“[E]xpressly Meant to Promote the Formation of the Domestic Virtues”: Domestic Interiors and Household Furnishings in Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

Building on recent scholarship about the cultural significance of material life in the nineteenth century, this article attends to Charles Dickens’s representation of domestic interiors and household furnishings in Our Mutual Friend, and reflects on the agency of material objects in shaping Victorians’ moral life. A close examination of the variations in different characters’ furnishings and their morally destructive or constructive consequences reveals that, while domestic furnishings are more often used as ways for boasting vanity or schemes for entrapping trust, they influence people’s moral life by inducing different performances of domesticity. It argues that the way of possessing things actually constitutes part of the Victorian social discipline, which, by encouraging proper ways of possessing and using domestic things, domesticates men and women to be household heads and housewives complying with bourgeois home values.

KEYWORDS: :

• domestic interior
• household furnishing
• Victorian
• Our Mutual Friend
• Charles Dickens

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 According to Ariel Beaujot, “[Victorian] middle-class households lived on incomes ranging from £100 to £1,000 a year” (2012: 4).

2 After they move to the new mansion, the most often used seat for Mrs. Boffin is “a large ottoman in the centre of the room” (487), a very fashionable seat in the Victorian era that allows for “far more relaxed postures” (Gloag 2023 [1964]: 216) than the easy chair and the settle.

Additional information

Funding

Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities 2022WKZDJC006.

Notes on contributors

Houliang Chen

Houliang Chen (corresponding author) is Professor of English in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His research tackles race, gender, and home culture in British literature of the long nineteenth century, as well as African American literature. His publications have appeared or will appear in peer-reviewed journals such as Textual Practice, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Dickens Quarterly, The Dickensian, Religion & Literature, and Textile: Cloth and Culture. He has also published widely in most leading journals in Chinese, such as Literary Review (〈〈文学评论〉〉), Foreign Literature Review (〈〈外国文学评论〉〉), Comparative Literature in China (〈〈中国比较文学〉〉), and Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art (〈〈文艺理论研究〉〉). [email protected]

Danni Wu

Danni Wu is a lecturer and doctoral student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research area covers home culture in nineteenth-century British and American literature.