SOURCE: “Invigilating Our Mutual Friend: Gender and the Legitimation of Professional Authority,” in Novel, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter, 1995, pp. 154-72.

[In the following essay, Shuman posits that Our Mutual Friend demystifies the Victorian domestic sphere at the same time it legitimates the professionalism of the intellectual worker.]

Examining the contradictions of nineteenth-century professional authorship and the gendered separation of public and private in David Copperfield, Mary Poovey argues that “stabilizing and mobilizing a particular image of woman, the domestic sphere, and woman's work were critical” to the fixing of “the English writer's social role” and “the legitimation and depoliticization of capitalist market and class relations” (89). Since Poovey, it has become a truism to assert that professional Victorian intellectuals rely on the extraeconomic authority granted the domestic woman by the doctrine of separate spheres in order to resolve the contradictions of their place in capitalist relations of production: they may then depict themselves as policing the line between the public and private spheres rather than challenging it.¹ At the end of David Copperfield, David and Agnes preside together over a Copperfield household full of children named for the novel's characters. In the following pages, I will argue that in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), however, the relationship between professional and domestic authority is not nearly so collaborative.

Instead, the novel provides a model of professional expertise, as valuable yet invaluable as domestic power, yet freed from its fragility. If we trace the plots that lead to the emergence of the novel's two normative intellectual workers—John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn—we find that the novel's demystification of domestic ideology plays a key role in mystifying and legitimating the professional's place in the Victorian economic system. It does so by replacing domesticity's doctrine of separate spheres with a new version of that doctrine, one that makes a surprisingly unDickensian use of the growing Victorian state and its institutions. Our Mutual Friend appropriates the paradigmatic form of interaction between the state and the intellectual worker—the examination—as the paradigmatic form of interaction between its characters. Invigilating at the examinations of Our Mutual Friend, scrutinizing its many test takers (and givers), we find gender reemerging as crucial, not in the Victorian home, but in the strategies of the Victorian schoolroom.

I.

One of the novel's first examinations takes place when Noddy Boffin interviews Silas Wegg for the job of reader early in Our Mutual Friend. Part of the comedy of their interchange arises from Boffin's uncertainty about what sort of object the objectified knowledge of the professional intellectual laborer is and what form of exchange can procure it:

Now, it's too late for me to begin shovelling and sifting at alphabeds and grammar-books. … But I want some reading—some fine bold reading, some splendid book in a gorging Lord-Mayor's-Show of wollumes” (probably meaning gorgeous, but misled by association of ideas); “as'll reach right down your pint of view, and take time to go by you. How can I get that reading, Wegg? By … paying a man truly qualified to do it, so much an hour (say twopence) to come and do it.

(94)

Boffin begins by depicting learning to read as a version of his own former job (“shovelling and sifting”) and ends by assuming that, like that job, reading itself fits neatly into a conventional capitalist/worker relationship. The “profit” he expects from this relationship, however, cannot be characterized as the capitalist's surplus value. Part of a realm of luxury and leisure, intellectual labor may not be labor at all. Sandwiched between his market-based analogy is an association of the act of reading with consumption rather than production, reminding us of the problematic distinction, for intellectual laborer, between employer and customer. Boffin's “Lord Mayor's Show” hints, however, not so much at the power of a Victorian consumer as at the anachronistic glamour of Renaissance display, implying that intellectual attainments might not be something that nineteenth-century money can buy. At the same time, the narrator's knowingly literate parenthetical remark in the midst of Boffin's comic ignorance suggests that, while Wegg is hardly the “man truly qualified,” such qualifications do exist. An authentic professional authority, inaccessible to characters like Boffin (at this stage of the novel, anyway) and Wegg, hovers over these confusions. However complex the valuing of intellectual labor may prove, it has value nonetheless.

