“4. Sweat Work and Nose Grinding in Our Mutual Friend” in “Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination”
CHAPTER 4 Sweat Work and Nose Grinding in Our Mutual Friend
Any one reading … [Our Mutual Friend] might see that the author meant to put forth all his strength and do his very best; and those who have an eye for literary workmanship could discover that never before had Mr. Dickens’s workmanship been so elaborate.
—E. S. Dallas (November 29, 1865)
The Emergence of Dual Idiomatic Pillars
The imaginative processes with which Dickens began his last two completed novels were in many ways quite contrary. We have seen how Dickens’s reliance on the “brought up by hand” idiom in Great Expectations helped him develop a novel in a manner that allowed him to intervene swiftly to boost the slumping sales of All the Year Round. Once that fast-paced, weekly serialized novel was finished, though, Dickens began to exhibit significant signs of depletion. He had never toiled so hard or spread himself so thin with writing (both fiction and nonfiction), editing, speechmaking, and performing public readings as he did during this period in his life. Upon finishing Great Expectations in the spring of 1861, he confided in William Macready that working such long hours in all these capacities had made him decidedly “worse for the wear” (House et al. 1965–2002, ix, 424). Persistent neuralgic pains in his face, excruciating headaches, and general body fatigue began to incapacitate him for longer periods—especially after his public reading performances started to exhaust him at times to the point of fainting. Thus “trying to plan out [his] new book,” Our Mutual Friend, amid all the other draws on his time and his battered body proved exceedingly arduous (House et al. 1965–2002, x, 55). In fact, Dickens had more difficulty starting what would turn out to be his final (completed) novel than he did with any other in his career. Harry Stone (1987, 331) has characterized Our Mutual Friend’s fitful and protracted incubation period as the most “hard, slow, demanding, [and] laborious” that Dickens had ever experienced.
Dickens told John Forster (1892, 740) that he had “leading notions” for his new novel almost immediately after finishing Great Expectations in April 1861, but he also found it almost impossible to move past this nebulous initial stage. On several occasions, he tried to begin writing in earnest only to get nowhere. He wrote to W. F. De Cerjat almost a year later, in March 1862, that he was “trying to plan out a new book, but [had] not got beyond trying,” and to Forster a month after that, “Alas! I have hit upon nothing for a story. Again and again I have tried” (House et al. 1965–2002, x, 55, 75). “I seize a pen, and resolve to precipitate myself upon [the] story,” an exasperated Dickens reports in July 1862, “then I get up again with a forehead as gnarled as the oak tree outside the window, and find all the lines in my face that ought to be on the blank paper” (House et al. 1965–2002, x, 109). As late as the summer of 1863, he complained to Wilkie Collins that he was “always thinking of writing [my] long book and am never beginning to do it” (House et al. 1965–2002, x, 281). The problem, according to Stone (1987, 329), “was how to join [his] scattered themes and images and how to make them live in a larger design”—as he had done so expediently and successfully in Great Expectations.
A change of scenery apparently proved to be of enormous help in dislodging Dickens’s multiyear imaginative log jam. After “evaporating for a fortnight” in France during August 1863, he wrote Forster to report that he was at last “full of notions … for the new twenty numbers” of Our Mutual Friend, and this time, the actual writing began to take; he started actively composing the opening chapters within a few weeks (House et al. 1965–2002, x, 283). By January 1864, he had completed the first two numbers (chapters 1–7) and was beginning the third number (chapters 8–10).
What happened during the sojourn in France that helped Dickens finally organize his scattered themes and images into a larger design? To say that we can only speculate would be appropriate on several levels. Dickens’s career-long interest in hard, earnest work was becoming a newly urgent “leading notion” for him because of its now heightened contrast with the speculative, get-rich-quick ethos of London’s emerging finance capital industry in the early 1860s. The contemporaneousness of these financial concerns is built into the temporality of this new book. Unlike most of his other novels, Our Mutual Friend is set in the contemporary present—as the very first words of the novel announce: “In these times of ours …” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 13). Mary Poovey (1993, 51, 67), among others, has shown how the narrator’s vitriolic criticism of “these times” is connected to the ways limited liability legislation let loose “a mania for profit” where seemingly everyone inhabited “a giddy world beyond moral restraint.”1 Long a proponent of the secular Victorian “Gospel of Work,” Dickens began to heighten his disdain for a culture wherein financial success and social position could be achieved without ever really “working”—as the narrator says in Our Mutual Friend—but by speculating in the “mysterious business [of “Shares”] between London and Paris” that “never originated anything, never produced anything” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 118). Paradoxically but pertinently, while financial speculators were enriching themselves without actually working or producing anything, Dickens was “having to buckle-to and work [his] hardest” to keep up with the incessant regimes of punishing labor on multiple fronts that he had established for himself by this point in his career (House et al. 1965–2002, ix, 322). Henry James (1865, 786) was probably not far off as he famously observed that was Dickens working to “exhaustion” in Our Mutual Friend, laboring (ineffectively in James’s opinion) to “d[i]g out” the novel “with a spade and pickaxe.”
Considering all of these juxtapositions between London’s financially speculating nouveau riche and Dickens’s laborious contemporary circumstances, it should be unsurprising (though no critic has yet pointed it out) that Dickens invokes different variants of the idiomatic expression derived from the primeval curse pronounced on the labor of mankind—“by the sweat of the brow shalt thou eat bread”—twenty-four times in Our Mutual Friend—and as we have seen with Dickens’s other imaginatively governing body idioms, only in Our Mutual Friend among all of his other fictional works. This would seemingly confirm Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s (2011, 315) belief that Dickens reserved his strongest mockery for the ideas to which he was most strongly attached. A lack of sincerity in and dedication to work was always anathema to Dickens, but it was especially so at this juncture in his life when he was pushing himself to labor on through significant pain and exhaustion. Thus, we will now consider the ways that Dickens brings what could be called idiomatic mockery to new heights in his final novel—how he cultivates, hones, and nearly perfects his growing penchant for exploiting an idiom’s malleability by way of its direct applications and violations. I agree, in this sense, with Garrett Stewart (2022, 277) who has recently seen Our Mutual Friend, contra Henry James and other contemporary reviewers, less as “a depletion of genius than its [genius’s] compendium” wherein Dickens’s career-long “phrasal habits [become] etched into a sharper new outline.” For Stewart Our Mutual Friend is the novel where Dickens’s “ingrained verbal flourishes” solidify into a “stylistic summa” as the Inimitable’s “lexicon gets emphatically repackaged, [and] labelled with the rhetorical equivalent of ‘registered trademark’ ” (227, 240). The “stylistic summa” of his career-long phrasal habits, the ultimate “registered trademark” we encounter in Dickens’s final novel, in my view, though, is distinctly—and doubly—idiomatic.
I say this because the idiomatic intensification Dickens achieves in his last novel involves his imaginative orchestration of not just one but two principal body idioms. We will see how nineteen variants of a second idiom used only in Our Mutual Friend and in no other novel—“nose to the grindstone”—links up with the former, first as an expression describing one hard at work and then eventually in terms of the idiom’s wider association with coercion, deception, and social mastery. As we have seen, this use and misuse2 of idiomatic body language has been an accretive and an imaginatively embodied process for Dickens in his mature fiction: the right-hand men and women in Dombey, the characters with and without actual shoulders to put to the wheel in Bleak House, the nurturing and neglecting ways of being brought up by hand in Great Expectations (Bodenheimer 2007, 36). Now we encounter at the end of Dickens’s career a showcase of characters who do and do not work “by the sweat of their brows,” who do and do not put theirs and others’ “noses to the grindstone.” Tracing how these unique idioms3 emerge—and eventually merge—will allow us a new and privileged glimpse into how Dickens imagined the novel that many consider his most self-consciously constructed work.4 We will see Dickens fulfilling Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981, 292) hypothetical case where “parodic stylizations” of social dialects may “be drawn in by the novelist for the orchestration of his themes and for the refracted (indirect) expression of his intentions and values.”
The evaluation of the ways in which these two idioms come to structure Our Mutual Friend rhetorically and thematically, however, involves a careful analysis of their appearances over the course of the first five numbers (May through September 1864 installments) as well as an examination of what is known about the novel’s provenance once Great Expectations drew to a close. I mention the first five numbers for a specific reason. Dickens’s composition of Our Mutual Friend involved a planned return to the monthly number format after almost a decade of writing fiction for weekly publication (Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations). As Sean Grass (2014, 45) has shown, this return to an elongated publication setup, combined with failing health, the mishandled (and very public) dissolution of his marriage, a concealed new relationship with Ellen Ternan, and declining reputation among contemporary critics, prompted Dickens to make a resolution to Forster that he would not to begin publishing his new long novel with fewer than five numbers completed in advance. Earlier in his career, Dickens had written overlapping novels (Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge) without any sizable written backlog. However, with his final few novels, he had increasingly wanted a substantial reserve in place before publication began. Partly owing to the complexity of his later art and the difficulty of proceeding rapidly with it while juggling so many other demands on his time but also because a comfortable reserve of writing was now a necessary hedge against illness, distress, and unforeseen interruptions, Dickens conceded to Forster that he was “forced to take more care than [he] once took” (Stone 1997, 331). My overarching argument is that as Dickens took more care in composing his later novels, he also relied more heavily (and often) on his idiomatic imagination to help him organize and execute his novels’ plot formulations, characterizations, and themes. Based on what we know about Great Expectations’ success, the content of early planning documents for Our Mutual Friend, and speed and assurance with which he eventually wrote the novel’s early sections in late 1863 and early 1864, it is entirely possible that Dickens—after struggling mightily to organize what he called the leading “notions” of his new book—returned from his fortnight in France with relatively definitive ideas of how these two idiomatic phrases, “by the sweat of the brow” and “nose to the grindstone,” could productively inform Our Mutual Friend’s twenty numbers.
Ridiculing and Relying on the Idiom
It is a likely possibility that Dickens drew on the “sweat of the brow” idiom as an insistence on earnest labor amid his disdain for London’s booming but work-bereft finance capital industry. But there is also a deeper relationship between the idiom and its biblical context that helped him imagine some of the novel’s core themes. Whereas Dickens’s aversion to organized religion is no secret, neither is his firm grasp of the Bible and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Several scholars have dedicated entire books, or significant portions of books, to Dickens’s expansive use of biblical material, though none have analyzed such religiosity in conjunction with the unmistakably Edenic origin of the “sweat of the brow” idiom.5 This absence is remarkable because the predation, scheming, and deceitfulness by which so many characters pursue money and social dominance without meaningful labor is a major part of what makes the world of Our Mutual Friend a decidedly “fallen” world. It is significant, then, that one of its principal idioms directly relates to the original (biblical) fall and the labor that is attendant on that fall in the post-Edenic curse from Genesis. Dickens would have been most familiar with the King James version of the Bible (1997, 3:19), which reads, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Because the phrase is used first and foremost by the lower class and illiterate characters, though, Dickens employs the more colloquial (and far more popular) “sweat of the brow” idiom throughout Our Mutual Friend. The repeated invocation of this universally common idiom allows Dickens to emphasize one of the novel’s most supreme and sustained ironies: many characters presented in Our Mutual Friend have fallen so far that the novel’s greediest “sinners” simultaneously invoke and dodge the divine justification of labor in their elaborate schemes to avoid work. Because of the Bible’s familiarity to all classes, literate or not—what the popular philologist Richard Chenevix Trench (1852, 30) called its imbricated status in the English “national mind”—this particular idiom needs no historical data visualizations of the kind I have provided in previous chapters to demonstrate its consistent circulation through the British lexicon during this era.6
Even so, the context for the relationship between labor and the “sweat of the brow” idiom is not entirely straightforward in Our Mutual Friend. This is partly because the representation of work in Dickens in general, and in Our Mutual Friend in particular, has long been a flag over notoriously contested ground. Humphry House (1941, 55) believed that Dickens maintained “a passionate interest in what people do for a living and how they make do.” George Orwell (1965, 82) argued that Dickens, by and large, failed to present a “realistic” portrait of the working classes. Alexander Welsh (1971, 78) attempted to resolve the discrepancy by claiming that Dickens’s novels “espouse work as a value but not as an experience.” More recently, and more definitively related to the focus of this chapter, Nicola Bradbury (2005, 2) writes that “work … proves a powerful key to Our Mutual Friend” and Brian Cheadle (2001b, 86) adds specificity to this idea in his assertion that “work enables [Our Mutual Friend’s] narrative: it provides ‘Secretary Rokesmith’ with the pretext to stay at the Boffins’, thus initiating the ordering impulse of the main plot, and it calls Mortimer Lightwood out, with Eugene in tow, toward Lizzie and the radical decentering in the subplot.” Patrick Brantlinger (1996, 162), on the other hand, has argued that “almost nobody [in Our Mutual Friend] does anything that could be called productive labor.”7 My analysis of several working characters will reveal that this is not completely accurate, even as it indexes much of the narrator’s indignantly satirical portrayals of characters who resist working. But the sense that very few characters engage in meaningful labor might help explain why the chapter dedicated to Dickensian “Work” in Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux’s (2011) book fails to mention Our Mutual Friend at all. For my evaluation of how this particular idiomatic expression pertaining to labor evolves in this novel, though, I would rather not get bogged down in evaluating the “realism” or even the representation (more often the absence) of Dickensian work. It is enough for me, instead, to hew more closely to House’s (1941, 55) less controversial idea that “work plays an essential part in the characters’ approach to life”—as it did perhaps never more so in Dickens’s own life as he began the novel.
