From “Marked”-ness to Mutual Care: Care Communities and the Marriage Plot in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend

An automaton is a mechanical dissembler, appearing to possess that which by definition it cannot – autonomy. In the Victorian material imagination, this liminal figure appears as an analogy for both normal and pathological behaviours, as a paradigm and a warning, as a doppelgänger of the ideal worker and a symbol of all that was held to be reactive, affectless and inhuman. In <em>The Old Curiosity Shop </em>and <em>Our Mutual Friend</em>, Dickens merges this symbolic automaton with the marvellous showpieces and mass-produced toys of popular culture, creating an ambiguous, distressed figure whose unstable autonomy casts doubt on the authenticity of the freedom of automatous (automaton-like) characters. <em>The Old Curiosity Shop</em>, which features a cameo by an automaton, draws on factory literature's shifting material subjectivity in its portrayal of Little Nell and Quilp's automatous affinities. In <em>Our Mutual Friend</em> musical automata and speaking machines are models for human degradation. In both novels, automatous humans appear to be autonomous self-movers, but are perhaps, like android automata, dissemblers performing an imperfect impression of human agency.

<i>Sarah Winter</i> The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens<i>The Pleasures of Memory: Learning to Read with Charles Dickens</i>. Sarah Winter. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii+455.

Research Article| May 01 2000 Curiosity as Didacticism in the Old Curiosity Shop SARAH WINTER SARAH WINTER Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Novel (2000) 34 (1): 28–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/1346138 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation SARAH WINTER; Curiosity as Didacticism in the Old Curiosity Shop. Novel 1 May 2000; 34 (1): 28–55. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1346138 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNovel Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Novel Corp. 20002000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review

In The Birth of the Clinic, an extended engagement with medical science and its institutions in eighteenth-century France, Michel Foucault argued that an epistemic shift took place at the end of the eighteenth century, a major component of which was the rediscovery of the idea that death provided 'the absolute point of view over life and opening ... on its truth'.1 For Foucault, the development of pathological anatomy in this period was the most vital expression of the new medicine. Through the dissection of the dead body came the discovery that 'it is at death that disease and life speak their truth' (B°C, p145). From this perspective, disease breaks away from the metaphysic of evil and becomes, instead, 'life undergoing modification in an inflected functioning' (p153). More importantly, the anatomical gaze revealed 'the forbidden imminent secret: the knowledge of the individual' (p170). Accordingly, Foucault concluded that 'the experience of individuality in modern culture is bound up with that of death' (p197).Elisabeth Bronfen made productive use of this re-emergence of the idea that death is 'that moment in a person's life where individuality ... could finally be attained' and 'an otherwise incommunicable secret could be made visible' in her reading of nineteenth-century literature and art.2 She cites, as one example, Nell's death in The Old Curiosity Shop, where death 'recreates the body into a perfect version of its former self' (Over her dead body, p89). She notes also the nineteenth-century literary convention in which the deathbed scene involves not only the farewell greetings from friends and kin but also the dying person's last minute vision of the after-life (p77). While death remains an untransmissable experience, the deathbed spectators watch the dying person hovering on the threshold and through them hope to gain a glimpse into 'the Beyond'.This new conception of 'death's presence in life' which Foucault delineates, Bronfen suggests, gave a new power to the dying person and led to 'elaborate stagings' of death (p77). Death certainly seems to have been a regular part of everyday Victorian life, from high infant mortality rates to the death of women in childbirth, from public executions to familial death-beds, from elaborate rituals of mourning to commemorative photographs of the dead.3 Victorian fiction bears eloquent testimony to 'death's presence in life' in a rich variety of forms. If we confine ourselves to the works of Dickens, in addition to Nell's long journey to death in The Old Curiosity Shop, there is Oliver Twist's morally-improving final meeting with Fagin in the death-cell; the 'Resurrection Men' in The Tale of Two Cities; the unhealthy graveyards of Bleak House; the death-house of Our Mutual Friend; and Pip's meditations over the tombstones of his parents and five little brothers at the start of Great Expectations.By contrast, we generally think that dying and death have retreated from contemporary everyday life, withdrawn to the non-places of nursing homes, hospitals, hospices, funeral parlours, crematoria. Thus Ruth Richardson, in her pioneering work on the history of attitudes towards death in the early Victorian period, observes that nowadays 'preparation of the dead for disposal is regarded as a sanitary problem, dealt with professionally by hospitals and undertakers'.4 Roger Luckhurst makes a wider claim: 'In advanced capitalist societies, encounters with extremity are suppressed: birth, death, insanity are all removed from the everyday and placed under technical and institutional command'.5 In Marc Auge's words, this is 'a world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital'.6In this essay, I will argue that while the process of dying has been removed to these non-places, death itself (in mediated and unmediated forms) has become ubiquitous in contemporary life. I will approach this through the engagement with death in a range of recent novels arguing that, if 'death's presence in life' was linked with the attainment of individuality for the Victorians, death in recent fiction is rather associated with an alienation and a randomness that de-emphasise individual identity. …

