Abstract:
'The Material Life in Dickens' Novels' is a study of how Dickens writes the materials of his physical "world" in commerce with the various influences and orders of substance that make up human existence. The eight novels it treats, for the most part in themed pairs, are The Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit and Hard Times, Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Great Expectations, and Little Dorrit. The Martin Chuzzlewit and Hard Times chapter is a study of the mutually influential relationship between humans and their environments, both civic and natural, and the frequently detrimental effect these relationships have on the human constitution. Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities are looked at in terms of a total human environment, specifically at how relational imbalance leads to a loss of essential human parts so pervasive that it ultimately depletes humans of discrete identities, and society of its humanity. The David Copperfield and Great Expectations chapter considers the predicament of developing middle-class masculinity in a world where a man's substantial future establishment is forged against other, degraded, substances loose in the world, as well as against many opportunities for disappearance, including the insubstantiality of the child. The project is book-ended by The Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit, two novels depicting Dickens' journey of disillusionment from free sociality and, correspondingly, mess without consequences, to a society where endemic and accumulative imbalance dominates the material and psychic conditions of life. All of these treatments have the premise that things in the Dickens world constantly influence each other to the extent of recreating or destroying each other. This is possible because Dickens' stylistically conflates of all orders of substance, including human substances (essential, moral, physical), with the substances of the world that are already loose in the lived environment, particularly grime and filth - the substances that cause spoilage and dissolution. By conflating physical conditions for living with essential and, just as crucially, social conditions for living, Dickens can write a traffic in substances that describes all types of material and social disorder in his world.