Commodity Culture in Dicken's 'Household Words': The Social Life of Goods by Catherine Waters

Abstract

1122 Reviews its representation. In other words, his suggestion that the taking of a census ispart of the general movement toward what Michel Foucault called discipline' (p. 14) enables Wordsworth 'to identify abstract counting as one of the primary processes of the imagination' proves merely to be an interesting juxtaposition. Nevertheless, there ismuch of interest in Garrett's study for both novice and initiate.He argues convincingly for Wordsworth's self-conscious attempt towrite thenation, exemplified by thepoet's considerable literaryoutput between 1814 and 1823, a period during which tenvolumes of his poetry were published. In particular, The Excursion and Thanksgiving Ode serve as the groundwork upon which Garrett builds his claim that 'thispublic phase was not accidental, butWordsworth's deli berate and self-conscious efforttowrite a national poetry and become the national poet' (p. 69). Rather than retreating intoArcadian tranquillity,Garrett argues that Wordsworth was engaged purposefully with amapping of Britain?akin to the na tional census and national survey?in which he grappled with competing visions of Britain. However, Wordsworth's commitment to the particulars of the local (Peter Bell, TheWaggoner, The River Duddon) marked not a retreat but rather a repopula tion of thenational landscape, his 'most elaborate and conscious efforttowrite the nation through detailed local survey' (p. 126). Garrett concludes his study by invoking Svetlana Alpers's notion of the 'museum effect' inorder to demonstrate theway inwhich the aestheticizing gaze transforms its object into an object of aesthetic interest;museum culture and Romanticism, then, coexist with one another through their 'renewed awareness of historicity and a concerted effortto locate, collect, classify, catalog, and interpret thepast' (p. 150). He is critical ofArnold's 'GreatDecade' poet, and of theVictorian petrifaction of Wordsworth, whereby he becomes a Romantic monument, one indistinguishable from the landscape of his poetry and linked inextricablywith the national heritage of Britain. Ironically, as Garrett argues, 'thepoet attempts towrite the nation, and the nation revises the poet into itsown image' (p. 197). Garrett's unique approach yields fresh insights into the complex relationship between a nascent national and poetic self-consciousness, their convergence, and subsequent transformations. University of Warwick Brian Haman Commodity Culture inDickenss 'Household Words : The Social Life of Goods. By Catherine Waters. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2008. viii+i84pp. ?50. ISBN 978 0-7546-5578-7. This is the first book-length study ofHousehold Words, the twopence weekly miscel lanywhich broadly targeted the burgeoning middle classes of the 1850s under the watchful eye of itsfamous founder and 'Conductor, Charles Dickens. While much previous scholarship has concentrated on thisDickens connection, Catherine Wa ters shiftsthe focus away from itsfamous Conductor, instead approaching her study 'froma direction suggested by the form and contents of the journal itself (p. 7). This approach enables Waters to quote liberally from other prolific contributors to the journal, resulting in a book that ismuch less about Dickens thanmight be expected MLR, 104.4, 2009 1123 but which is undoubtedly the richer for it. Itself a commodity to be purchased via the new disposable income of the growing middle classes, Waters argues that the periodical in general, and Household Words inparticular, regarded commodity cul turewith great ambivalence and frequent contradiction. Rooting her discussion in the culturalmoment of theGreat Exhibition of 1851,Waters characterizes theworld inwhich Household Words moved as one inwhich 'identity is mediated by fictions of commodity culture' and the spectacle of that commodity is of primary importance (p. 45). As such, this is an informative and convincing examination of the relation ship between people and things, of the emergence of a consumer society inwhich sign-value begins to supersede the use-value of goods, and of the unease and com plicitywith which Household Words journalists responded to these social changes. At the outset,Waters states thatHousehold Words 'wasmost significantly distin guished by its imaginative non-fiction prose, which blurred the boundary between journalism and literature with cultural effects that have yet to be properly re cognized' (p. 2). Such generic blurring makes for unusual articles: biographies of anthropomorphized inanimate objects, for example; advertisements which merge into fictional stories and vice versa; and the 'process article', dubbed 'a form of industrial tourist tale' byWaters, which attempts tomake readers aware of the labour and production...