Heir Conditioning:Dickens Planning Ahead Robert Tracy (bio) The "purposive" man is always trying to secure a spurious delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time: […] by pushing always forward into the future, he strives to secure an immortality. John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." "Everything is some kind of plot, man." Thomas Pyncheon, Gravity's Rainbow. How to end The Pickwick Papers after serial publication in 20 monthly installments (Apr. 1836 – Nov. 1837) "was as little known to [Dickens] as to any of his readers" (Forster 88).1Not until Dombey and Son (1846–48) did he begin preparing careful working plans for each new novel. Before Dombey, how did Dickens end earlier novels without an exit strategy? How would he finally clarify mysterious events that readers had been speculating about for 19 months? His solution was to invent a will, imposing eccentric conditions an heir must meet to inherit, explaining retroactively a story's many mysteries in its final installments. Reporting disputed will cases at Doctors' Commons made him familiar with eccentric bequests: his "POSTSCRIPT in lieu of Preface" for Our Mutual Friend in 1865 tells readers that "[T]here are hundreds of Will Cases […] far more remarkable than that fancied in this book," in the archives at Doctors' [End Page 44] Commons. An eccentric will, invented after serial publication began, provides an exit strategy for Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens's imagined testators think like novelists. They write wills that control heirs as novelists control fictional characters. He prepared working plans for every novel after Dombey, but continued introducing wills to explain the mysteries he had invented. Dickens's 1837 preface to Pickwick explains what he learned about serial publication. A novel's "general design" should be "simple enough" to survive "this detached and desultory form of publication." Each number should be "complete in itself," but "form one tolerably harmonious whole." While Pickwick had not been "artfully interwoven or ingeniously complicated," prefaces to later novels emphasize their woven design or pattern – terms Dickens preferred to plot (Little Dorrit, 1857 Preface). Forster met Dickens at Christmas 1836; he soon began urging him to decide how a novel would end before beginning publication. "I was responsible for [the] tragic ending" of The Old Curiosity Shop, he declares, and quotes Dickens's thanks for "your most valued suggestion, to keep my thoughts upon the ending of the tale." Dickens "had not thought of killing [Little Nell], when, about half-way through [publication], I asked him to consider whether it did not necessarily belong even to his own conception, after taking so mere a child through such a tragedy of sorrow, to lift her also out of the commonplace of ordinary happy endings, […] All that I meant he seized at once, and never turned aside from it again" (Forster 150–51). Oliver Twist (Bentley's Miscellany, Feb. 1837–Apr. 1839) begins with Oliver's birth in a workhouse, "badged and ticketed, […] a parish child […] humble half-starved drudge." His mother's death, immediately after giving birth, leaves him without identity and caste: "[I]t would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have fixed his station in society" (Oliver Twist I: ch. 1, Feb. 1837, italics mine). Dickens's reference to "station in society" hints that Oliver may not be a typical workhouse child. His language, moral instincts and Cruikshank's illustrations emphasize his difference from Fagin's boys: their "'looks convict 'em when they get into trouble, and I lose 'em all. With this boy, properly managed, […] I could do what I couldn't with twenty of them'" (Twist IX: ch. 19, Dec. 1837). Bentley's readers were well into Oliver Twist before Dickens decided that a will, imposing specific conditions on an heir, could be revealed to explain "More Mysteries Than One" in the final installment: Monks's identity and Fagin's attempts to make Oliver a criminal. Not until the twelfth installment (Bk. II, chap. 26, Mar. 1838), when "a mysterious character," enters, would readers encounter Monks and learn he has already been conspiring with Fagin to involve Oliver in a robbery. Writing to...

This essay proposes a new way of thinking about Dickens's “little” characters in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, referencing Melanie Klein's “play-technique.” Klein was the first to theorize the anxious aggressive child and to posit a complex object relating in which the damage and repair of toys mediated and modulated the unmanageability of infantile emotion. Dickensian characterization, often criticized as object-like and lacking complex interiority, can be understood to intuit the developmental dynamics that Klein would locate in interactions between the child and the thing. Dickens's increasingly interiorized protagonists are surrounded and mirrored by toylike figures that problematize the thesis of novelistic maturation, proving as essential to the depiction of a complex psychology as internal monologue or achieved Bildung.

