Our Mutual Friend: Service Work as Subject-Work

Abstract

The previous chapter examined how George Eliot’s Silas Marner and Brother Jacob engaged with the rise of services by interrogating the increasingly troubled relationship between productive labor and community, and led Eliot to locate the possibility of socially productive immaterial labor in narrative work even as her plots castigate its other forms as unproductive labor. Eliot’s writing thus approaches service work indirectly through play with and deformation of the discourses surrounding unproductive labor. By contrast, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864) more directly confronts the rise of services, first and foremost with its choice of characters. Dickens applies Thomas Carlyle’s expansive, religious view of work as a socially disciplining activity to a cast of characters that includes river scavengers, dustmen, pawnbrokers, clerks, secretaries, teachers, lawyers, and bill brokers. Such work, of course, was understood as unproductive. Unproductive labor also underpins the novel’s use of dust and finance as resonant motifs for waste and fraud. As we have seen in Chapter 1, references to waste, finance, and fraud are often found in discourses of unproductive labor, and it is thus no surprise that the novel uses them to solicit these discourses, both for the objects in which they traffic and their effects on the social world. Services appear out of this convergence of workas-inescapable-discipline with characters engaged almost entirely in unproductive labor, thus reflecting the novel’s thematic concerns with finance and corruption while simultaneously effecting a subtle alteration that discovers productive immaterial work where formerly all was dust and imposter.