In this sense, the opening chapters of Our Mutual Friend provide an incredibly detailed glimpse into how each of its characters’ approach to life is colored by their various and often opposing relationships to labor. The first chapter, for instance, despite its portrayal of “the awful sort of fishing” in which Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam practice, establishes the father and daughter as an unlikely but dedicated pair of manual laborers (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 13). We learn that Lizzie unequivocally does not like the work, but she is willing to acknowledge that her labor “pulling a pair of sculls” for her father’s boat allows them to survive and for her to set aside money for her brother’s education so that he may be freed from having to perform similarly demanding manual work (13). Poovey (1993), Lyn Pykett (2002), and others have demonstrated how Lizzie’s reluctant though arduous toil on the river essentially credentializes her for the hardworking roles she later assumes assisting Jenny Wren in the making of doll’s dresses and, when she is forced from London, laboring at the paper mill.8 Her father, Gaffer, also has several positive qualities associated with his labor despite its indecorousness. Unlike the malingering Rogue Riderhood, “there [is] something business-like in [Gaffer’s] steady gaze” on the novel’s first page (as he works at what Dickens refers to as his “trade”) (House et al. 1965–2002, x, 357). Moreover, another feature differentiating these “waterside characters” is reflected in that part of the body with which the previous chapter has shown the Victorians to be supremely preoccupied: hands. Lizzie, who identifies her rowing hands as “coarse, and cracked, and hard, and brown,” tells Charley that their father’s laboring hand is “a large hand but never a heavy one when it touches [her]” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 519, 37). By contrast, Riderhood’s daughter, Pleasant, (understandably) associates her father’s hand not with work but with the physical violence that was so prevalent in Great Expectations.9
Perhaps more noteworthy is how closely Dickens’s description of Gaffer resembles Henry Mayhew’s (1968, ii, 148) “laborious,” “persevering,” “steady,” and “industrious” characterization of real-life Thames dredgermen. Here is Mayhew describing a dredger and his environs: “There is … always the appearance of labour … A short stout figure, with a face soiled and blackened with perspiration … the body habited in a soiled check shirt, with the sleeves turned up at the elbows, and exhibiting a pair of sunburnt brawny arms, is pulling at the sculls, not with the easy and lightness of a waterman, but toiling and tugging away like a galley slave, as he scours the bed of the river with his dredging net in search of some hoped-for prize” (149, emphasis mine). Compare this to Dickens’s ([1864–65] 1997, 13, emphasis mine) description of Lizzie and her father in Our Mutual Friend’s third paragraph: in their “sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man showed … with no covering on his [perspiration] matted head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder … still there was business-like usage in his steady gaze.” Dickens knew Mayhew well, and it should be clear from the comparison above that he often explicitly borrowed from Mayhew’s reporting to produce accurate descriptions of his own working-class characters. My larger point about the comparison is that Dickens, from the very first page of the novel, presents us with working characters who do in fact labor by the sweat of their brows before we are introduced to the character—Rogue Riderhood—the notoriously unlaborious dredgerman who so often hypocritically invokes the idiom.
Such contrasting conceptions of labor appear to be one of the “leading notions” Dickens had of the novel when it began to take shape in his imagination while he was in France. Dickens never used the “sweat of the brow” idiom in any of his prior fiction and yet it shows up in his earliest plans for Our Mutual Friend, which he composed well before the first number was published (May 1864). For example, in his plans for the first number, Dickens has already decided to list the title for chapter 12 as “The Sweat of an Honest Man’s Brow,” and he notes below the chapter heading that Riderhood will visit the lawyers Wrayburn and Lightwood “To Earn the [Harmon] reward “ ‘by the sweat of his brow’ ” (Stone 1987, 341). Given the accurate observations of K. J. Fielding, J. Hillis Miller, Juliet McMaster, and others about the way the novel’s opening chapters jump from one apparently unconnected part of the story to another, we might even think of Riderhood’s favorite idiomatic refrain as the beginning of a consolidating index for those who do and do not “work” in the expansive world of this text.10
Even Riderhood’s first satirical and ironic uses of the idiom are telling given the context of the novel’s opening chapters vis-à-vis work. After all, Riderhood seeks out the lawyers in order to claim a reward for which he has most definitely not worked. Despite the fact that it is Gaffer’s sodden and perspiring work, not his own, that recovers the body at the outset of the novel, Riderhood boldly asserts that “I am a man as gets my living, and seeks to get my living, by the sweat of my brow. Not to risk being done out of the sweat of my brow, by any chances, I should wish afore going any further to be sworn in” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 151). Such clustered repetition suggests Dickens’s playful enjoyment with unfurling the parodical contradictions embedded within Riderhood’s hypocritical uses of the idiom. Bodenheimer’s sense of how parody operates in Dickens is useful, here. According to her, “Parody in Dickens says, ‘I simultaneously rely on and ridicule this language’ ” (Bodenheimer 2007, 36). This is exactly what happens in Riderhood’s use of the idiom. For instance, despite Riderhood’s plan to avoid work by claiming the reward, he has the gall to assert that he has earned the money: “I wouldn’t have knowed more, no, not for the sum as I expect to earn from you by the sweat of my brow” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 155). When the lawyers balk with suspicion, if only because of the size of the reward (as much as 10,000 pounds), Riderhood doubles down on the premise that a person who has performed the labor of a dredgerman somehow deserves the financial windfall, in part to relieve the burden of his “honest” conscience: “It is a pot of money; but is it a sin for a laboring man that moistens every crust of bread he earns.… Is it a sin for that man to earn it? … So I made up my mind to get my trouble off my mind, and to earn by the sweat of my brow what was held out to me” (157). Here, Dickens relishes parodying Riderhood’s ignorance of the connection between Edenic “sin” and its biblical consequences regarding human survival through arduous work. By the hypocritical gymnastics of Riderhood’s logic, he [Riderhood] questions whether it is “sinful” for a laborer to “earn” the reward money “by the sweat of [his] brow,” not by working—but by simply taking what is “held out to [him].”11
For all their hypocrisy, Riderhood’s multiple “sweat of the brow” assertions conform to Bourdieu’s ideas about how everyday linguistic exchanges operate as a social function of distinction in the relations between classes—and particularly how the struggle for such distinctions is often waged on the terrain of common speech. In Language and Symbolic Power (1991), he maintains that the use of everyday expressions, including slang and idioms, is an important way that those with less economic and social capital are able to distinguish themselves. “Language is a body technique,” for Bourdieu (1991, 86), “a dimension of bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s whole socially informed relation to the world, are expressed.” Body idioms are therefore “indices of quite general dispositions toward the world and other people.… They ai[m] at the very essence of the interlocutor’s social identity and self image” (87). This could not be truer of Riderhood’s (mis)conception of himself as a laborer. Despite what he really is (a malingering work shirker of the highest order), he seeks to use his “sweat of the brow” assertions to exercise the only “authority” he has when dealing with the genteel lawyers who definitively do not perform their work “by the sweat of [their] brows.”12 Riderhood believes that his membership in the “working” class alone trumps his hypocritical invocation of it by way of the idiom. It is a belief in what Bourdieu (1990, 110) calls “the magical efficacy of [a] performative language which makes what it states”—an efficacy that “does not lie, as some people think, in the language itself, but in the group that authorizes and recognizes it.”
Nonetheless, Riderhood’s hypocritical ignorance is never greater than when Dickens pivots between the figurative and the literal valences of the idiom. Chapter 12, the chapter in which Riderhood goes to the office of Wrayburn and Lightwood, contains multiple figurative invocations of the idiom, but it becomes literalized only at the moment when Riderhood senses that the lawyers harbor suspicions regarding his claims to “honest” earnings. Riderhood has just pinned the Harmon murder on Gaffer Hexam but in the next breath claims that he “was in reality the man’s best friend, and tried to take care of him” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 156). Employing what Bourdieu (1991, 68; emphasis original) refers to as “strategies of [phrasal] condescension” to maintain social distinctions, Wrayburn uses Riderhood’s own words against him as he sardonically asks about whether the dredgerman has tried to take care of his “best” friend “with the sweat of [his] brow?” Riderhood, confident that his laboring status authorizes him, rather than condescending lawyers, to use physically laboring language of this kind, ups the idiomatic ante in his response: “Till it poured down like rain,” he proclaims (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 153). But Riderhood’s confidence in the expression vanishes as Lightwood uncovers that Gaffer’s “best friend” has “merely nothing” besides circumstantial evidence to make his case. Part of the ingeniousness of this important early scene lies in Dickens’s orchestration of how the erosion of Riderhood’s confidence in the idiomatic expression that he has been repeatedly invoking coincides with the phrase’s literalization, as we witness Riderhood “wiping his face with his sleeve” before attempting to justify his increasingly hollow accusations (153). The parodic humor, of course, comes from the fact that Riderhood’s brow begins to sweat literally only when he is forced to engage in a kind of laborious truth-twisting “work” in order to try to convince the lawyers of his fabricated story.13
Moreover, the manuscript version of this scene reveals a glimpse into how Dickens began simultaneously to both rely on and to ridicule this idiom as he was writing out the novel for the first time. When Eugene asks with mocking derision if Riderhood “tried to take care” of Hexam (his “best friend”) “with the sweat of [his] brow?,” Dickens had Riderhood’s response read, “Exactly that” in the original handwritten manuscript. But then he crossed this out and wrote “Till it poured down like rain”—as if he recognized a chance to exaggerate and ridicule Riderhood’s unearned use of the idiom. There is also an interesting alteration to the lines where Riderhood explains his “deserving” rationale for claiming the reward money. The first written manuscript version of Riderhood’s lines read, “So I made up my mind to get my trouble off my mind, and to earn what was held out to me.” But Dickens then crossed out “what was held out to me” and wrote in its place, “by the sweat of the brow what was held out to me.” Dickens makes a similar alteration in the scene that appears in the next chapter where the Inspector, the lawyers, and Riderhood stake out Gaffer Hexam’s house. As Eugene establishes their positions in “the post of watch,” he asks, “Mr. Inspector at home?” The Inspector replies, “Here I am, sir.” Eugene’s next question appears this way in the manuscript: “And our worthy friend is in the far corner?” Dickens later emends the question to, “And our friend of the perspiring brow is at the far corner there?” (emphasis mine). He also added—via a caret insertion—the literalized detail where Riderhood appears “wiping his face with his sleeve.”14 These alterations are significant for a number of reasons that link up with my assessment of Dickens’s growing reliance on body idioms. In particular, they reveal at close scale (within two successive chapters) and in as “real” a time as we can identify the ways Dickens moves from simply introducing a catch-phrase idiom to refining it and refracting it more thematically at specific junctures in his composition. Focusing our attention on these handwritten manuscript alterations allows us to reflect in a very specific manner on what John Bowen (2021) has termed the small “refinements of thinking and phrasing, refinements of expression” that reveal Dickens’s creative process in action.15
The refinement of Riderhood’s “till it poured down like rain” response to Eugene’s mocking question also predicts the original idiom’s wider circulation throughout the novel. The fact that Riderhood meets Wrayburn’s derision with derision of his own inaugurates a larger pattern wherein he (Riderhood) is not the only butt of the idiomatic joke. John Carey (1973, 63–64) has remarked that Dickens’s humor “depends on the detection of falsity, but also on its invention” to the extent that his “hypocrites are the prime beneficiaries of his inventive genius.” And this is certainly true of the broader context within which Riderhood first makes his workful assertions. We learn, for example, several chapters before Riderhood comes to claim the reward that Lightwood and Wrayburn are lawyers by training but not in practice, an idleness on which they both openly muse. Eugene remarks that he has been “upon the honourable roll of solicitors of the High Court of Chancery, and attorneys at Common Law” for five years but has “had no scrap of business” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 29). Mortimer’s description of his own professional unemployment outdoes even his partner’s: “I … have been ‘called’ seven years, and have had no business at all, and never shall have any. And if I had, I shouldn’t know how to do it” (29). Thus, Dickens’s initial presentation of Riderhood’s hypocritical boasting could hardly contain more all-around discordancy. The very first paragraph of chapter 12, titled “The Sweat of an Honest Man’s Brow,” describes the lawyers’ formal plan to “establish” their idleness in a more tranquil location: “They had newly agreed to set up a joint establishment together. They had taken a bachelor cottage near Hampton, on the brink of the Thames, with a lawn, and a boat-house, and all things fitting, and were to float the stream through the summer and the Long Vacation” (147). Though the lawyers are at least “honest” about their professional idleness, the comedic element of Riderhood’s first appearance is heightened by the fact that he is clearly barking up the wrong tree with his “sweat of the brow” assertions. In fact, Lightwood is so unused to exertions of any kind that the night spent waiting for Gaffer Hexam to return lands him in a state of near complete futility: “the night’s work had so exhausted and worn out this actor in it, that he had become a mere somnambulist. He was too tired to rest in his sleep, until he was even tired out of being too tired, and dropped into oblivion” (179).
