Our Mutable Inheritance: Testing Victorian Philology in Our Mutual Friend

Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) is populated by characters who labor to recover a surplus of corpses and more from the mud and dust of London, everything from messages in Dutch bottles to Frenchmen’s bones, objects revisable and articulable. Likened to words, these dynamic objects render definition open to interpretation. In this sense, searching the origins and lifetimes of these objects represents a kind of physical etymology, a metaphorization of the diverse philological work undertaken in the mid-nineteenth century. By the time of Our Mutual Friend’s publication, discourses of philology and language origins had found their flashpoint in Friedrich Max Müller’s lectures at the Royal Institution, but Müller’s popular and controversial contributions to what he called the “science of language” were an extension of ongoing debates that already would have been familiar both to Dickens and regular readers of periodicals from the Westminster Review to Dickens’s own All the Year Round. These philological discussions often assumed the idioms of geology and evolutionary anthropology, as in the work of Müller and the archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench. In the 1850s, Trench even adopted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase “fossil poetry,” arguing that words were like “the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved,”¹ and that a conservation of that history was necessary to secure pure linguistic meaning. His writing veers into jingoism,² exemplifying how the notion of language as an inheritance was integral to formations of racial and national identity. At times confronting the metaphors of the philologists, and at times working the contours of its own linguistic play, Dickens’s great novel of capital and its apportionment dramatizes and interrogates the formation of historically sedimented language communities with characters who redefine themselves and their surroundings with utterances sometimes contingent, sometimes deliberate. The individuals most engaged in reinvention and language change, with Jenny Wren at the fore, are the most alienated, those that conservative politics would reject, but who nevertheless lay claim to their linguistic inheritance in the installments of Our Mutual Friend sold alongside the philological essays and reviews of Dickens’s own separate magazine.

This essay argues that Dickens, uniquely positioned to engage with philological discourse as influential author and editor, emulated and revised notions of language change not in terms of origins, progress, evolution or development, but as a current social and political matter, a question of what we do with language every day. Critics such as Isobel Armstrong and Linda Dowling have established our understanding of the nineteenth-century philologists: how they labored on a continuum dating at least to Locke, and how philology itself transformed from etymological and philosophically speculative to a soft science invested (at least nominally) in empirical methodology.³ This critical work has been carried forward, in literary and cultural studies, through the efforts of Christine Ferguson, Will Abberley, Megan Perigoe Stitt and Felicia Bonaparte.⁴ Ferguson and Abberley in particular have focused on how linguistic mutability rendered social identity open to revision, and how competing philosophies of language might also have destabilized ideas of nation and race, particularly in genre and colonialist fiction. I depart from their work by focusing on Dickens rather than poets, genre fiction writers, or thinkers and translators like George Eliot, and I argue that Dickens was deeply invested in the notion that language can be changed for the better by speakers across class, and that the artist can and must contribute to reimagining political possibility on a fundamental level like that of language. While Eliot in Middlemarch (1871–72) captures a gradualist, diachronic view of historical and linguistic change, and while Thomas Hardy depicts dialect speakers doomed in the face of standardization,⁵ Dickens’s characters maneuver in a much more boisterous present.⁶ For the nomothete Jenny Wren, as well as tender Twemlow and the laconic Jewish outsider Mr. Riah, language, hewn from a clinging past, can be redesigned for the increasingly democratic politics of the mid-nineteenth century. Dickens writes this presentist production not...