Abstract
In this reflection on her participation as Mortimer Lightwood in Birkbeck’s Our Mutual Friend Twitter reading project, Holly Furneaux situates the project in a long legacy of actively reading Dickens’s works. She opens up some possibilities about the queer potentials of the serial form, the counterfactual, and Dickens fans’ creative responses.
Highlights
We’ll eat chops and tomata sauce, or shrimps with heads, unpeeled And watch others wrecked as they put off for us
That’s how I felt as a new tweeter using a two-part serial of a maximum of 140 characters to publish my first poem, a paean to the love of Mortimer Lightwood for the ‘friend he has founded himself on’, Eugene Wrayburn
Birkbeck’s Twitter project to accompany the serial reading of Our Mutual Friend month by month takes its place in a long and thriving tradition of readers imagining characters as independent of the pages in which they first appeared. This is the kind of fantasy we steer ourselves and students away from in literature classes, Dickens would likely have enjoyed it
Summary
We’ll eat chops and tomata sauce, or shrimps with heads, unpeeled And watch others wrecked as they put off for us. Mortimer Lightwood; or, Seriality, Counterfactuals, Co-Production, and Queer Fantasy
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