National Dustmen

Abstract

This chapter asks how Our Mutual Friend recycles a key metaphor from Hard Times, where Members of Parliament were “national dustmen” who seemed to “owe no duty to an abstraction called a People.” It does so by following the coal dust across Dickens’s writings. In particular, it looks at Dickens’s response to the blue books about coal mines, along with the employment of a literary man, Richard Horne, as a blue book commissioner and an industrial correspondent for Dickens’s Household Words. It examines the intertextual relationship of Dickens’s novel with Horne’s articles, including “Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed,” “The Black Diamonds of England,” and “A Coal Miner’s Evidence.” Reading Our Mutual Friend as “industrial fiction,” the chapter emphasizes Dickens’s attempt to redeem the decomposing forms of national literature, in the lead-up to the Representation of the People Act of 1867.