Even if the lawyers’ “friend of the perspiring brow” is the idiom’s most obvious (and eventually odious) target, there is evidence that the phrase’s repetition by both parties has a more subtle effect—at least on Wrayburn—as the lawyers attempt to locate Gaffer at the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters (168). This public house is frequented almost entirely by the working classes, a point underscored by its owner’s (Miss Abbey Potterson’s) account of how she has come to the successful management of the place: “It has been hard work to establish order here, and make the Fellowships what it is, and it is daily and nightly hard work to keep it so” (76). Sensing that the idle lawyers would be too conspicuous in such an environment, the Inspector suggests that they feign working in the lime shipping trade as they attempt to learn more about the case of the Harmon murder from the working-class patrons at the Fellowship-Porters (161). Wrayburn is eager to run with the idea of casting off his aristocratic descent and to play the role of one born to a long line of workers, claiming to a working-class customer that his has been “a family immersed to the crowns of their heads in lime during several generations” (162). This would be somewhat eccentric but still perhaps unremarkable were it not for Wrayburn’s extended participation in playing this working role well beyond its practical purpose, which is to blend in with the pub’s working clientele. For instance, as the lawyers pay their bill, Wrayburn asks “in his careless extravagance” if the potboy, Bob Gliddery, “would like a situation in the lime-trade” (167). Bob respectfully declines, but Wrayburn does not let it go at that; he tells Bob that if he ever changes his mind to “come find me at my works, and you’ll always find an opening in the lime-kiln” (167; emphasis mine). Bob thanks him, but Wrayburn is still bent on compounding the laboring facade. He introduces Lightwood, saying, “This is my partner … who keeps the books and attends to the wages. A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work is ever my partner’s motto” (167). Even Lightwood is mortified by the unnecessary lengths to which his friend goes, and as they leave the pub, he inquires of Eugene, “How can you be so ridiculous?” (167; emphasis original). Although Wrayburn simply chalks this up to being “in a ridiculous humour,” it is clear that at some level, the repeated references to working “by the sweat of the brow” induces in the idle lawyer a determined desire to play the part of a man who really does work for his living—a goal for which he explicitly strives at the end of the novel.
Wrayburn may exhibit a momentary desire to associate himself with lower-class manual labor at the Fellowship-Porters, but his interactions with Bradley Headstone reveal his more sustained attraction to earnest middle-class work—even as he gloats over the schoolmaster and denigrates the profession.16 As we have seen with the case of the Cambridge-educated Arthur Munby, a highly fraught and anxious relationship to the category of middle-class masculinity in relation to lower-class labor began to crest in the 1860s—where positions both above and below the social hierarchy became shot through with conflicting and contradictory desires and behaviors. Wrayburn’s seemingly “ridiculous” desire to associate himself with lime-kiln work is actually not so bizarre if we consider it in terms of what James Eli Adams (1995, 1) calls “the energies and anxieties of masculine self-legitimation” at mid-century.
My point as it pertains to the lawyer Wrayburn and the schoolmaster Headstone is not only that we see such complex tensions play out along classed lines but that these same tensions manifest themselves in association with the idiomatic expression pertaining to labor that I have been tracing. Wrayburn mocks Riderhood’s claim to working “by the sweat of his brow” partly because his social position allows him to do so. Riderhood offers little threat to his genteel masculinity (as an ostensibly practicing lawyer), and yet his “ridiculous” behavior at the Fellowship-Porters reveals that Riderhood’s equally ridiculous assertions of “honest” manual labor do hit some kind of uncomfortable mark. That mark gradually becomes something of a bull’s-eye when Wrayburn meets Headstone and the latter explicitly asserts that a kind of genuine hard work has “won [him] a station which is considered worth winning” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 388).
We will return to Wrayburn’s “amiable occupation” of “goading the schoolmaster to madness” on the London streets later on in this chapter, but for now, I want to analyze the subtle but familiar ways in which Dickens registers Headstone’s work and his character’s deeply vexed relationship to that work. Unlike Bounderby from Hard Times, who maintains an arrogant ease as the “bully of humility,” Headstone is anxiously proud of the position he has attained. We sense this partly because of the narrator’s insistence on his unassailably “decent” appearance but also because of the emphasis on his unsettled physical demeanor. Headstone appears within the first few pages of his entrance into the novel as having “a suspicious manner,” a “settled trouble in the face,” “a constrained manner,” an “uneasy figure,” and a “cumbrous and uneasy action” (218, 226, 229). The narrator perhaps sums up the depth of Headstone’s conflicted (and repressed) manner best in simply saying, “The schoolmaster was not at his ease. But he never was, quite” (225). This constitutional unease is nevertheless exacerbated by the recognition of his rival suitor’s higher class position—especially since it is a position for which Eugene has done no earnest work to achieve. Headstone’s uneasiness, for example, spikes on learning of Wrayburn precisely because of the predicament it creates in terms of his own relationship to labor. At one remove, Headstone wants his “pauper lad” origins “to be forgotten” as he vies with a seemingly self-assured aristocratic lawyer for Lizzie’s hand, but at another, he feels compelled to emphasize his workful industriousness as a means to assert his moral and ethical superiority over the indolent, aristocratic lawyer (218). This predicament is all the more difficult (and paradoxically cruel) for the schoolmaster to navigate in his first interaction with the razor-witted Wrayburn given Headstone’s “naturally slow … intellect that had toiled hard to get what it had won” (218).
Part of the complexity of the scene where these two characters first meet lies in the confusion of what constitutes “work” in all of these different scenarios. Eugene’s witty and repeatedly arrogant dismissal of “the schoolmaster” creates the embarrassing situation whereby Headstone needs the aid of his pupil, Charley Hexam, to help attempt to establish his respectability: “Mr. Headstone,” Charley says in admonishment, is “the most competent authority, as his certificates would easily prove” (288). Realizing that this tack only solidifies Eugene’s sense of superiority over him, Headstone tries to reframe his professional accomplishments in terms of labor: “You reproach me with my origin,” he says. “You cast insinuations at my bringing-up. But I tell you, sir, I have worked my way onward, out of both and in spite of both, and have a right to be considered a better man than you, with better reasons for being proud” (291; emphasis mine). Not only has Headstone’s “sluggish intelligence” had to toil hard to attain his position, but it is also toiling hard in the moment here to navigate his associations to labor (536). Attempting to do so is tortuously and literally hard work for Headstone, a spectacle punctuated by a performance of Riderhood’s original idiomatic formulation of labor. “Oh what a misfortune is mine,” cries Headstone, “breaking off to wipe the starting perspiration from his face” (290; emphasis mine). This idiomatic echo, however melodramatically configured, continues to proliferate in its resemblance to Riderhood’s invocation. For example, when Headstone says to Lizzie that seeing him “at [his] work” would convince her that he has “won a station which is considered worth winning,” we learn that he again “t[akes] out his handkerchief and wipe[s] his forehead” (340). And still later while recounting for Rokesmith the story of how Lizzie “repels a man of unimpeachable character who has made for himself every step of his way in life,” he once again “t[akes] out his handkerchief and wipe[s] his brow” (381). So in Headstone Dickens has created a character who truly embodies the idiom, though not without treacherous complications. As we shall see with more fell implications further on, it is literally and physically hard work for Headstone to repress his “very, very strong feelings” on this topic (381).
Idiomatic Characters and Characteristics
The “sweat of the brow” idiom also poignantly frames the interaction between the two characters who embody the most proximate and yet most contrasting representations of labor in Our Mutual Friend: Rogue Riderhood and Betty Higden. The same chapter (“Minders and Re-minders”) where we learn that “the death of [Gaffer] Hexam render[s] the sweat of the [Riderhood’s] brow unprofitable,” and where “the honest man had shufflingly declined to moisten his brow for nothing,” we are introduced to the consummately “hard working, and hard living” Betty Hidgen (194, 199). Betty’s approach to life and labor could hardly be more opposite to Riderhood’s precisely because they are one and the same for her: living and working are inseparable activities. When the Boffins originally ask what they can do for her after losing the orphan baby, Betty’s response is refreshingly different not only from Riderhood but from the majority of the novel’s other scheming characters—Lammle, Silas Wegg, Fascination Fledgeby, the preconversion Bella Wilfer, and so forth—who go to great lengths angling for money rather than working for it. Betty tells the Boffins, “I want for nothing myself, I can work. I am strong.… I never did take anything from any one. It ain’t that I’m not grateful, but I love to earn it better” (202, 203; emphasis mine). She also recognizes that Sloppy, though a hard worker himself, will never achieve independence if she does not leave him, and so she sets out alone to the countryside, providing for herself and repaying a small loan from the Boffins all the while. Contemplating this decision, she thinks, “I’m a good fair knitter, and can make many things to sell.… Trudging round the country and tiring myself out, I shall keep the deadness off, and get my own bread by my own labour” (376; emphasis mine). Getting her own bread by her own labor, of course, continues to echo the novel’s biblical idiom (by the sweat of the brow “shalt thou eat bread”) but in an unassuming and selflessly authentic key.
The authenticity she brings to her working life is perhaps the most surprising characteristic of Betty’s “surprising spirit” (199). “The poor soul,” we learn, “envied no one in bitterness, and grudged no one in anything” (498). This quality certainly sets her apart from the novel’s other venal characters in general but from Riderhood most particularly. And it is important for my argument that Dickens renders the starkness of these two characters’ differences in repeated references to the idiom we have been tracing. For instance, Riderhood interprets Wrayburn’s failure to take up his case and sue for (unearned) compensation after he is nearly drowned by a steamer as a grudge against his so often self-proclaimed “working”-class occupation: “[Wrayburn] always joked his jokes agin me owing, as I believe, to my being a honest man as gets my living by the sweat of my brow. Which he ain’t, and he don’t” (538; emphasis original). Riderhood’s hypocritical mantra here and elsewhere heightens the stakes for the scene in which he meets the ungrudgingly workful character of Betty Higden. This is significant because by this point in the novel, Betty has not only proven herself as someone who really does earn her living in the manner of Riderhood’s favorite invocation, but she has worked herself to the brink of a very real—as opposed to an almost and accidental—death. Betty begrudges no one and wishes only to be left alone to die undegraded without being committed to a parish workhouse. But Riderhood, now “an honest man” who “gets [his] living by the sweat of [his] brow” as the dozing and “indolent” Deputy of Plashwater Weir Mill-Lock, leverages the terrified adamance of Betty’s wishes into a bribe in exchange for not turning her in to the parish when he encounters her near the end of her life (501). “Pocketing the coins, one by one,” from the person who has worked herself to near death, Riderhood has the astounding impertinence to announce that he is “a man as earns his living by the sweat of his brow” (502). Here, though, the narrator acknowledges the despicability of the transaction by once again mockingly literalizing Riderhood’s idiomatic calling card: “he drew his sleeve across his forehead, as if this particular portion of his humble gains were the result of sheer hard labour and virtuous industry” (502).
The hypocrisy of Riderhood’s extortion (and the narrator’s acknowledgment of it) appears even more flagrant given the genuinely “workful” circumstances surrounding Betty’s death only a few pages later. Her rugged pilgrimage “toiling away … to earn a bare spare living” takes her past laboring poseurs like Riderhood and eventually to the paper mill where she feels comfortable surrounded by earnest industriousness. “When I am found dead,” Betty says, “it will be by some of my own sort; some of the working people who work among the lights yonder” (505; emphasis mine). Betty is correct that she will be found among the workers of the paper mill, but she will not be found dead. Instead, she dies in the arms of Lizzie Hexam, after a solemn and touching exchange—a central part of which confirms her desire to die among “working people who work”:
“Am I not dead?”
“I cannot understand what you say. Your voice is so low and broken that I cannot hear you. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean Yes?”
“Yes.”
“I was coming from my work just now, along the path outside (I was up with the night-hands last night), and I heard a groan, and found you lying here.”
“What work, deary?”
“Did you ask what work? At the paper-mill.” (505; emphasis mine)
This concentrated prominence of “work” in Betty’s death scene helps provide a fitting end for a person who has labored her entire life to stay out of the parish workhouse. Not only does she manage to stay out of the workhouse, but her final association with labor is officially instantiated when her remains are brought in to an “empty store-room of the mill” to lay among the other workers before her burial (508).
