Contours of Status and Power: Seats and Sitting Postures in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

Abstract The Victorians were notorious for their preoccupation with the posture and carriage of men and women, by which they outlined the contours of their refinement and moral characters. Drawing on Victorian etiquette manuals and modern social psychological studies regarding sitting postures, this article addresses scenes and melodramas featuring seats in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend so as to reveal how Dickens has created a scathing satire on the respectable pretension and deep moral vices of Victorian society through his seemingly exaggerated description of characters’ sitting manners. It argues that seat performance is not only a crucial means for Victorians’ self-representation but also a shrewd strategy for domination. While Dickens’s caricatured depictions of Lammle’s and Fledgeby’s abominable sitting manners manifests his biting attacks on Victorian predatory fortune-hunters’ thirst for power and money, his rendition of Jenny’s and Bella’s questionable sitting poses lays bare the miseries and imprisonment of women in that era.