Among Dickens' full-length novels, Barnaby Rudge has been the awkward stepchild, impossible to ignore and difficult to love. Compared to Nicholas Nickleby and The Old Curiosity Shop, its predecessors, it is not remarkably rich in either comic invention or moving pathos. It does not glow with the high spirits of Pickwick or the warm, compassionate tolerance of David Copperfield: its best humor is edged with satire, and the pathos is often rather thin and forced. Nor, despite the crowds that swarm through its pages, does its world seem free or spacious: there is, for Dickens, an almost tight-lipped unwillingness to deviate from the intricate and rather grim progression of the story. This may be partly accounted for by the mode of publication: Dickens seldom felt at ease in the short weekly installments which did not leave space to “play around [the story] here and there, and mitigate the severity of . . . your sticking to it.” Some have thought that Dickens' imagination was constricted by subject matter he had systematically “researched” from written documents, even though some of the freest and most vigorous writing occurs in the passages based on history. Whatever the reason, Barnaby Rudge is a rather forbidding and at times even arid book, disturbing rather than reassuring despite the happy ending: in feeling as in technique, it is akin to such later “dark” and comparatively unpopular novels as Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend. But I think it is both richer and more firmly and meaningfully organized than many critics have allowed.

This study argues that the museum wielded enough cultural capital to shape not only the content of literature (which picked up themes like collection, hoarding, display, and organization) but also the formal arrangement of such literature into catalogues, taxonomies, and the dense material-based descriptions for which the Victorian novel is often criticized. The museum, it is shown, is far more central to Victorian thought than has been recognized, and its presence in literature has been misread or overlooked in contemporary criticism. This study also provides a narrative of the Victorian preoccupation with the museual, especially as regards the natural history movement and the natural history museum. While there have been studies of the nineteenth-century museum and its appearance in literary texts, there has until now been no sustained account of the reach of its influence, nor has there been an attempt to represent Victorian views on the museual and its reach into everyday life. This study draws on the criticism of museum scholars such as Sharon Macdonald and Tony Bennett to examine the influence of the museum on key works of Victorian literature such as Charles Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, Henry Mayhew's 1851 and London Labour and the London Poor, and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White..

Brings together Klein’s play-technique and the work of Charles Dickens to think through recent theories of character and its relation to self or personhood. The chapter begins with The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), the most explicit toy story of Dickens’s oeuvre. Where Dickens instates the values of the hearth, the figure of Tackleton the toy-merchant, hawker of grim-faced, demoniacal toys, manifests an alternative vision of brutal play that cannot quite be swept under the domestic rug. It then moves to The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and particularly the figure of Daniel Quilp, angry puppet counterpart to Little Nell’s waxwork doll. Where previous readings have tended to highlight the counterintuitive and contradictory appeal of these two characters, frequently declaring allegiance with the more animated Quilp, it reads these characters as a therapeutic pair, symbiotically manifesting the unstable dynamics of aggression and reparation. Finally, it compares Caleb Plummer’s “Blind Daughter” Bertha in Cricket on the Hearth and Our Mutual Friend’s (1865) Jenny Wren: two “doll’s dressmakers” who combine overt reparative work with unmitigated expressions of aggression and guilt. It draws attention to the affinities and tensions between Kleinian reparation and Anna Freud’s altruistic surrender.

List of Figures Preface Introduction: Dickens and the Pleasures of Memory 1. Memory's Bonds: Associationism and the Freedom of Thought 2. Dickens's Originality: Serial Fiction, Celebrity, and The Pickwick Papers 3. The Pleasures of Memory, Part I: Curiosity as Didacticism in The Old Curiosity Shop 4. The Pleasures of Memory, Part II: Epitaphic Reading and Cultural Memory 5. Learning by Heart in Our Mutual Friend 6. Dickens's Laughter: School Reading and Democratic Literature, 1870-1940 Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

This essay suggests a way in which Dickens’s novels might be made more immediately accessible to students by drawing parallels between the sociopolitical situations they describe and our own. It is based mainly on Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit, but calls on to Great Expectations and The Old Curiosity Shop too. The manifestations of the unchallenged rule of money are examined like, among others, the collusion between the political and the financial worlds, nepotism, the get-rich-quick syndrome or the ostentatious exhibition of wealth. The consequences of such a state of affairs are then drawn: on the general level with, mainly, the growing gap and distrust between the haves and the have-nots and on the individual level with the temptation ordinary people are led into, either of utter selfishness or of withdrawal into private life. It also looks at the alternatives, such as the dream of a return to a golden age, or the relief given by satirical laughter, both signs of helplessness against the power of money, even if Dickens’s novels always end with the righteous being rewarded.

