In Bleak House (1852–1853) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Charles Dickens draws analogies between human beings and bees, which function as an important means to address social and moral problems of Victorian society. This article shows how references to bees expose the hedonistic version of psychological egoism represented by Skimpole’s drone philosophy in Bleak House and how Dickens attacks the evils of insatiable greed underlying the ideology of the middle-class “economic man” implied by the worker-bee analogy in Our Mutual Friend. I argue that the Mandevillian tension between private interests and public benefits underlies Dickens’s allegorical representation of bees.
September 2024: Houliang Chen is a Professor of English in the School of Foreign Languages at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His research primarily revolves around Victorian literature and culture, with a special focus on the works of Charles Dickens. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals including Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Dickens Quarterly, The Dickensian, Textual Practice, and English Studies. He has also published widely in most of the leading journals in Chinese.
Although critics have seen Dickens as having emphasized the individual and domestic life at the expense of politics in A Tale of Two Cities, the novel offers reasons for thinking that Dickens was using it as an occasion for reevaluating our understanding of moral agency in modernity. In emphasizing resemblances that seem to blur the boundaries between individuals, Dickens calls attention to the ways in which we are not morally autonomous, in which our abilities to act are conditioned by our sometimes being taken for others. While that predicament might seem lamentable, Dickens concludes the novel by presenting Sydney Carton as a character who recognizes it well enough to see it as a riddle, and a riddle to be solved.
Frances Ferguson is the author of Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (1977), Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (1993), and Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (2004). She has also written essays on eighteenth and nineteenth century topics and on literary theory. She has taught at the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Chicago and is currently Mary Elizabeth Garrett Professor in Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.
The essay studies the scene of recognition in four novels by Dickens -- Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and A Tale of Two Cities. It argues that Dickens’s use of the topos of recognition is linked to a specific view of social reality centered on the belief that the legitimacy of the social order and the place of individuals within it are predicated on continuity. The variations that the four novels offer on this topos should be understood as the means by which Dickens attempts to work out a persuasive way of promoting and protecting this view of social reality in spite of the contradictions and impasses it entails.
June 2005: Michal Peled Ginsburg is a Professor of French and Comparative Literatures at Northwestern University (USA). She is the author of Flaubert Writing: A Study in NarrativeStragegies and of Economies of Change: Form and Transformation in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, both published by Stanford University Press. She is also the co-author, with Moshe Ron, of Shattered Vessels: Memory, Identity, and Creation in the Work of David Shahar (SUNY Press and Ha-Kibbutz Hameuchad)and the editor of Approaches to Teaching Balzac’s Père Goriot (MLA). Her most recent essays are ”The Prose of the World” (in Il Romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti [Einaudi, 2003, IV: 85-110], co-authored with Lorri Nandrea) and ”House and Home in Dombey and Son” (forthcoming, Dickens Studies Annual).
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