Lounging and Dying on the Edge of the Financial Market: Beyond the Cycle of Financial Speculation in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

It is often argued that Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’ last completed novel, reflects, if not intensifies, the author’s increasing social pessimism that is said to permeate his later works including Bleak House and Little Dorrit, a negative ethos that stands in sharp contrast to his earlier works charged with boisterous laughter and vigorous expressiveness. The lively networks of communal interactions and responses, which often appeared in his earlier novels as a useful antidote to a dehumanizing tendency in society for instrumental or institutional modernization, become exhausted in the last novel, replaced as they are by a mechanical world of money investment. The main narrative thus appears to bespeak the world of financial investment, whose extensive scope interweaves all levels of society, and tolerates no behaviors or intentions outside its cyclical movements fuelled by a desire for profit. However, my view is that such a dominance of the capitalist market is punctuated by intriguing signs of crisis cropping up at both narrative and figural level. In my opinion, these signs are brought on by the way in which Dickens’ use of language in sustaining the market cycle takes on a mechanical or surreal tone tinged with existential futility, one that evokes a growing sense of failure in its referring to the world outside. I want to argue that this linguistic peculiarity echoes a similar sense of crisis laden in the complacency and greed of the mid-Victorian financial market, which would eventually evolve into an alarming prospect of a financial crash. Seen in this way, his unique use of language, while appearing to correspond with the overall landscape of financial speculation, is, in fact, critical of its cyclical patterns. In what follows then, I want to salvage such a unique “deconstructive” strategy of expression from what other commentators commonly consider as hints of pessimism in Dickens’ writing; a strategy that not only discloses the sense of illusoriness in the world of money investment, but also, more importantly, paves the way for a different direction in the narrative, one that gravitates towards the animating force of human experience extending beyond the financial market.