional writing in a single periodical rather than on the novel, as well as the important related claim that although Household Words's attitudes about and interests in commodities resonate with those of other Victorian periodicals and with Victorian culture more generally, nonetheless the distinctiveness of Household Words's style offers new insights about these topics.