This kind of consistent toggling between scenes of earnest industriousness and hypocritical idleness—often refracted through the “sweat of the brow” idiom—becomes a principal way in which Dickens indexes his characters’ central identities. The other important character whose ardent dedication to labor authentically aligns with the “sweat of the brow” idiom is the Doll’s Dressmaker, Jenny Wren. In an early interaction with the clientless Eugene, this self-described “idlest and least of lawyers” questions why Jenny is so industrious (236). Jenny explains to the feckless lawyer that she needs to support not only herself but also her drunken father through her needlework.17 Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to identify a scene in which Jenny does not appear in conjunction with an almost exaggeratedly diligent application to her labor. The narrator’s constant association of Jenny with her trade—“work[ing] all night” (223), “sitting alone at her work” (337), “bending over the work” (337), “busy at her work by candle-light” (522), “profoundly meditating over her work” (701), “f[alling] to work at a great rate” (700)—has led some influential critics to reference the Doll’s Dressmaker in association with the rhetoric of the brow idiom. Catherine Gallagher (2006, 96), for instance, has recently focused on “the result of all [Jenny’s] sweat” in relation to the constancy and industriousness of her labor throughout the novel. This formulation is particularly germane for the “sweat of the brow” expression because it represents yet again a critic’s invocation of the idiom where it really does belong rather than where it has been hypocritically proclaimed (i.e., with Jenny and not Riderhood). As I have emphasized throughout my study, however, this phenomenon of critical, rather than authorial, acknowledgment of the idiom’s explicit applicability to female characters is a troubling and unfortunately deficient component of Dickens’s wider idiomatic imagination.
This missed opportunity to acknowledge the sweat of Jenny’s brow is even more disappointing if we consider how Gallagher’s description of Jenny’s working “sweat” could not have been more contemporaneously relevant in the era’s lexicon. Her “back’s bad” and her “legs are queer” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 222) as a result of her need to “work, work, work all day” and also “all night” (223, 713). Here, the triplicated description of Jenny’s labor reprises the most oft-repeated lines from Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” (1843)—the immensely popular poem lamenting the plight of London seamstresses. (Hood’s speaker repeats the triplicated rhetoric of “work! work! work!” or “work—work—work” eight times in eleven stanzas.18) It is likely that Dickens would have been acutely attuned to the horrors of this so-called “sweated” trade while he was working up ideas for his new novel in the summer of 1863.19 In June of that year, at the height of London’s fashionable season, the young dressmaker Mary Ann Walkley collapsed and died from heat exhaustion after working twenty-six hours without rest. Just weeks later, Punch printed a cartoon by John Tenniel, titled “The Haunted Lady, or ‘The Ghost’ in the Looking-Glass” (figure 19), that depicted the grim reciprocity between idle aristocratic London women and their immensely overworked dressmakers.20
But just as Betty Higden relies on her work to “keep the deadness off,” Jenny Wren’s sweated labor not only invigorates her, but it paradoxically mobilizes her. Talia Schaffer (2018, 201) accurately describes the physically impaired Jenny as “one of the most active figures in the novel, not particularly pitiable in certain respects.”21 More specifically, she is most active and least pitiable when she is in closest propinquity to her work. She “hobbl[es] up the steps” to Riah’s, for example, in order to collect the scraps for her dresses, but once collected, she “trot[s] off to work” quite amiably (and ably) (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 553, 554).
The various juxtapositions between the hypocritical bluster and the diligent authenticity of the “sweat of the brow” idiom also structures the novel’s earliest chapters where the “highest” members of society come in for severe critique. We have seen how the opening chapter, despite its depiction of Gaffer Hexam’s unseemly dredging work, identifies his businesslike dedication to the trade that “sodden[s]” his face with sweat (13). Although we are likely to miss it on an initial reading, this sets up another one of Dickens’s earliest invocations of the idiom when, at the Veneering dinner party only ten pages into the text, John Podsnap appears (reflected in the magisterial looking-glass scene) with a “dissolving view of red beads on his forehead” (21). The derisive humor lies in the suggestion that sweat-of-the-brow “work” for this section of society is largely comprised of simply mixing among themselves in elaborately pretentious social settings. Such a suggestion culminates in the brilliantly sarcastic chapter “A Piece of Work,” where the moneyed group resolves to undertake the supposedly “laborious” task of bringing Veneering in for Parliament. Here, the Veneerings initiate what becomes a refrain that appears on nearly every page of the chapter: “we must work” (244, 246, 248, 249, 251). Podsnap confirms his sense of brow-perspiring work as mingling with fellow socialites (and not with his occupation as a marine insurer) in his response to the working charge: “I have nothing very particular to do to-day … and [so] I’ll mix with some influential people” (247). Similarly, the charade in which upper-class work effortlessly produces money and notoriety may be seen in Lady Tippins’s actions, “for she clatters about town all day, calling upon everyone she knows, and showing her entertaining powers and green fan to immense advantage” (248). And the narrator corroborates that Lady Tippins knows well the name of the game she and the other “hard workers” play to such financial advantage: “that this same working and rallying round is to keep up appearances” because “many vast vague reputations have been made, solely by taking cabs and going about” (249).
Alfred Lammle and Fascination Fledgeby are two characters whose hollow reputations have been made in precisely this way. Although both are despicable characters in relation to their avoidance of work, the circumstances of their despicability are slightly different. Lammle achieves the appearance of a moneyed gentleman by virtue (or vice) of his association with the 1860s speculative market boom where financial success has no physically traceable derivation beyond the opaqueness of “traffic in Shares” (118). Dickens’s unequivocal disgust for this sort of “occupation” manifests itself in the narrator’s frustrated attempts to locate anything tangible in Lammle’s “achieved success”: “Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. What are his principles? Shares” (118). Of course, we learn soon hereafter that Lammle has no principles (or any money), but he might have maintained the appearance of success in shares if his wife, Sophronia Akershem, had not been similarly deceitful about her own lack of money. The couple’s subsequent scheming for unearned money throughout most of the novel crystallizes Dickens’s view of the moral dysfunction at the heart of London society.
Whereas the Lammles simply pretend to have money they do not have, Fledgeby compounds his lying, pretending “to be a young gentleman living on his [own] means” at Pubsey and Co.—all while using Riah to deflect the odium for exacting the usurious interest rates that enrich him (269). I bring up Riah in relation to Fledgeby for a particular reason that will provide one final example of the pervasive effect the “sweat of the brow” idiom has on so many characters beyond Riderhood. Consider the scene where Fledgeby forces Riah to play the role of Pubsey’s exorbitant and inexorable interest collector most directly (because of an unexpected visit from Lammle). It begins with the two characters (Lammle and Riah) occupying their usual (true) positions. Riah, after making his early morning collection rounds, shows up at the Fledgeby residence to turn over “every sovereign” to the still-comfortably slumbering money lender (419). Fledgeby’s hypocrisy and disgracefulness culminates here in “his desire to heighten the contrast between his bed and the streets” where Riah has been toiling on his behalf (418). From the “comfortable rampart” of his fireside bed, Fledgeby experiences “a plunge of enjoyment” thinking about this aspect of his so-called occupation (418). Fascination emerges from his bed only to raise insulting suspicions concerning Jewishness and the money Riah has collected for him in the “chill and bitter” London streets: “ ‘I suppose,’ he said, taking [a sovereign] up to eye it closely, ‘you haven’t been lightening any of these; but it’s a trade of your people’s, you know. You understand what sweating a pound means; don’t you?’ ” (419; emphasis original). Riah meets these insults with a revealing question of his own, asking, “Do you not, sir … sometimes mingle the character I fairly earn in your employment, with the character which it is your policy that I should bear?” (419; emphasis mine). This measured and accurate response from Riah effectively turns the tables and makes Fledgeby the unwitting butt of his own insulting insinuation. Far from “sweating a pound,” Riah has been sweating it out, fairly earning what little money he makes from doing Fledgeby’s (dirty) work. And such a prospect is underscored by the narrator’s descriptions of Riah’s behavior at the opening of the scene where he is shown “drawing out a handkerchief, and wiping the moisture” from his forehead as he awakens Fledgeby (418). There is no question that Riah does so in part because of the scene’s physical conditions; he is coming out of the “chill and bitter” London morning and into the warmth of Fledgeby’s fireside apartments. But by the often literalized logic of the idiom we have been tracing, Riah’s brow-wiping actions also locate him among the novel’s very few who genuinely do work “by the sweat of the brow.”
Deception, Mastery, and Noses to the Grindstone
It is not until the middle of the novel that the second guiding idiom of Our Mutual Friend first appears in its most explicit form. Dickens titles the fourteenth chapter of book 3 “Mr Wegg Prepares a Grindstone for Mr Boffin’s Nose.” This is not to say, however, that the idiom is thematically absent from the text until its midpoint. Following Bakhtin (1981, 346), the play of social dialects in a novel makes it entirely possible for a dialect’s “ ‘theme’ [to] sound in the text long before the appearance of the actual word.” The “sweat of the brow” and “nose to the grindstone” idioms, in this sense, are actually fundamentally linked in compelling ways. God’s parting words to Adam in Eden are at least in part a reminder that although he will labor for his food by the sweat of his brow, he will retain nothing from that labor in death: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19).22 Claire Wood (2015, 149) and others have observed the ways in which Our Mutual Friend’s dust heaps “have clear connotations of the biblical dust that we are returned to by the burial service.” Stewart goes even further. He describes the “liturgical formula ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ ” as “the unspoken matrix of the entire novel” (Stewart 1990, 209). Similarly, in an influential critique under the heading “Money, Language and the Body,” Steven Connor (1985, 149) maintains that “throughout the novel there is a repeated movement whereby the human body is first stripped of value [and then] reduced to [the] mere dust or detritus” from Genesis. This helps us begin to see how the two principal body idioms in Our Mutual Friend are bound up together in a commonly shared biblical imaginary wherein the meanest and most avaricious characters are constantly engaged in venal struggles to grind others down to dust—often in the rhetoric of putting others’ “noses to the grindstone”—and crucially, all so that they will not have to moisten their brows with work to attain their own bread.
Bradbury does not specifically identify either of the idioms, but she nonetheless hits closest to my sense of how these two salient idiomatic expressions coalesce and operate in the world of the text. The brilliantly concise title of her article, “Working and Being Worked in Our Mutual Friend,” captures the overlap I see in Dickens’s development of the “sweat of the brow” and “nose to the grindstone” idioms because it pinpoints “ ‘Work’—as a noun and a verb; action and object; self-motivated or imposed” (Bradbury 2005, 2). As we have seen, one of the novel’s primary themes involves an exploration of how characters either do or do not work; now we will see how this occurs while most of these characters simultaneously work each other in efforts to avoid working. For Bradbury, the dual aspect of activity and passivity in the term work, noun and verb, epitomizes the most “complex dynamic operating in Our Mutual Friend” (2). I agree, but I maintain that the particular way in which this complex dynamic of interpersonal mastery operates depends on the dual idiomatic structure that undergirds an important dimension residing at the novel’s imaginative core.
Although Dickens had not specifically used the idiomatic expression “nose to the grindstone” in any of his previous novels, it was hardly a non sequitur for him. His abiding interest in the trope of grinding mastery and literal grindstones has several germane precedents within his oeuvre. We see evidence of this interest very early on in Pickwick Papers (1836–37), for instance. Mr. Jackson, the lawyer from Dodson and Fogg who represents the plaintiff in the Bardell case, visits Pickwick to deliver subpoenas to his friends Snodgrass, Tupman, Winkle, and Weller. Jackson’s point is to make Pickwick aware of the powerful position such subpoenas afford Dodson and Fogg by incriminating the defendant “upon the testimony of [his] own friends” (Dickens [1836–37] 2003, 377). What is important for our purposes is how the lawyer demonstrates the powerful mastery his firm has over Pickwick via his subpoenaed friends: “Mr. Jackson smiled once more upon the company; and, applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary … mill with his right hand, thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime … which was familiarly denominated ‘taking a grinder’ ” (378). The ideas associated with noses and grindstones also stay with Dickens through the 1840s. Think, for instance, of how Barnaby Rudge’s (1841) Simon Tappertit expresses his frustrated desire to dominate his rival, Joe Willet, by taking to the grindstone in the locksmith’s shop:
“I’ll do nothing to-day,” said Mr. Tappertit … “but grind. I’ll grind up all the tools. Grinding will suit my present humor well. Joe!”
Whirr-r-r-r. The grindstone was soon in motion; the sparks were flying off in showers. This was the occupation for his heated spirit.