The valuing of intellectual work in the context of mid-nineteenth-century capitalism was a crucial task for the emerging British professional at the time of the writing of Our Mutual Friend.² Magali Sarfatti Larson shows that, while “the constitution of professional markets which began in the nineteenth century inaugurated a new form of structured inequality … different … from the model of social inequality based on property and identified with capitalist entrepreneurship,” the commodification of expertise was still crucial to professionalization (xiv, 40). Nineteenth-century authorship, for example, was “conceptualized simultaneously as superior to the capitalist economy and as hopelessly embroiled within it” (Poovey 106). This contradiction is a necessary one for intellectual laborers, who are particularly liable to damage by being placed either in or outside the capitalist marketplace. While bargain and sale threaten to devalue their intangible products, placement beyond the market threatens to deny them access to consumers of these products.³

For the Victorians, the distinction between the economic and the extraeconomic is inevitably tied to the gendered division of labor. Our Mutual Friend begins to loosen this link as Boffin and Wegg complete their agreement, emphasizing a division between the public, masculine genre of history (in the suitably impressive form of Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) and the intimate, feminine genre of “poetry” (in the less-canonical form of Wegg's stock of penny ballads, most of which feature domestic settings):

“Was you thinking at all of poetry?” Mr Wegg inquired, musing. …

“To tell you the truth Wegg,” said Boffin, “I wasn't thinking of poetry, except in so fur as this:—If you was to happen now and then to feel yourself in the mind to tip me and Mrs Boffin one of your ballads, why then we should drop into poetry.”

“I follow you, sir,” said Wegg. “But not being a regular musical professional, I should be loath to engage myself for that; and therefore when I dropped into poetry, I should ask to be considered so fur, in the light of a friend.”

(95)

In other words, Wegg and Boffin classify intellectual work as both production and consumption, capitalist and precapitalist, valuable and invaluable, by invoking the doctrine of separate spheres: one masculine, public, market-dominated (the historical reading Wegg does for Boffin at an hourly wage), one feminine, domestic, devoted to leisure (Wegg “dropping into poetry” for “me and Mrs Boffin,” not as an employee, but as a friend). Together, these separate spheres make a whole which fixes the relation between the money value produced in the marketplace and the moral values produced at home. The implication is that intellectual labor, rather than challenging this relation, reproduces it within itself.

But the problems posed by intellectual labor's relation to capitalist market relations cannot here be solved by recourse, “in the last instance,” to Ruskinian domesticity. Wegg, after all, is no gentlemanly protagonist whose personal as well as professional identity form the problematic center of the novel, but a humorous grotesque whose legitimating use of the domestic sphere is continually exposed as incompetence and greed. Although the “poetry” Wegg frequently drops into usually depicts domestic scenes of a sentimentally imagined past, he uses it, with often ludicrous results, to express his own thoroughly prosaic, market-dominated concerns. Whereas the Victorian writer's feminized authority places him above the dangers of the marketplace, Wegg's parody of such authority, as Frances Armstrong notes, makes even the marketplace look good (140-41).

When he arrives at Boffin's Bower, Wegg provides a textbook example of professional authority's simultaneous reliance on and exclusion of the private sphere when he corrects his employer's mistitling of The Decline and Fall:

“I think you said Rooshan Empire, sir?”

“It is Rooshan; ain't it, Wegg?”

“No, sir. Roman. Roman.”

“What's the difference, Wegg?”

“The difference, sir?” Mr Wegg was faltering and in danger of breaking down, when a bright thought flashed upon him. “The difference, sir? There you place me in a difficulty, Mr Boffin. Suffice it to observe, that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs Boffin does not honour us with her company. In Mrs Boffin's presence, sir, we had better drop it.”

(103)

