Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words: The Social Life of Goods (review)

Inhabitants of mid-Victorian Britain faced a burgeoning commodity culture that made a cornucopia of goods available and extended the capitalist mode of production deep into the fabric of social experience. Many enjoyed the plenitude of mass production, yet its novelty, together with the appeal and anxieties it aroused, needed to be made sense of. Catherine Waters uses Household Words to demonstrate the multiple ways that the period responded to, and was fascinated by, the social life of goods. The journal functioned as something of a handbook for its predominantly middle-class readership in that it filled the "new gaps in knowledge created by industrialization" (97). The eight chapters of Waters's book are as wide ranging as the commodity culture it attempts to encompass, moving from advertising to second-hand clothes, death and commemoration, the city-as-spectacle, and the manufacture of international goods.

Household Words was, of course, part of the commodity culture it described, and the book is at its most insightful when it is sensitive to this interrelationship. Thus there is a revealing analysis of the "branding" of Household Words, whereby acolytes such as George Augustus Sala were encouraged to reproduce a slick, fanciful style, that Elizabeth Gaskell called "Dickensy," which resembled the commercial idiom that the journal so often appraised. When analyzing an article by Sala that pokes fun at the linguistic excess of "House To Let" advertisements, Waters demonstrates the stylistic affinity between Sala's "verbal pyrotechnics" and "the practices of contemporary advertisement that he goes on to critique" (30).

The book's strongest aspect is its identification of the types of discursive forms, narrative and stylistic, developed in Household Words to describe the social life of goods. The roots of this approach derive, in part, from the fact that, while this is a study of a periodical as an entity, the figure of Charles Dickens appears frequently. As Waters reminds us, a substantial body of criticism has explored Dickens's unique interest in subject-object relations and the way everyday things come to life in his work, and her study identifies this as a particular modus operandi of Household Words.

Chapters 5 and 6 are probably the most effective in maintaining the double focus of the book, with analyses that simultaneously illuminate Household Words and commodity culture. Chapter 5 traces the prevalence of the "process article," a genre that described the life-story of a good in its transformation from raw material to finished product. In a fashion akin to John Ruskin's "On the Nature of Gothic" (1854), such articles restored an "awareness of the labour involved in its production" (17). Harriet Martineau, for example, wrote a series of industrial tourist tales describing visits to Birmingham factories for carpet-weaving, glass-blowing, and button-making. George Dodd and Charles Knight were similarly recruited for articles on everyday artefacts such as needles and steel pens. Objects were given biographies as if they were human subjects: commodities were endowed with character and personality. Household Words was not only interested in making domestic goods knowable though; chapter 6 demonstrates its interest in the bewildering luxury of foreign goods festooning the shelves of shops and bazaars. Articles on more far-flung commodities—coffee, spices, pearls, rice—traced the global routes by which they arrived and served to "bridge the widening international gaps between producer and consumer" (120).

In focusing on Household Words, published between 1850 and 1859, the book has a manageable frame to approach a key period in the expansion of commodity culture. Yet the very pervasiveness Waters identifies creates a structural problem. Commodity culture is everywhere, to the extent that it loses its force as a mode of analysis. This capaciousness is accentuated by the book's relatively loose conceptualization of commodity culture, which might have been mitigated by Waters referencing more of the recent historical work on luxury goods and the circulation of commodities pre-1850...