Whirr-r-r-r. (Dickens [1841] 1973, 86)
Dickens had also associated the grindstone with oppressive labor, greedy dominance, and social mastery in his depiction of Ebenezer Scrooge in 1843 (1971, 46), describing him as “a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone … a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire.” Similarly, we learn in David Copperfield ([1849–50] 2004, 301) that Rosa Dartle has “brought everything to a grindstone” in her efforts to master Steerforth’s affections—the futility of which causes her to “w[ear] herself away by constant sharpening.”
Dickens takes these individualized characteristics and raises them to far wider thematic heights in the 1850s and 1860s, though. The list of possible titles for Hard Times (1854), for example, contains a flurry of grindstone references: “The Grindstone,” “Mr Gradgrind’s grindstone,” “The universal general grindstone,” “Mr Gradgrind’s grindstone facts,” and again, “Mr Gradgrind’s grindstone” (Stone, 1987, 251). Of course in the story itself, the stone that the allegorically named character turns becomes a “mill of knowledge,” which is fitting given the connection between the mechanistic way the Coketown school churns out facts and the way its factory churns out textiles (Dickens [1854] 2003, 59). But it seems that by the early 1860s, Dickens was even more keen on pursuing the imaginative possibilities that literal grindstones afforded. His Book of Memoranda lists the following “Titles for such a notion [of the book that would eventually become Our Mutual Friend]”: “The Grindstone,” “The Great Wheel,” “Round and Round,” “Rokesmith’s Forge,” and “The Cinder Heap” (Kaplan 1981, 6–7). Perhaps what Fred Kaplan calls this “notion” can be traced to Dickens having actual grindstones on his mind as he struggled to get his new book started. Just few years before beginning to compose Our Mutual Friend, Dickens had titled a chapter of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) “The Grindstone,” wherein he presents a scene of revolutionaries gruesomely working an enormous grindstone to sharpen their blood-stained weapons. It is important to note that the physical (literal) proximity of one’s nose to this kind of sharpening stone is where the now well-known figurative expression originated. The operator of this type of grindstone was required lie down on a full body-length plank above the spinning stone so that his or her nose was only inches away from the actual grindstone in the sharpening process (figure 20). Such a setup is briefly alluded to in Little Dorrit ([1855–57] 2003, 285) when the narrator notes how a “step-ladder” is required in the shop of Doyce and Clennam to access “the large grindstone where tools are sharpened.”
As we have seen with his other imaginatively deployed idioms, Dickens’s use of the “nose to the grindstone” expression occurs at more or less the time when the idiom was acquiring the figurative meanings that we are so familiar with today. In fact, one of the definitions the Oxford English Dictionary lists for the idiom was just beginning to circulate toward the middle of the nineteenth century: “to keep (oneself or another) continually engaged in hard and monotonous labour.” The following visualizations from the British Library Newspapers Digital Archive (figure 21) and the British Periodicals Archive (figure 22) show the growing use of the idiom in wide swaths of the cultural lexicon at mid-century.
So Dickens was once again at the forefront of his era’s lexical trends—both in his fiction and in his life. I mention his life because he had drawn on exactly this figurative, “modern” sense of the idiom in describing his own work beginning and completing Great Expectations (1860–61)—the novel immediately preceding Our Mutual Friend. He told Forster that “the preparations to get ahead of [the publication schedule of Great Expectations] … will tie me to the grindstone pretty tightly” (House et al. 1965–2002, ix, 320, emphasis mine).23 Barely three weeks later, he characterized his hard work in a letter to Wilkie Collins using a similar formulation: “I must get down to Gad’s tonight, and get to work again. Four weekly numbers have been ground off the wheel, and at least another must be turned, afore we meet” (ix, 330).24 And after Bulwer Lytton had convinced him of the need to alter the novel’s ending, he wrote to Collins using the same grindstone rhetoric, reporting “that I have resumed the wheel, and taken another turn at it” (ix, 428).25 The circumstances that I have enumerated here demonstrate that Dickens had a career-long preoccupation with literal and figurative grindstones and that he associated the hard and sustained labor of writing—what Thomas Carlyle (1842, 194) liked to call “sweat of the brain”—with grindstones at precisely the time he was struggling to develop his ideas about work and mastery that eventually emerge as two of the central idiomatic concerns of his last completed novel.
Nose Abrasions
My claim that the “nose to the grindstone” idiom operates as a second idiomatic pillar of Our Mutual Friend requires an analysis of the ways in which the idiom works its way into the imaginative structure of the novel after Dickens lists it in his planning notes but well before its explicit appearance halfway through the novel. This necessarily involves a consideration of how Dickens draws on other literal and figurative parts of the idiom’s definition at the time he was composing the novel’s early sections. The Oxford English Dictionary dates back to the mid-sixteenth century the following usage of the idiom: “to get the mastery over another and treat him with harshness or severity; to grind down or oppress” (emphasis mine). The example the Oxford English Dictionary cites is from John Heywood’s Proverbs in the English Tongue (1546): “I shall revenge former hurts, Hold their noses to the grindstone.” Our Mutual Friend’s theme of just this kind of abrasive oppression in the social sphere is so prevalent, in fact, that it is difficult to locate a critic of the novel who does not specifically acknowledge its “grinding” attributes in some fashion.26 Nonetheless, the associations between this overarching theme and Dickens’s use of the “nose to the grindstone” idiom have been so far critically unexplored.27
These repeated idiomatic associations appear at the earliest stages of Our Mutual Friend’s composition. The original ending of the second number, the chapter titled “A Marriage Contract” (which Dickens had already composed before the first installment appeared in print), contains several germane connections to the grindstone idiom in this regard.28 The reference to the Veneering-hosted wedding of Alfred Lammle and Sophronia Akershem as a “contract” in this early chapter is appropriate because both parties agree to marry under the assumption that the other is wealthy. Only during a honeymoon walk on the Isle of Wight do the parties learn that they have married each other “on false pretenses”; neither has any wealth in reality (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 127). What is important here is how the narrator describes Lammle’s angry and embarrassed state on learning of his new wife’s lack of money in terms of abrasions that appear on his nose. We learn that its “colour has turned to a livid white, and ominous marks have come to light about his nose” (128). Lammle’s shame of confronting the moneyed Veneering circle without the guise of wealth causes “ominous marks” to appear on his nose—as if it has already been pressed to the social grindstone of public embarrassment. This phenomenon occurs again on the same page when the Lammles decide to double down in a pact to “pretend to the world” and agree to pursue “any scheme that will bring [them] money” (129). The temporary relief provided by thinking about this ruse is registered in the narrator’s affirmation that “those aforesaid marks” on Alfred’s nose “have come and gone” (129), a description that suggests reprieve from the grindstone of embarrassing truth.
Moreover, this grinding sense of social mastery and its attendant pressures resurfaces in the Lammles’ first moneymaking scheme: their orchestration of an arranged marriage between Georgiana Podsnap and Fascination Fledgeby. Barely three pages after “ominous marks” conspicuously emerge and disappear on Lammle’s nose, the weak and impressionable Podsnap daughter is described as possessing a distinctly “rasped surface of nose” in the moments that she is being coerced into a marriage by the designing Lammles (132). Not only does this rasped nose description allude to the grim existence awaiting her as the potential wife of a man (Fascination Fledgeby) whose “youthful fire was all composed of sparks from the grindstone,” but it is also representative of the larger “scrunch or be scrunched” world of Our Mutual Friend where no one seems to care what happens to others—so long, as the grindstone-associated saying goes, it is no skin (rasped) off their nose (266, 470).29
Alfred Lammle’s nose also continues to be the primary bodily site on which alternating social successes and financial failures manifest themselves. For example, when the ploy to profit from Georgiana Podsnap’s marriage runs aground and the “happy pair of swindlers” begin anew their “work together” (i.e., their attempt to make money without working), Sophronia pressures her husband, asking, “ ‘Have you no scheme … that will bring in anything?’ ” (545). The desperate prospect of having no scheme while attempting to live in lavish society solely on Alfred’s small annuity causes the couple to fret over their ability to “beg money, borrow money, or steal money” successfully (546). Just as when Alfred learns of his wife’s lack of money on their honeymoon, this new state of desperation and its attendant loss of leverage in the social sphere is similarly figured in the rhetoric of the grindstone idiom. Pondering the consequences of such a bleak scenario, Lammle once again appears with “a white dint or two about his nose”—as if the pressure to maintain his moneyed persona is, however briefly, embodied in the nicked surface of his nose put to a grindstone (545). This state of desperation, along with the state of Lammle’s nose, however, does not last long. Sophronia hits on the idea to blackmail Boffin by revealing to him their knowledge of Rokesmith’s declaration of marriage of Bella. The couple envisions immediate financial profit from this blackmail scheme but also banks on a belief that it will pay further dividends by situating Lammle to replace Rokesmith as Boffin’s secretary. The important component of this anticipated turn of events for the purposes of my argument lies in the fact that it, too, is depicted as a relief—figuratively and literally—from the pressures of the grindstone. After the couple evaluates what they take to be the viability and success of their plan to “earn” money by blackmail, Alfred’s nose appears no longer in danger of being put to the grindstone: “Mr. Lammle smiled.… In his sinister relish of the scheme … making it the subject of his cogitations, he seemed to have twice as much nose on his face as he had had in his life” (548).30
Indeed, the size and state of noses turns out to matter a great deal in Our Mutual Friend. And by this point in his career, Dickens delights in finessing the malleability of idiomatic association throughout the novel. For example, Fledgeby’s true disposition as “the meanest cur existing” plays out not in terms we might expect from the narrator’s canine reference but in those related to grindstones and noses (266): “Fledgeby … maintained a spruce appearance. But his youthful fire was all composed of sparks from the grindstone; and as the sparks flew off, went out, and never warmed anything, be sure that Fledgeby had his tools at the grindstone, and turned it with a wary eye” (266–67). This description, of course, alludes to Fledgeby’s “profession” in the bill-brokering line where he uses Riah to keep his clients’ noses to the grindstone while collecting exorbitant interest on the money he loans.
The treatment of noses figures prominently in Fledgeby’s private life as well, especially in scenarios involving the fluctuations in the atmosphere of interpersonal mastery and social power. One of the most salient examples of this shifting nature of power occurs when Lammle pays a breakfast visit to Fledgeby in order to gauge the status of the proposed marriage he (Lammle) has arranged between Fledgeby and Georgiana Podsnap. Because Lammle is relying on the money that will come to him from the brokered union, he is anxious to push the process along as quickly as possible. But Fledgeby essentially refuses to divulge any information on the scheme’s progress and, since he presumably gets to decide on whether the marriage will go forward at all, exercises his position of power over Lammle when he feels uncomfortably pressured. “Don’t you on that account,” Fledgeby insists, “come talking to me as if I was your doll and puppet, because I am not” (268). Fledgeby’s further insinuation that the meek Georgiana (not of the “violent,” “pitching-in order”) might not answer for his marital liking sends Lammle—“a bully by nature and by usual practice”—into “a violent passion” (270). What follows is an extraordinarily comical tableau of Lammle’s nose-centered assertion of social power and mastery:
“I tell you what, Mr. Fledgeby,” said Lammle advancing on him. “Since you presume to contradict me, I’ll assert myself a little. Give me your nose!”
Fledgeby covered it with his hand instead, and said, retreating, “I beg you won’t!”
“Give me your nose, sir,” repeated Lammle.
Still covering that feature and backing, Mr. Fledgeby reiterated … “I beg, I beg, you won’t.”
“And this fellow,” exclaimed Lammle, stopping and making the most of his chest—“This fellow presumes on my having selected him out of all the young fellows I know, for an advantageous opportunity! This fellow presumes on my having in my desk around the corner, his dirty note of hand for a wretched sum payable on the occurrence of a certain event, which can only be of my and my wife’s bringing about! This fellow, Fledgeby, presumes to be impertinent to me, Lammle. Give me your nose sir!”
“No! Stop! I beg your pardon,” said Fledgeby, with humility.
“What do you say, sir?” demanded Lammle, seeming too furious to understand.
“I say,” repeated Fledgeby, with laborious and explanatory politeness, “I beg your pardon.”
Mr. Lammle paused. “As a man of honour,” said he, throwing himself into a chair, “I am disarmed.”
Mr. Fledgeby also took a chair, though less demonstratively, and by slow approaches removed his hand from his nose. (271)
I quote this scene at considerable length because it provides an extended example of Our Mutual Friend’s preoccupation with mastery by way of noses well before the actual phrase “nose to the grindstone” appears in the text and because it inaugurates a pattern of nose-oriented power shifts that characterize many of the novel’s most interesting (and humorous) contests for social dominance.