To save his status as “literary man,” Wegg must mark out history as an area from which proper ladies must be excluded. At the same time, he transforms a joke about Britain's imperial competitor⁴ into a lesson in the proper way of conducting middle-class gender relations. Boffin, newly risen from the working class, takes the lesson to heart, feeling that “he had committed himself in a very painful manner” (103). But as Wegg begins to read, the Boffins' interpretations of the public and political activities of the Roman Empire challenge Wegg's reliance on the complementarity of public and private by taking unintentional advantage of his incompetence: “Then, Mr Wegg … entered on his task … stumbling at Polybius (pronounced Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr Boffin to be a Roman virgin, and by Mrs Boffin to be responsible for that necessity of dropping it) …” (103). The combined work of Wegg, Mr Boffin, and Mrs Boffin transforms the ancient historian (one of Gibbon's sources for the Decline and Fall) and progenitor of cultural capital into a woman whose offspring we can only imagine as literal, domestic, and illegitimate. In the figure of Silas Wegg, we see the androgynous intellectual's “manly delicacy” (103) subverting the very task it sets out to accomplish.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the doctrine of separate spheres, the last resort of intellectual pretenders like Silas Wegg, receives a sustained attack in Our Mutual Friend. When Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood set up house together, Eugene has one room “very completely and neatly fitted as a kitchen,” joking that its “moral influence … in forming the domestic virtues, may have an immense influence upon me” (337). Despite the disapproval we are expected to feel towards Eugene at this stage, this literalizing parody of the benefits of domestic influence would seem to be echoed by the novel itself. The novel's well-known condemnation of capitalist exchange is not balanced by a celebration of the home as an enclave shielded from market forces; instead, the domestic woman's special influence is depicted as illusory or futile. Family happiness and the maintenance of separate spheres seem unrelated: the novel makes no meaningful division between couples who work together in either sphere and those whose work is divided between them.⁵ Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam do provide their eventual husbands with certification as the novel's normative voices—but not by embodying domestic power. In fact, the counterfeit secretary John Rokesmith/Harmon and the reluctant barrister Eugene Wrayburn—the men who will turn out to be “truly qualified” at novel's end—gain their qualifications through the demystification of domestic power and its replacement by pedagogic authority.⁶

There is scarcely a Dickens novel without a portrait of some kind of school, but not even in Hard Times is a preoccupation with the methods and effects of pedagogy so marked as in Our Mutual Friend. Narrative itself appears structured by pedagogy when we compare the static presentation and thwarted projects of the “Social Chorus” characters to the novel's two main plots: the River plot features a struggle over who will teach Lizzie and the Dust Heap plot Bella's testing in disinterestedness and loyalty. When Mortimer questions Eugene about his intentions towards Lizzie after Bradley and Charley visit their chambers, Eugene complains that “one would think the schoolmaster had left behind him a catechizing infection” (348). This “infection” pervades Our Mutual Friend. The novel's well-known obsession with reading and writing is filtered through a continual barrage of quizzes and qualifying examinations, often comic (Wegg's job interview, Bella's quizzing of her infantilized “schoolboy” father, Miss Peecher's self-interested questioning of her favorite pupil, Mary Anne), but also chilling (Rogue Riderhood's “inspection” of Bradley's class, Gaffer's scholarly display of his “Body Found” posters), thought-provoking (Jenny's questioning of Lizzie about her feelings for Eugene, John's “cross-examin[ation]” during his first proposal to Bella [433]), and melodramatic (the final test of Bella's loyalty during the near-arrest of her husband, Jenny's discovery of Eugene's sickbed desire to marry Lizzie). If, as J. Hillis Miller claims, “the true mode of existence in Our Mutual Friend is intersubjectivity” (288), the true mode of intersubjectivity in the novel is the examination.

Twentieth-century readers tend to be disappointed by the transformation of the independent Bella into “the doll in the doll's house” at Blackheath (746), doing scholarly research into cookery books and living in true wifely ignorance of her husband's City job. But this process is also one in which middle-class domesticity itself is first parodied, then shown to be artificially constructed, and finally rendered irrelevant. When Mr Inspector arrives at the cottage to arrest Bella's husband, he plays on the distinction between “matters of business” and those “of a strictly domestic character” in order to avoid doing so in front of her:

[L]adies are apt to take alarm at matters of business—being of that fragile sex that they're not accustomed to them when not of a strictly domestic character—and I do generally make it a rule to propose retirement from the presence of ladies, before entering upon business topics.

(830-31)

The inspector's intervention, of course, will result in no rough masculine business from which Bella must be shielded. Rather, it will reveal that Bella's contented isolation at Blackheath is not the novel's happy ending, but merely a test of her loyalty and lack of avarice, the passing of which will lead her out of that isolation. In fact, the novel's actual happy ending demands the dissolution of the division between matters of “business” and of “a strictly domestic character.” Once Bella is installed in her West End mansion, she will be too rich to need to read cookbooks, and her husband's City job will be exposed as a mere fiction. Bella accomplishes her husband's triumph not through her adaptation of domesticity, but through the placing of that domesticity in a pedagogical framework, not by becoming a good bourgeois wife, but by passing a test as a good bourgeois wife.