Reviewed by: Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading Ewart Skinner Jennifer A. Wicke . Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading. New York: Columbia UP, 1988. 224 pp. $27.50. Wicke's critique complements the already formidable scholarly bibliography on advertising. It provides a field long dominated by social science types with a valid literary analysis of advertising's decussation with "high culture." Using Charles Dickens, Henry James, and James Joyce, she traces the symbiotic, diachronic unfolding of advertising and literature as mutually interacting discourses. Proposing to demystify the practice, she foregrounds advertising as "a language in its own right" not "divorced from other cultural productions." Methodologically, Wicke's analytical device is a high art/low art matrix across which she meshes literature and advertisement, asserting in effect that neither can be fully read without reference to the other. Her hypothesis is broached through a very specific passage, "the great novelistic tradition," but claims a much broader [End Page 315] theoretical plane, that is, "the changing place of literature per se in contemporary culture." The relationship between literature and advertising so regarded, Dickens is relatively easy pickings for proof. As the "first capitalist of literature," he matures synchronously with the "aestheticizing of capitalism," a fact which allows Wicke to demonstrate the centrality of advertisement to Dickens novels and to show that Dickens' novels were directly related, as products, to advertising. She argues that advertising "emerges as a subtext or organizational principle" of Dickens' works, including Sketches by Boz, Pickwick, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend. There is an interlocutionary shift of purpose with James. The Bostonians deploys advertising metaphors, and its world is already beginning to be the world laid out by advertisers. The Ambassadors addresses the problematic of the "assault on the eye" and "battles" with advertising instead of parodically absorbing it. The American Scene is a "structural analysis" of the social conditions that fluctuated American advertising. Joyces Ulysses expresses yet another turn. In text, tone, and philosophy it represents a "new literature with no discernable author and no particular reader—advertising." For Joyce, advertising and "mass cultural forms become a matrix of textual practices, set within a parody frame of scholastic and classical reference." Ulysses marks the third phase of Wicke's dialectic of advertising and literature. In the first stage, which ends with Dickens, advertisement shares in the parturition of the realist novel and subsequently is imprinted by the literature it helped create. In the second stage, James "brings literature and advertisement into open rivalry, with literature on the defensive." In the final development, marked by Ulysses, advertising is "firmly esconced" as concomitant to any act of production, and "literature begins to be colonized by advertising. . . . Ulysses records but does not succumb passively to this takeover." All through Wicke's text, advertising is set up as a "powerful mode of social reading," crucial to the novel's emergence as a powerful social institution. Whether or not one would wish to extend Wicke's hypothesis to "Balzac, Hardy, Baudelaire, Gissing, T. S. Eliot, Twain, Melville, Valery, the Futurists, Flaubert, Pynchon, etc.," as Wicke suggests, one cannot deny that the author has brought a freshness of approach, a new perspective for understanding contemporary literature—and for that matter, social science critiques of advertising. [End Page 316] Ewart Skinner Purdue University Copyright © 1990 Purdue Research Foundation

Charles Dickens is famous for his deathbed scenes, but these have rarely been examined within the context of his ambivalence towards the Victorian commodification of death. Dickens repeatedly criticised ostentatious funeral and mourning customs, and asserted the harmful consequences of treating the corpse as an object of speculation rather than sympathy. At the same time, he was fascinated by those who made a living from death and recognised that his authorial profits implicated him in the same trade. This book explores how Dickens turned mortality into the stuff of life and art as he navigated a thriving culture of death-based consumption. It surveys the diverse ways in which death became a business, from body-snatching, undertaking, and joint-stock cemetery companies, to the telling and selling of stories. This broad study offers fresh perspectives on death in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, and discusses lesser-known works and textual illustrations.

Academic fans of Dickens's early novels will be gratified by John Bowen's Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, a ringing defense of the novels Dickens wrote in the first half of his career. Bowen, Lecturer in English at Keele University, explains that common readers have always loved the early novels, which exhibit humor of a peculiar freshness along with emotional richness, and discusses Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit. Scholars, on the other hand, have favored Dickens's later works, such as Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, viewing those novels as superior in plot structure and unity of tone and symbolism. These readers have also welcomed the darker vision of the later novels, with their bleak view of Victorian (capitalist) society, because seemingly these dark, "serious" novels could support a higher estimate of Dickens's work.