The end of the scene recounted above also takes on more definitive associations with the grindstone idiom. The narrator tells us that after the humiliating breakfast meeting with Lammle, “Fledgeby did not recover his spirits or his usual temperature of nose until the afternoon” (272; emphasis mine). This statement suggests that Fledgeby, normally accustomed to sparks flying from putting others’ noses to the grindstone, experiences a taste of his own nose-burning medicine at the hands of Lammle. Moreover, it demonstrates the ways in which social power is recouped in Our Mutual Friend via a repetitive cycle of nasal humiliations and reassertions of mastery. For instance, Fledgeby’s experience of nearly having his nose put to the grindstone by Lammle only triggers a truculent desire to reassert himself over someone else who has less power than he. This plays out in the scene directly following Lammle’s nose grabbing, as Fledgeby grows impatient when calling on his counting house, Pubsey and Co., where his power and mastery remain unchallenged. “He got out of temper, crossed the narrow street again, and pulled the house-bell as if it were the house’s nose, and he were taking a hint from his late experience … for he angrily pulled at the house’s nose again, and pulled and continued to pull, until a human nose appeared in the dark doorway” (272–73). Of course, the human nose belongs to Riah, the subordinate whom Fledgeby uses as a front to keep his clients’ noses to his usurious grindstone.
Shortly hereafter, Fledgeby seizes on an opportunity to exact retribution from Lammle’s bullying—and he does so with “a certain remembrance of that feature”—his nose—on which Lammle had previously bullied him (422). Lammle pays an unannounced visit to Pubsey and Co. to inform Fledgeby that Podsnap has been tipped off about the scheme to have his daughter married for money. Podsnap’s cancellation of the wedding effectively deprives the Lammles (once again) of the money they expected to receive from their scheme. Never one to miss a glimpse of weakness or to pass up an occasion to exercise power over another, Fledgeby realizes the likelihood that Lammle will need a loan from his firm and, therefore, levels a dire threat from behind a charade that Riah is the real owner of Pubsey and Co. “ ‘You have sustained a loss here.… But whatever you do, Lammle, don’t—don’t—don’t, I beg of you—ever fall into the hands of Pubsey and Co. in the next room, for they are grinders. Regular flayers and grinders, my dear Lammle,’ repeated Fledgeby with a peculiar relish, ‘and they’ll skin you … and grind every inch of your skin to tooth-powder. You have seen what Mr. Riah is. Never fall into his hands, Lammle, I beg of you as a friend!’ ” (423; emphasis mine). The narrator’s comments on Lammle’s physical reaction to this most recent threat only strengthen the linkages to the theme of noses and grindstones: “The brooding Lammle,” the narrator tells us, appears at this vulnerable moment “with certain white dints coming and going in his palpitating nose” (423). The real grinder, of course, is not Riah but Fledgeby. And this is fitting since the character who revels in his ability “to work a lot of power over you” is “all composed of sparks from the grindstone” (427–28, 266). Fledgeby might well be what the narrator calls “the meanest cur existing,” but his actions and those around him who jockey for money and power reveal that Our Mutual Friend’s social atmosphere is idiomatically less “dog-eat-dog,” as Ledger (2011, 266) has characterized it, than it is “nose-grind-nose.”31
The experience of having his nose on and off the grindstone continues to index Lammle’s fortunes and misfortunes all the way through to his exit from the novel. After his scheming with his wife fails and they are forced to sell their possessions at auction, the Lammles pay an urgent visit to the Boffins in a last-ditch effort to procure Alfred a position as the Golden Dustman’s new secretary. The Lammles waste no time insinuating Alfred’s willingness and competence for the position, but they are met by a double rampart of Boffin silence: “here had been several lures thrown out, and neither of [the Boffins] had uttered a word” (629). Wondering if the Boffins’ untutored social graces account for their silence but also sensing the urgency of the moment, Mrs. Lammle decides to make a more direct appeal, declaring that her husband is “burning to serve” Mr. Boffin (630). When again “neither Mr nor Mrs Boffin s[ay] a word” in response to this explicit appeal, the Lammles begin to perceive the gravity of their powerless and ruined state, but important for my argument, this perception becomes registered in the now familiar sense that Lammle’s nose is being put to a grindstone: “several white dints began to come and go about Mr. Lammle’s nose, as he observed that Mrs. Boffin merely looked up from the teapot for a moment with an embarrassed smile, which was no smile” (630). The desperation rapidly grows for the Lammles and their decision “try ’em again” eventually, though reluctantly, moves the Boffins to reveal their knowledge of the couple’s deceitful ways. This disclosure, and all the opportunities it shuts down in terms of the Lammles’ survival by scheming, yet again manifests itself as an even more grinding pressure on Alfred’s nose: “the coming and going dints got almost as large, the while, as … the teaspoon” (631). However, the Boffins’ keenest desire is to be rid of the Lammles altogether, and they know that providing them money is the most expedient way to ensure their swift departure. Thus, Boffin provides a bank note for one hundred pounds under the pretense that the Lammles have done “a very great service” by informing them of Rokesmith’s pursuit of Bella. But it is telling that the narrator frames even this development as one in which Lammle’s nose is lifted from the grindstone of having either to find other schemes or, heaven forbid, work for his survival. Almost immediately after Mrs. Lammle takes possession of the money packet, we learn that Alfred “had the appearance of feeling relieved, and breathing more freely” flashes “a glittering smile and a great deal of nose” (632; emphasis mine).
Without question, Dickens’s most psychologically complex exploration of this kind of grinding mastery occurs in the antagonistic relationship between Bradley Headstone and Eugene Wrayburn. Money still matters here but only in relation to broader class antagonism and, eventually, to romantic rivalry. The class antagonism is on full display when the pair first meet in the lawyer’s offices and Wrayburn acts “as if there were nothing where [Headstone] stood” while he pejoratively asks, “And who might this other person be?” (285). Headstone unwittingly makes the mistake of responding to the question not with his name but with his professional position as a “schoolmaster”—a mistake that Wrayburn leverages throughout the duration of their first meeting by reducing Headstone to his respectable but undeniably lower social occupation.32 And unwitting is the right word for Headstone in comparison to Wrayburn. The schoolmaster’s paradoxically “sluggish intelligence” is no match for the lawyer’s quick wit at every turn of their initial conversation (536). Wrayburn’s aggressively condescending and dismissive treatment of Headstone in this first meeting, because it is performed for no evident reason (the romantic rivalry for Lizzie not yet established), is perhaps the best reflection of the unmitigated social cruelty that Our Mutual Friend repeatedly exposes. The “consummate[ly] indolen[t]” lawyer’s quick wittedness seeks no larger fulfillment at this point in the novel than demeaning his intellectual and social inferior for his own enjoyment (285).33
Audrey Jaffe identifies this impulse toward social mastery for its own sake as one of the defining features of the novel. “More than any other of Dickens’s novels,” she argues, “Our Mutual Friend traces a pattern of epistemological one-upsmanship: characters not only busy themselves finding out all they can about one another, but they invent their own plots, entrapping others in schemes of which the point is often merely to entrap” (Jaffe 1991, 157). This assessment certainly applies to both sides of the Headstone-Wrayburn relationship: Headstone uses various methods to gather information about the status of Lizzie Hexam’s romantic life. And Wrayburn, for his part, enjoys a perverse satisfaction from “goad[ing] the schoolmaster to madness” by leading him on through cat-and-mouse night chases all over London (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 533). Since Wrayburn derives “inexpressible comfort” from this cruel endeavor, it is worth recounting at length the detailed way in which he describes the process to Lightwood that leads to the infliction of “grinding torments” on Headstone (533):
I do it thus: I stroll out after dark, stroll a little way, look in at a window and furtively look out for the schoolmaster. Sooner or later, I perceive the schoolmaster on the watch.… Having made sure of his watching me, I tempt him on all over London. One night I go east, another night north, in a few nights I go all around the compass. Sometimes, I walk; sometimes, I proceed in cabs, draining the pocket of the schoolmaster who then follows in cabs. I study and get up abstruse No Thoroughfares in the course of the day. With Venetian mystery I seek those No Thoroughfares at night, glide into them by means of dark courts, tempt the schoolmaster to follow, turn suddenly, and catch him before he can retreat. Then we face one another, and I pass him as unaware of his existence, and he undergoes grinding torments. Similarly, I walk at a great pace down a short street, rapidly turn the corner, and, getting out of his view, as rapidly turn back. I catch him coming on post, again pass him as unaware of his existence, and again he undergoes grinding torments. (533; emphases mine)
On both of the above occasions I emphasize with italics, Dickens revised in the manuscript from what had originally been simply “torments” to “grinding torments” (156; emphasis mine). Joel Brattin (1985, 340) surmises that Dickens made these changes “perhaps looking back to the mill metaphor” from book 2 where Headstone, in conversation with Lizzie, labors with his words “as though they came from a rusty mill.” This explanation is possible, of course, but Dickens’s alterations here resonate more plausibly with a particular kind of physically abrasive mastery which he has repeatedly associated with having one’s nose put to the grindstone. For instance, Wrayburn gloats that his night rambles make “the schoolmaster so ridiculous, and aware of being made ridiculous, that [he] see[s] him chafe and fret at every pore when [they] cross one another” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 533; emphasis mine).
At one point shortly hereafter, the two lawyers pass Headstone on their way back to their chambers, and Wrayburn appeals to Lightwood to notice the accuracy of his descriptions: “you see as I was saying—undergoing grinding torments” (534). As we have now seen Dickens do so often, he relishes extending the figurative to a partial literalization of the idiom in the narrator’s description of the passing schoolmaster: “It [grinding torment] was not too strong a phrase for the occasion.… [Headstone] went by them in the dark, like a haggard head suspended in the air” (534). Moreover, in the subsequent pages, the narrator continues to describe the schoolmaster’s apparently severed head on multiple other occasions: “the haggard head suspended in the air flitted across the road,” “The haggard head floated up the dark staircase,” “The head arose to its former height from the ground, floated down the staircase again” (536–37). This is surely Dickens at his grotesquely but thematically punning best. The character on whose name he eventually settles as “Headstone”34 endures such grinding mastery at the hands of Wrayburn that his “head” repeatedly appears as if it has been entirely ground off at the (grind) “stone”! He becomes a character, like Captain Cuttle, in whose very name Dickens (dis)embodies one of the central idiomatic themes of the novel.
The finest literalization and inscription of this theme on Headstone’s body, however, occurs after he has been ground down to his physical breaking point in staying up all night following Wrayburn around the city while also attending to his regular teaching duties in the daytime. It culminates in the confirmation of Headstone’s most humiliating fear as he witnesses Wrayburn and Lizzie “walking side by side” during one of his ragged night vigils (625). Here, Headstone’s resigned acceptance of Wrayburn’s mastery over him may be seen in his recounting of the event to Riderhood. “What did you do?” asks Riderhood to which Headstone responds, “Nothing” (625). Riderhood’s next question, “What are you going to do?” though, elicits a bodily response that not only locates but literalizes in excelsis Headstone’s vulnerability as a consequence of enduring such “grinding torments”:
[Headstone] dropped into a chair, and laughed. Immediately afterwards, a great spirt of blood burst from his nose.
“How does that happen?” asked Riderhood.
“I don’t know. I can’t keep it back. It has happened twice—three times—four times—I don’t know how many times—since last night. I taste it, smell it, see it, it chokes me, and then it breaks out like this.” (625)
Critics have long remained as baffled to explain this event as Headstone himself. Stephen James’s (2012, 226) description of Headstone’s “unaccountable and repeated nosebleeds” is representative of the larger critical inability to make sense of Headstone’s seemingly bizarre nose bleeding. Thinking about this scene, though, in relation to the novel’s overarching preoccupation with mastery and its grinding effects on noses allows us to access perhaps one of the greatest but as-yet-unremarked-on Dickensian in-jokes. Headstone, as we have seen, is the character in whose very name Dickens embeds the elements of his own demise. Just as he puts his head to its own stone (all but grinding it off in his nightly pursuits of Wrayburn), his ungovernable passion to torture himself in confirming Lizzie’s romantic choice after his rejection has the effect of putting his nose so thoroughly to the grindstone that beyond the sparks and white dints of the novel’s earlier proboscis pressures, we encounter a nose ground down to a bloody pulp. Headstone’s defacement is thus ingeniously fulfilled in virtually every sense of the idiom.35
Idiom Convergence
Thus by the time the “nose to the grindstone” idiom first appears explicitly in Our Mutual Friend (in book 3, chapter 14: “Mr Wegg Prepares a Grindstone for Mr Boffin’s Nose”), it not only officially names a thematic pattern of grinding mastery that has been structuring the novel from the start, but it also emerges organically in conjunction with issues of work and labor heralded by the “sweat of the brow” idiom. In fact, the “nose to the grindstone” idiom could not fulfill its narrative purpose of exposing frauds and keeping the Harmon property intact without a direct relationship to the ways in which those involved—Boffin, Wegg, and Venus—do and do not work. We know from very early on that Mr. and Mrs. Boffin’s “religious sense of duty” and “moral straightness” make it difficult for them to stop working even when they inherit the Bower (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 105). The newly wealthy dustman who confounds the idle lawyer Wrayburn by cheerfully asserting that “there’s nothing like work” even goes so far as to consult his wife about “beginning work again” despite their newly inherited fortune (98, 104). In contrast, Wegg, the “wily” character who speaks in the “nose to the grindstone” idiom most has a “mercenary mind” that is constantly focused on exacting the greatest amount of money out of Boffin with the least possible work (186, 64).