The rewriting of domesticity as examination entails the rewriting of the supervisory authority of the domestic woman (see N. Armstrong) as that of the masculine invigilator (an authority Wegg seeks—but never attains—in his blackmailing surveillance of Boffin). From the early days of the deception, Bella is always accompanied by John's “semi-omniscient” surveillance (Jaffe, Vanishing 14-15). When she and John leave Betty Higdon's funeral, narrator, reader, and even the train they take are asked to share in John's eroticized view of her:

O boofer lady, fascinating boofer lady! If I were but legally executor of Johnny's will [where he leaves “a kiss for the boofer lady”]! If I had but the right to pay your legacy and to take your receipt!—Something to this purpose surely mingled with the blast of the train as it cleared the stations, all knowingly shutting up their green eyes and opening their red ones when they prepared to let the boofer lady pass.

(594)

In other words, although we do not “see” him, as the ruse progresses, John's perspective melts into that of a suddenly arch and personified narrator, always present to supervise and judge Bella's progress in her scholarly attempts at domesticity:

[A]bove all such severe study! For Mrs J.R., who had never been wont to do too much at home as Miss B.W., was under the constant necessity of referring for advice and support to a sage volume entitled The Complete British Family Housewife, which she would sit consulting, with her elbows on the table and her temples on her hands. …

(749)

There need be no division between professional life and domestic life; it is replaced by the division between teacher and student.

When we first meet that most domestically angelic of heroines, Lizzie Hexam, she plans a future with her father, “keeping him as straight as I can, watching for more influence than I have” (73). But as she seems to suspect, Lizzie exudes womanly influence to singularly little effect. Not only does she fail to reform Gaffer, but the brother she raises with such perfect womanly self-sacrifice grows up selfish and cruel. Her would-be seducer, Eugene, changes his ways not because of her virtuous pleading but because of Bradley's more masculine chastisement. When Lizzie does wield domestic power effectively, she does so against her own will, and destructively. Bradley claims that Lizzie “could draw me to any good,” but this seems an afterthought to his main point, which is that “[Y]ou could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me” (455). When he discovers her hiding place, Eugene makes use of the concept of womanly influence to suggest that Lizzie's power be blamed for her own potential ruin as well: “I don't complain that you design to keep me here. But you do it, you do it” (759).

Eugene's pursuit of Lizzie is nevertheless synonymous, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick shows, with his transformation from aristocratic to professional gentleman. It is not, however, as an angelic influence that Lizzie makes Eugene into a good lawyer, but as the contested site of pedagogic action. Coaxing her to accept his gift of lessons, he claims that

“Your false pride does wrong to yourself and does wrong to your dead father.”

“How to my father, Mr Wrayburn?” she asked, with an anxious face.

“How to your father? Can you ask! By perpetuating the consequences of his ignorant and blind obstinacy. By resolving not to set right the wrong he did you. By determining that the deprivation to which he condemned you, and which he forced upon you, shall always rest upon his head.”

It chanced to be a subtle string to sound, in her who had so spoken to her brother within the hour. It sounded far more forcibly, because of the change in the speaker for the moment; the passing appearance of earnestness, complete conviction, injured resentment of suspicion, generous and unselfish interest.

(286)

His claim to be the “idlest and least of lawyers” (287) is hardly convincing: expert at arguing a shaky case, and at convincing the jury of his belief in his client's innocence, Eugene demonstrates in his pursuit of Lizzie-as-pupil the makings of an excellent barrister.

The novel's replacement of the domestic angel with the schoolgirl raises two questions. First, why school? Why does the novel turn from the domestic haven to the figurative classroom as a site for the legitimation of professional authority? Second, why girl? How can the masculine intellectual laborer make use of a femininity robbed of domestic authority? In Part II, I will suggest that the school functions as the paradigmatic state-run institution in a novel where institutions are depicted in a strangely unDickensian manner. The novel becomes a vast examination room, denigrating masculine modes of transmitting knowledge and granting women a special capability for blocking such transmissions. Femininity can then serve masculine professional authority by producing and containing a reified knowledge immune from the risks of exchange.

II.

