Weapon Weilding Women: The Feminine Implement or Ornament in Dickens novels (preliminary notes)

Possession and Dispossession
Carlyle argues that Society is Founded on Cloth (Sartor Resartus); Dickens seems to indicated that society is founded on food.

Murray Roston, for example, in Victorian Contexts (1996), where he argues more generally that the personification of the inanimate in Dickens's fiction can be linked to the inception of a commodity culture dependent upon the taste of the consumer: Dickens employs the possessions, homes and habiliments of his characters 'as animated external emblems of their inner being', 'seeing within the proprietary selection of goods a method of differentiating character'.

Murray Roston, Victorian Contexts: Literature and the Visual Arts (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 83, 77.


“In her study of fashion and modernity, Adorned in Dreams, citing the passage from Boz, Elizabeth Wilson asks why 'clothes without a wearer, whether on a second-hand stall, in a glass case, or merely a lover's garments strewn on the floor, can affect us unpleasantly, as if a snake had shed its skin'.13 She argues that part of the answer to this 'strangeness of dress' is that the body is a cultural organism with limits that are equivocally defined and it cannot be separated from the dress which inscribes it, producing it as a social body: thus 'Clothing marks an [already] unclear boundary ambiguously, and unclear boundaries disturb us'.14”
Waters, Catherine. “'Fashion in undress': Clothing and Commodity Culture in Household Words”. Journal of Victorian Culture 12.1 (2007) 26-41



movement of imperial goods, marvelling at the linkage of incongruous sites and the vast distances commodities can travel

London as “necropolis” and “heterotopia”.
“The second-hand clothing shop is a form of heterotopia – one of those 'other', phastasmagoric spaces described by Foucault that reverse or contest social ordering.27”
Michel Foucault, 'Different Spaces', in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984 (London: Penguin, 1998), qtd in Waters


Such accounts of the contingency of incongruous juxtapositions effected in the city displace the flâneur's delight in the suggestive contrast of urban types onto the clothing they once wore. (Waters)
Food seems to agree with the character of the eater – men eat sausages, invalids eat gruel…

The revelation of personality and self fashioning via food: Wemmick’s efficient sausage, Pip’s mouthed knife.



http://research.calacademy.org/research/anthropology/kitchen/
“In Victorian England, a household's inventory of silver serving pieces clearly indicated one's wealth and status. Silver was the main source of revenue for England's royalty for centuries, and as early as the 1300s, a standardized system for hallmarking silverwork had developed in England, consisting of five hallmarks. The first hallmark was the maker's mark, followed by the county and city marks, the date letter in an oval, and finally, the sovereign's head. The most valuable pieces were called Sterling signifying that their content was at least 925 parts fine silver per 1000. Three wonderful examples of Sterling silver pieces are the wine tasting cups (or quaichs) shown below.

The Industrial Revolution resulted in new metal working techniques which ultimately made silverwork less costly and thus more readily available to working class people. Silversmiths could also experiment with a variety of imaginative designs, thus starting a mid-Victorian passion for collecting all kinds of silver plate objects that were used in table settings.

Two new alloying techniques that were developed in England were Sheffield Plate and Plated Silver. Although it is not certain that the firm of Elkington and Company actually discovered these processes, clearly this firm first saw the practical possibilities for applying the techniques for mass production. Sheffield Plate is the name applied to wares created by fusing together thin sheets of silver and copper.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine,–
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is.
(Browning, AL, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html#1)

These opening lines of Aurora Leigh bring to mind the Victorian necrophilia that we have been discussing in connexion with Tennyson and Robert Browning. In Memoriam and The Ring and the Book are both sort of mourning artifacts, or transitional objects, to use Melanie Klein’s terminology…what seems macabre about this but is probably healthy, is, as Barrett Browning points out, that the object continues to be a source of pleasure (pleasure which can be sort of thanatic or masochistic) even after the cessation of love.

On Reading Erica Jong's Fear of Flying

A brief foray into the 18th or the 20th century is enough to send me scuttling back into the nineteenth. 19th century England was a brief haven of repression in an otherwise sordid history. Sometimes I talk about anger, or love, but what I really want to claim is innocence.