The difference in these two characters’ dispositions reaches its highest and most comical pitch in the chapter where the semiliterate Wegg frets that Boffin’s hiring of Rokesmith as his secretary will jeopardize his cushy “job” as a ballad and book reader. Boffin assures Wegg that this is not the case because it would mean “that [he, Wegg] were not going to do anything to deserve [his] money” (188). But the changing hands of this undeserved money is exactly what comes to pass in the final page of the chapter. The narrator tells us that Wegg, “being something drowsy after his plentiful repast, and constitutionally of a shirking temperament, was well enough pleased to stump away, without doing what he had come to do, and what he was paid for doing” (191–92). It is ultimately this Rogue-like, work-shirking aspect of Wegg’s constitution that leads him to attempt “to put [Boffin’s] nose to the grindstone” by blackmailing him into paying for the right to retain the Harmon estate (570).
Although Venus at first joins in the blackmailing plan, his earnest dedication to his work as a taxidermist precipitates his decision to withdraw from it and to inform Boffin of Wegg’s untoward designs. Dickens makes it clear in his first descriptions that Venus “take[s] a pride and a pleasure” in his trade, describing himself as “a workman” who has improved his knowledge of anatomy “by sticking to it until one or two in the morning” (89, 90). It takes some digging around in the dust heaps with Wegg and searching for treasures and later-dated wills that would deprive Boffin of his inheritance to remind Venus of his (Higden-like) preference for honest work over easy money. He tells Boffin as much when he makes the decision to reveal Wegg’s nose-grinding plans: “All I know is this: I am proud of my calling after all.… Putting the same meaning into other words, I do not mean to turn a single dishonest penny by this affair” (565). Venus’s wording here is an inverted echo of the narrator’s description of Riderhood: “It had been the calling of his life to slink and dog and waylay” (689).
As with Riderhood, Fledgeby, Lammle, and the novel’s other rapacious schemers, Wegg has no regard for work, honesty, or fellow feeling. All he (thinks he) knows of the world is the one of grinding social mastery that comes in for heaviest indictment. Wegg’s view of the world is limited to Bradbury’s notion of work as a verb: work or be worked. Interestingly but not surprisingly, the chapter wherein Wegg proclaims his intentions to put the Dustman’s “nose to the grindstone” on seven different occasions, he first assumes Boffin has similar intentions: “Boffin. Dusty Boffin. That foxey old grunter and grinder, sir, turns into the yard this morning, to meddle with our property” (568; emphasis mine). This is the climactic chapter (book 3, chapter 14) that finds Boffin listening to the conversation between Wegg and Venus from behind the alligator in the taxidermist’s shop. Dickens heightens the comedy of this scene, though, as we have seen him do so many times before, by alternating between the literal and figurative dimensions of the idiom. Wegg considers Boffin’s appointment of Sloppy as a foreman of the dustheaps to be “an act of sneaking and sniffing” and in the same sentence declares, “his nose shall be put to the grindstone for it” (568; emphasis mine). Such idiomatic rhetoric only becomes more and more comically visceral as Wegg promises that he “shall not neglect bringing the grindstone to bear, nor yet bringing Dusty Boffin’s nose to it. His nose once brought to it, shall be held to it by these hands … till the sparks fly out in showers” (571). Moreover, the repetition of Wegg’s idiomatic threats become fully somatic for Boffin several chapters later. When Venus informs Boffin, who has yet to find the later-dated will, that the blackmail scheme is imminent, and that he supposes Wegg will “turn to at the grindstone” at his next chance, the narrator describes how “Mr. Boffin took his nose in his hand, as if it were greatly excoriated, and the sparks were beginning to fly out of that feature” (638).
Fittingly, the two guiding idioms that I have been tracing converge most definitively near the end of the novel in the plot sequence that resolves Our Mutual Friend’s principal problem of deciding who will inherit the old Harmon estate. For Wegg, the “great exertion” of “turning an imaginary grindstone” becomes real “sweat of the brow” labor when he is forced to keep pace with Boffin and Sloppy sifting the dust mounds day after day (643, 646). Dickens marks this transformation with a literal fulfillment of the first idiom, using the creative power of idiomatic language to make the phrase do several things at once. Working “by the sweat of his brow” for perhaps the first time in his life, Wegg appears “panting and mopping his head with his pocket-handkerchief” (643). But Boffin’s discovery of an even-later-dated will in which he, not the Crown, is the beneficiary allows him to counter Wegg’s “newly-asserted power” (646). The Golden Dustman, however, exercises his power over “the ligneous sharper” by forcing Wegg to do precisely what he (Wegg), like so many others, spends the novel trying to avoid: work (60). The combined idiomatic irony, of course, is that the “sweat of the brow” work Wegg must now undertake in the dustheaps to “sharpen fine” Boffin’s nose “w[ears] Mr. Wegg down” to a state of reversed literal and figurative mastery. We learn that working the mounds has so “worn Mr. Wegg down to skin and bone” that “the grindstone did undoubtedly appear to have been whirling at his own nose, rather than Boffin’s” (759, 760)—an exquisitely deserved reversal that Dickens had been aiming to achieve based on his planning notes from the novel’s earliest compositional stages which ask, “Mr Wegg’s Grindstone sharpens the wrong nose?” (Stone 1987, 371).
Like so much of his later fiction, Dickens’s final novel ends not by offering a solution to society’s systemic ills but by emphasizing traits and characteristics that can make living in such a society more bearable. And it is crucial for the argument I have been making that these traits and characteristics are deeply aligned with the two idiomatic phrases that appear only in Our Mutual Friend. Those who dedicate themselves to work (by the sweat of their brows or otherwise), like Sloppy and Jenny Wren, gravitate toward each other and remain in London while those who do not, like the Lammles and the Veneerings, are exiled abroad. Even the lawyers, a professional group normally skewered by Dickens throughout his career, come off relatively well because of their newly acquired appreciation for work at the end of the novel. Mortimer Lightwood, in addition to now working as the solicitor for the Harmons, “applie[s] himself with infinite zest to attacking and harassing Mr. Fledgeby” and to “disentangle[ing]” Twemlow from “the sublime Snigsworth’s wrath” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 782, 783). Lightwood’s embrace of work is so thoroughgoing that Dickens actually describes it with rhetoric associated with Jenny Wren’s sweated profession: Lightwood acts “professionally with such unwonted dispatch and intention, that a piece of work was vigorously pursued as soon as it was cut out” (782). The lawyers’ changed attitudes regarding work also invoke the “nose to the grindstone” idiom’s sense of diligent labor. Just as Dickens described his own diligence “turning to the wheel” in order to compose and revise his fiction, Lightwood regrets that he allowed his inheritance to “preven[t] [him] from turning to at Anything” for so much of his life (790; emphasis mine). What is more, Wrayburn not only develops the capacity to understand his friend’s regret but also the ability to transform it into a hopeful future defined by similarly meaningful labor. “In turning to at last, we turn to in earnest,” Wrayburn says as he envisions a life in the colonies, “working at [his] vocation there” (791; emphasis mine).
Idiomaticity and Intentionality
The concern most central to this study—the generative impulses of the Dickens’s creative imagination—comes to a fitting and quite explicit climax with the material Dickens appended to the final completed piece of fiction he ever wrote. In his “Postscript, In Lieu of Preface” that appeared at the conclusion of the last double number of Our Mutual Friend in November 1865, Dickens attempted to beat “a class of readers and commentators” to the critical punch by anticipating their objections to his treatment of the novel’s “leading incident”: the Harmon-Rokesmith murder/survival plot (798). Here, he defends his efforts to maintain a delicate balance between what he was required to reveal and what to conceal over the course of the story’s nineteen-month publication, finally declaring “that an artist (of whatever denomination) may perhaps be trusted to know what he is about in his vocation”:
To keep for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out, another purpose originating in that leading incident, and turning it to a pleasant and useful account at last, was at once the most interesting and the most difficult part of my design. Its difficulty was much enhanced by the mode of publication; for, it would be very unreasonable to expect that many readers, pursuing a story in portions from month to month through nineteen months will, until they have them complete, perceive the relations of its finer threads to the whole pattern which is always before the eyes of the story-weaver at his loom. (798)
As anyone might expect, Dickens’s bald and public attempt to outflank criticism of the novel’s construction at its conclusion only made the target more conspicuous to his contemporary detractors. The Saturday Review, for example, directly criticized the “story weaver at his loom” control that Dickens had so confidently described: “The execution is coarse and clumsy, and the whole picture is redolent of ill-temper and fractiousness.… Even Mr. Dickens has seldom written a book in which there is so little uniformity of plot, so few signs of any care to make the parts fit in with one another in some kind of proportion”36 (Grass 2014, 612–13). Writing for the Westminster Review in October 1864, Justin McCarthy reached conclusions that similarly contested Dickens’s postscripted declaration of his awareness (and control) of “the finer threads to the whole pattern.” Because “his mind [was] in fragments,” according to McCarthy ([1864] 1965, 438), Dickens began the book “without having formed clear notions of it as a whole” (419), “abandons himself to the guidance of fancy, and makes a point of giving complete liberty to his Spirit at the very commencement of his task,” which necessarily in McCarthy’s view reveals “the absence of controlling power” (420).
Not surprisingly, then, especially given the confident pronouncement of retrospective control Dickens makes in the postscript, a significant portion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism of Our Mutual Friend has also been preoccupied with the nature and degree of Dickens’s organization and intent—even as the novel’s critical esteem rose far beyond the purview of its first reviewers. As Grass (2014, 5) has commented, this makes sense for reasons that heighten the importance of Dickens’s appended postscript: “[Our Mutual Friend] simply came last, and it will always therefore remain the final example of Dickens’s habits of writing and revision, his final striving after long-held artistic aims.” The questions Ernest Boll asks at the outset of a 1944 article in Modern Philology test the claims of Dickens’s postscript (using Dickens’s own story-weaver trope) and set the agenda for those interested in probing the novel’s imaginative “design”: “What were the headline images that sprang up before Dickens’s mind when the inspiration began to work in him? What gropings did his imagination evolve in its reach after interest and plausibility? How consciously did Dickens work at his craft, that is, how responsible an artist was he? To what detail did he keep his hand upon the design he wove month after month?” (96). It speaks to the immense and sprawling complexity of Our Mutual Friend that critics have taken up far-ranging (and widely opposing) positions on these important questions regarding the novel’s construction. At one end of the spectrum, there are those who recognize it as Dickens’s culminating artistic achievement but who see its incohesive disjointedness as its highest artistic merit. J. Hillis Miller’s pioneering assessment from the 1950s, for instance, maintains that “Our Mutual Friend might be compared to a cubist collage. Its structure is formed by the juxtaposition of incompatible fragments in a pattern of disharmony and mutual contradiction.”37 Robert Kiely (1983) and Jaffe (1987) have extended this view by noting the ways in which the novel’s fragmentation and confusion make it Dickens’s most modernist work. McMaster (1987, 194) likewise sees “the fragmented world” of Our Mutual Friend as a notable departure from Dickens’s more tightly “designed” novels. “No previous novel,” she attests, “had been so atomic in its structure, or required more in the way of leaps, on the part of the reader, from one apparently unconnected part of the story to another” (194). Most recently, Anna Gibson (2015, 66) has argued compellingly that Dickens’s return to the monthly serial format allowed him to embrace an unknowing openness to multiple narrative possibilities where the fictional world appears “always being made, dismantled, updated, and remade” by characters who “act, react, and adapt to one another” in a free and open distributive network.
There are also many critics who occupy various positions at the other end of the spectrum, drawing either directly or indirectly on Dickens’s pronouncement in his postscript. More than half a century ago, U. C. Knoepflmacher (1971, 137) saw Our Mutual Friend as “the product of a practiced and self-assured craftsman in total command of all the rhetorical skills developed throughout his career.” Even more influential for generations of later critics, Knoepflmacher introduced the notion that the novel consists of “a gigantic jigsaw puzzle” in which the reader “eventually learns to recombine the jagged pieces that Dickens has so meticulously cut asunder” (143). Gregg Hecimovich (1995, 964, 960), for example, extends the interpretive conceit of Knoepflmacher’s giant jigsaw puzzle by asserting that Dickens’s “semantic trickery” is structured by an elaborate series of riddles wherein the reader becomes conscripted into “trying to find meaning in the accretion of clues.” Similarly putting full faith in Dickens’s ability to craft and conceal simultaneously (and intentionally), Kathleen Pacious (2016, 348; emphasis mine) views Dickens as “a master of trickery”—“plant[ing] the clues and applaud[ing] the savvy reader who is able to unearth them” as s/he/they “piece[s] together the separate strands of the plot to reveal the concealed meaning of the whole.” I emphasize Pacious’s identification of a singularity of meaning because of the way it restricts critics in the “Dickens as (conscious) designer” camp. For instance, John Reed (2011, 85) claims that Dickens “was in full command of his narrative [in Our Mutual Friend], so much so that he wanted to assist his readers in interpreting it correctly and to retain command of the mode of that interpretation.” This means identifying redundant passages that “constitute instructions for the proper deciphering” of information—Dickensian redundancies that Reed believes “convey the central meaning” of the novel and that “make as certain as possible that [the] text will not be misread” (97, 118; emphasis mine).
