‘Wind, Wind, Wind, Always Winding Am I’: Dickens’s Metafictional Clockwork

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the importance of timepieces and clockwork to Dickens’s conception of composition. Whilst the many clocks and watches that saturate his writing have often been read as indicative of an interest in time, the present study considers what the materiality of timepieces—namely, their markets and mechanisms—might also reveal of Dickens’s fiction. Taking Little Dorrit (1855–7) and Great Expectations (1860–1) as two central case studies demonstrating Dickens’s obsession with the horological, it traces a relationship between ‘works’ and ‘winders’ through these novels, before attempting to unveil the metafictional implications of the act of ‘winding’. The study also investigates the various malpractices of the contemporary horological market, positioning this context as crucial to our understanding of Dickensian winding as a particularly deceptive practice. Having unveiled the capacity for duplicity contained within mid-nineteenth-century clockwork, the article concludes by turning its attention towards the equally murky inner workings of the Dickensian plot and to Dickens’s curious sense of its clock-like construction. Departing from the imagery more traditionally associated with Dickens’s portrayal of composition, it asks how and why he envisioned writing as a kind of winding.