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This paper argues that in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens provides an alternative to the dominant aesthetic paradigm of his time, organicism. While organic form implies unity in the many, dust in this novel offers an aesthetic of similitude in which the whole is nothing but the part replicated over and over. Through the use of recurrences and doubling, the novel comes to embody this aesthetic. Social formations in the novel similarly challenge organic form, as familial roles are empty shells that characters only temporarily inhabit. When Dickens departs from organic ideals of differentiation and progress, he challenges the liberal principle of individuation.
January 2016: Ayşe Çelikkol is Assistant Professor of English at Bilkent University, Turkey, and author of Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her essays have appeared in American Literature, ELH, and Victorian Poetry, and she has most recently contributed to the Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture. She is currently at work on a book project on Victorian unbelief.