My point in surveying some of the opposing critical landscape related to Dickens’s construction of Our Mutual Friend is to think more deeply about the Inimitable’s creative energies both within his final novel and within his oeuvre more generally. At one level, the sheer number of the two idiomatic expressions we have been tracing in Our Mutual Friend, especially considering their appearance in only this one novel, suggests what Gallagher (2006, 115), discussing a different concern with the text’s bioeconomics, has termed “continuity too consistent to be accidental.” Given Dickens’s growing incorporation of unique idiomatic expressions to help in the imaginative construction of his mature fiction, his use of these two interconnected body idioms throughout Our Mutual Friend is indeed no accident by the time we come to his final novel. But I have no interest in attempting to prove Knoepflmacher’s sense that Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend, is in “total command of all the rhetorical skills developed throughout his career.” I do, however, submit that Dickens is at his “idiomatic best” in Our Mutual Friend where the “sweat of the brow” and “nose to the grindstone” idioms become braided together to make up at least one of the “finer threads to the whole pattern” in the Inimitable “story weaver’s” last novel. The combination of these two idioms is indeed the specific “stylistic summa” that Stewart (2022, 227) ascribes more generally to Dickens’s “ingrained verbal flourishes” and “phrasal habits etched into a sharper new outline.” I have argued that his reliance on these two particular idioms not only helped him to get started on the novel during a period of extreme physical and intellectual exhaustion, but they also helped him establish and execute many of the book’s major thematic developments. That said, the extent of Dickens’s awareness at every step of his composition and what that extent might mean in terms of authorial intention remains, thankfully, indeterminate. As Edward Casey (1976, 39) says in his phenomenological study Imagining, the imagination seldom produces even two acts of intention that work in exactly the same way. In my analysis of this last novel, as with Dickens’s others, I would never want to limit meaning to what the author supposedly intended by his reliance on certain idiomatic expressions (even if it were possible to determine such a thing irrefutably).
I realize that my position is partly at odds with what Dickens explicitly states at the end of his career in Our Mutual Friend’s postscript: that the artist must always understand what he is “about” better than the critic. This is patently not true, though. If it were, a writer, painter, sculptor, or artist of any kind would be the only competent judge of the merit and meaning of their own work. My entire study, in its most concentrated sense, is a response to Ernest Boll’s (1944, 96) question in Modern Philology—a question in which the author is in some ways paradoxically unqualified to answer: “What were the headline images that sprang up before Dickens’s mind when the inspiration began to work in him?” I have argued that the headline images that sprang up in Dickens’s mature imagination were idiomatic and that these idioms were at once bodily, lexically, formally, and conceptually thematic. In short, Dickens drew more and more from an embodied idiomatic inspiration—on varying levels of conscious and unconscious intent—as his career developed. It turns out, as George Levine has recently put it in a discussion of the intentional fallacy, “with Dickens, an almost terrifying creative energy unleashes forces of which he himself (like us on the psychiatrist’s couch babbling away) might not have been aware.”38 We can learn from Dickens’s idiomatic imagination—at whatever level of consciousness—important new dimensions of his fiction that the Inimitable himself may not ever have been able to articulate.
1. Poovey 1993, 51, 67. Stewart (1990, 227) has also remarked that central “to the satiric agenda of the novel [is] its attack on the [unearned] money ethic of Victorian society.”
2. Bodenheimer (2007, 36) contends that Dickens’s “central subject was the use and misuse of language.” I agree but argue that his central subject is more precisely a use and misuse of idiomatic body language.
3. These body idioms were not just unique in Dickens’s oeuvre; they were extremely rare in nineteenth-century novels more generally: the “sweat of the/my brow” idiom is used three times in one novel, twice in four novels, and a single time in forty-five other novels in my corpus of more than 3,700 nineteenth-century novels. The “nose to the grindstone” idiom is even more rare. Dickens invokes it or its variants nineteen times in Our Mutual Friend while it appears only thirteen times (all single instances) in the 3,700-novel corpus.
4. Critics from Knoepflmacher to Poole have seen the novel this way. Knoepflmacher (1971, 137) analyzed it as “the product of a practiced and self-assured craftsman in total command of all the rhetorical skills developed throughout his career.” More recently, Poole (2007, xxiii) has called Our Mutual Friend the Dickens novel that is “most self-conscious of its own processes.”
5. See Welsh (1971), Walder (1981), Sanders (1982), Larson (1985), and Wheeler (1990). More recently and specifically, Litvack (2008, 434–35) has analyzed the “overt biblical references in Our Mutual Friend” but does not mention the “sweat of the brow” idiom.
6. Trench (1852, 30) had written that the Bible “lives on the ear, like music that can never be forgotten.… Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national [British] mind.”
7. Claire Wood (2015, 132) puts it more precisely: “Only Gaffer’s corpse-fishing, Venus’s shop, and the dust-heaps are depicted as making money.”
8. Poovey (1993, 60) considers Lizzie “a working-class woman.” Pykett (2002, 177) describes Lizzie as “hard-working and self-sacrificing from the outset”; “her capacity for hard work” is “demonstrated in her arduous toil at her river trade.”
9. “From her infancy [he] had been taken with fits and starts of discharging his duty to her, which duty was always incorporated in the form of a fist or a leathern strap, and being discharged to hurt her” (Dickens [1864–65] 1997, 346).
10. Fielding (1958, 185) attests that the outset of the novel can “be enjoyed as a loose collection of pieces.” J. Hillis Miller (1958, 284) claims that the opening chapters constitute “the juxtaposition of incomparable fragments in a pattern of disharmony and mutual contradiction.” McMaster (1987, 194) says that “In the first number alone we jump between startlingly different scenes and sets of characters.”
11. A similar set of events occurs later in the novel (book 2, chapter 12) when Rokesmith, dressed in seafaring disguise, charges Riderhood with lying about the Harmon murder in order to falsely “earn” the Boffin reward money. Here, Riderhood asserts his honesty (“sweating away at the brow as an honest man ought”) and his dedication to physical labor (“I gets my living by the sweat of my brow”) only to contradict both when he proposes splitting the reward with Rokesmith (355, 352, 358).
12. Bourdieu is of course building on the theory of speech acts developed by J. L. Austin. Although Austin does considerably more justice to the sociohistorical aspects of language than structural linguists ranging from Ferdinand de Saussure to Noam Chomsky, his (Austin’s) account of performative utterances—their social “conditions of felicity”—does not go far enough in Bourdieu’s estimation. Within the social conditions of communication, Bourdieu (1991, 107–16) believes that speakers use expressions containing practical strategies that are always adjusted to relations of power.
13. Although he does not cite this part of the novel in particular, it certainly qualifies as one of the best examples of what Bowles (2019, 151) refers to as Dickens’s “technical manipulation of grammar, lexis, and phraseology in his blending of discourse presentation techniques to mock, entertain, and critique individual and collective manners of speech.”
14. These alterations appear in the handwritten manuscript, which is held by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City. I am indebted to Philip Palmer for arranging my access to the manuscript (and magnifying glass!).
15. From Bowen’s introduction to the Deciphering Dickens project, which was delivered at the “Dickens in the Digital Age Conference” on February 18, 2021.
16. I use the word attraction here in acknowledgment of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1985) pioneering argument in Between Men that a complex mapping of homosocial conflicts and affiliations underwrites many of the conflicts and affiliations of economic class in the nineteenth century. One of her strongest arguments culminates in her analysis of the classed and eroticized struggle between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone. See Sedgwick 1985, 163–79.
17. For a discussion of how these circumstances “make Jenny stan[d] for a certain kind of realism” and “sign of a social fact” (contra Henry James’s famously harsh assertion of her as unnatural and sentimental), see Schor 1999, 198–202.
18. Hood’s poem was a reaction to an 1841 inquiry into the employment and treatment of dressmakers and seamstresses, which revealed shocking reports of women suffering from consumption, starvation, neuralgia, and other developmental problems resulting from long work hours standing or sitting in place. See Ledbetter 2012, 19.
19. As McClintock (1995, 98) notes, “subcontracting and undercutting; extremely long hours for miserable pay; and work that was largely manual, repetitive and exhausting, performed in crowded and overheated garrets, gave the name ‘sweating’ to one of the most appallingly exploitative of the female trades.” For a more expansive account of the practice, see Bythell 1978.
20. For an alternate reading of Jenny in terms of her association with Pre-Raphaelite art, see Evernden 2018.
21. See Schaffer 2018. Schaffer’s point extends David’s (1981, 122) notion that Jenny Wren “is a million fictive miles away from the passive suffering embodied in Dickens’s other diminutive female creatures.”
22. This is especially interesting since Dickens had early on considered The Grindstone as a title for the novel (Kaplan 1981, 6–7).
23. October 4, 1860; emphasis mine.
24. October 24, 1860.
25. June 23, 1861.
26. For only a sampling of the phenomenon wherein “grinding” is explicitly used, see Kennedy (1973), Gribble (1975), Romano (1978), Kucich (1985), Brattin (1985), Poovey (1993), Cheadle (2001a, 2001b), Gallagher (2006), Bodenheimer (2007), Ledger (2011), S. James (2012), and Grass (2014).
27. This failure to recognize the imaginative potential of idiomatic language is surprising given that critics such as Kucich (1985,168) have explored how “many of the ‘inimitable’ characteristics of [Dickens’s] prose style” in Our Mutual Friend “are dedicated to produce some kind of exchange value in terms of meaning.” Although he does not analyze the prevalent idioms to which I have drawn our attention, Kucich maintains that syntax, metaphor, diction, conventions of description, redundancy of phrasing are all devices of “a rhetoric … doing some kind of work” (168).
28. Dickens overwrote the second number and was forced to postpone this particular chapter until early in the third number, where it eventually became chapter 10. This does not matter much for my argument, though, since Dickens composed all of this material before the novel “began” in print. For the most comprehensive study of the novel’s development, see Grass 2014, 37–38.
29. Dickens has previously used this expression in Hard Times ([1854] 2003, 103) when Bounderby proclaims that he will “have the skin off [Mrs. Sparsit’s Coriolanian] nose.”
30. For a distinctly erotic interpretation of Lammle’s “palpitating nose,” see David 1981, 105–6.
31. Ledger (2011, 366, 373) maintains that the novel “exhaustively anatomizes” the “dog-eat-dog mentality.”
32. For an analysis of how the possession or use of people’s names becomes a means of exercising power more broadly, see Connor 1985, 150–53.
33. There is also something more sinister in Wrayburn’s intellectual bullying of Headstone. To think about it in terms of the novel’s preoccupation with work (by the sweat of the brow or otherwise), the Headstone-Wrayburn antagonism represents something of a Dickensian anomaly. As Ledger (2011, 372) has noted, Dickens “repudiates, here as rarely before … the hard-working respectable school teacher with whom one might have expected Dickens to sympathize.” As despicable and destructive as his ungovernable passions become, Headstone works diligently at his profession and Wrayburn conspicuously does not. This anomalous depiction of Headstone reflects Bodenheimer’s (2007, 207) sense of Dickens’s own paradoxical relationship to class: “His views about social class were deeply ambivalent, alternating in an inchoate way between a paternalism that looked down and a resentment that looked up; these oscillations were conditioned by a personal experience of class instability that he could neither discuss outright nor stop representing.”
34. According to Dickens’s number plans (No. 6), the following is the whittled list of possible names: Amos Deadstone, Amos Headstone, Bradley Deadstone, and then finally (underlined) Bradley Headstone (Stone 1987, 345). For an alternate interpretation of Headstone’s name, see David 1981, 81.
35. For the historical and emblematic quality of the nose in the drama of defacement, see Groebner 2009, 76.
36. November 11, 1865.
37. J. Hillis Miller 1958, 284. In the same year, K. J. Fielding (1958, 185) suggests that the novel “can be well enjoyed as a loose collection of pieces that might have appeared in the pages of a magazine.”
38. This quotation comes from an email forum of the Geezer Gazette, an informal but nonetheless intellectually rigorous outlet for conversations about life and literature started by the late Gerhard Joseph, James Kincaid, and George Levine. March 9, 2021.
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