“[E]xpressly Meant to Promote the Formation of the Domestic Virtues”: Domestic Interiors and Household Furnishings in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

Building on recent scholarship about the cultural significance of material life in the nineteenth century, this article attends to Charles Dickens’s representation of domestic interiors and household furnishings in Our Mutual Friend, and reflects on the agency of material objects in shaping Victorians’ moral life. A close examination of the variations in different characters’ furnishings and their morally destructive or constructive consequences reveals that, while domestic furnishings are more often used as ways for boasting vanity or schemes for entrapping trust, they influence people’s moral life by inducing different performances of domesticity. It argues that the way of possessing things actually constitutes part of the Victorian social discipline, which, by encouraging proper ways of possessing and using domestic things, domesticates men and women to be household heads and housewives complying with bourgeois home values.