Despite the failure of domesticity in the novel, privileged anticapitalist enclaves do exist in Our Mutual Friend. If the novel's homes fail to provide an effective setting for domestic power, professional power is cozily at home in the novel's state institutions. The authority of such figures as the doctors in the Children's Hospital, the police inspector, and the schoolmistresslike Abbey Potterson goes unchallenged within their walls. When the inspector orders “You must come up. I mean to have you,” even Gaffer's hidden corpse responds, becoming untangled from the rope it is caught in (220-21). An “inveterate visitor of institutions” (Collins 3), Dickens was also a famously inveterate critic of schools, prisons, courts, workhouses, and government offices in his fiction. In Our Mutual Friend, however, while Betty Higdon's story condemns the Victorian workhouse, it is hinted that keeping little Johnny in her charming cottage leads to his death. At the Children's Hospital where he goes to die, the doctor comments, “This should have been days ago. Too late!” (383). Once arrived at the hospital, however, the former rather sulky infant becomes “one of a little family, all in little quiet beds,” guarded by “a coloured picture … representing as it were another Johnny seated on the knee of some Angel surely who loved little children” (384). Throughout the novel, institutions are havens of peace, order, nourishment, and tenderness (F. Armstrong 148). The violence and disorder of the riverside neighborhood are excluded when Mortimer and Eugene go to view Gaffer Hexam's find at “the wicket-gate and bright light of a Police Station; where they found the Night-Inspector, with a pen and ink, and ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office, as studiously as if he were in a monastery on top of a mountain …” (66). Positive depictions of private businesses in the novel depend on their mimicking, not families, but public institutions: Miss Abbey Potterson, landlady of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters (one of Dickens's most inviting pubs), has “more of the air of a schoolmistress than mistress of” her pub, and Riderhood approaches her “as if he were one of her pupils in disgrace” (107).

Our Mutual Friend is sometimes called Dickens's “modernist” novel, questioning the Victorian certainties of his earlier works. Jonathan Arac argues that the lack of a typical Dickensian overview in the novel is related to contemporary advances in centralization and institutionalization (181-82). Certainly, in resolving the contradictions of nineteenth-century intellectual labor, the novel gives the state-run institution a new role. In fact, Our Mutual Friend replaces the division between the economic and the domestic with a new “public/private” split: that between a “private” sphere of personal and economic relations and a “public” sphere composed of the state and its institutions.⁷ The new “public” institutions in the novel provide the same cozy shelter from the painful and disorderly “private” world of economic and domestic relations that the old “private” domesticity provided from the old “public” marketplace.

The familial havens provided by institutions were seen by Victorians as a way of remaking working-class culture in bourgeois culture's image. Schools, for example, should replace family for working-class children, who “should not take their parents for their example” (Digby and Searby 127). The professional—doctor, teacher, social-worker—was to play the same role for the working class as the domestic woman plays for the middle class, an angel in this state-rum “house.” Given the view of domesticity provided in Our Mutual Friend, however, this figuring of institutionalized professional power suggests that it might share the isolation and fragility of domestic angels.

Arac argues that institutionalization influenced Our Mutual Friend by taking the novelist's job: “What had once been the novelist's prophetic task [overview] is now safely in the hands of the constituted authorities … the novelist steps away from complicity with the establishment by abandoning the position of overview” (187). By 1865, centralized institutions provided the glue of Victorian society, so the novelist could abandon centralizing omniscience for “the inner view” (Arac 187). But the actual institutions depicted in Our Mutual Friend represent its least-connected entities. Enclaves of comfort and order, they are nevertheless threatened enclaves, fragile, tiny, and, like Lizzie's womanly influence, ultimately ineffectual. Despite the power of professional expertise within their borders, it cannot transcend them. Little Johnny can be comforted by the cleanliness and company at the hospital, but he dies nonetheless. The inspector proceeds with his monklike task only by ignoring the “howling fury of a drunken woman … banging herself against a cell-door in the back-yard at his elbow” (66), and he never does apprehend George Radfoot's murderer. Like the novel's other institutions, the rather sterile schools run by Bradley Headstone and Miss Peecher are placed by their opening description in the realm of fantasy, fairy tales, and childhood:

The schools were newly built, and there were so many like them all over the country, that one might have thought the whole were but one restless edifice with the locomotive gift of Aladdin's palace. They were in a neighbourhood which looked like a toy neighbourhood taken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly incoherent mind. …

(267-68)

This very placement, however, emphasizes the extent to which this realm is also one of dissociation and powerlessness, where the institution's very ubiquity suggests not plenitude, but a “restless” scarcity.

In Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron provide a valuable sketch of the actual mechanisms by which Althusser's School Ideological State Apparatus reproduces the subjects of capitalism,⁸ demonstrating how institutionalized education can dispense with the mystification that guards the inexplicit education provided by the family:

[T]he ES [Educational System] would lay itself open to the question of its right to set up a relation of pedagogic communication and to delimit what deserves to be inculcated—were it not that the very fact of institutionalization gives it the specific means of annihilating the possibility of this question.

(62)

Institutionalization allows the task of the ES—the reproduction of relations of production—to become explicit without becoming demystified. Because of the gradual, piecemeal process of its institutionalization in Britain, however, the disinterestedness of the Educational System could never be taken for granted in the nineteenth century. Although famously early in developing capitalist relations of production, Britain was notoriously late in developing a state school system.⁹ In the years leading up to the Education Act of 1870, a growing number of Victorians advocated compulsory, state-supported education for all, but this was bitterly opposed by powerful sectarian interests and equally powerful fears of excessive state interference. The compromise reached was a system of government grants for elementary schools run by church and other organizations. The result of this “uneven development” is that the school became the focus of conflicts over the relationship between capitalism and the state, before that relationship was finally taken for granted. Our Mutual Friend takes advantage of this moment of ambivalence, relying on figurative versions of the classroom examination to authenticate an intellectual authority that transcends market value, but also insisting on the incapacity of the actual school—“hopelessly embroiled” in a capitalist economy of “restless” exchange—to do so.

By the 1860s, the examination had become the primary mechanism for the occupational self-definition of intellectual laborers (Reader 71, 98). At the same time, it began to play a key role in structuring relations between working-class students, teachers, and the state. The Revised Code of 1862 established “the notorious principle of payment by results. In order to encourage high and regular attendance and keep a careful fiscal check … grants, instead of being of a more general nature, should be based on attendance plus examination” of each student in reading, writing, and arithmetic by state inspectors (Midwinter 37). Controversial from its inception, the Code fostered an emphasis on basic skills, rote learning, and memorization. Robert Lowe, the code's originator, defended his creation by making explicit the link between payment by results and high-capitalist economic principles: “Hitherto we have been living under a system of bounties and protection. Now we propose to have a little free trade” (qtd. in Midwinter 38). In this model, the infant public sphere of state-funded education is metaphorically privatized: the state wields the ultimate authority in the same way that the customer, in an open market, is always right. Schools were to compete for this customer by producing the best commodities, or students who could pass the Inspector's test. Because the school was granted a specific amount for each passing grade, schoolteachers' jobs depended on their students' answers. During the yearly inspection of the Tysoe village school in Warwickshire,

The master hovered round, calling children out as they were needed. The children could see him start with vexation as a good pupil stuck at a word in the reading-book he had been using all the year. … The master's anxiety was deep, for his earnings depended on the children's work. One year the atmosphere of anxiety so affected the lower standards that, one after another as they were brought to the Inspector, the boys howled and the girls whimpered.

(qtd. in Digby and Searby 9)

One mistress collapsed in front of her class under the strain of such an examination.

In Our Mutual Friend, free-trade education finds its most dramatic comeuppance in the career of the self-made schoolteacher turned homicidal maniac, Bradley Headstone. Bradley's “wholesale warehouse” of a brain is firmly associated with the market economy so savagely critiqued throughout the novel (David 57). The instructor's dependence on the answers of his students in the state examinations and the way in which the inspections undermined his authority by causing him to display his anxiety are taken one step further during Riderhood's blackmailing inspection, “in the way of school,” after the attack on Eugene:

“Master, might I, afore I go, ask a question of these here young lambs of yourn?”

“If it is in the way of school,” said Bradley, always sustaining his dark look at the other, and speaking in his suppressed voice, “you may.”

“Oh! It's in the way of school!” cried Riderhood. “I'll pound it, Master, to be in the way of school. Wot's the diwisions of water, my lambs? Wot sorts of water is there on the land?”

Shrill chorus: “Seas, rivers, lakes, and ponds.”

“Seas, rivers, lakes, and ponds,” said Riderhood. “They've got all the lot, Master! Blowed if I shouldn't have left out lakes, never having clapped eyes upon one, to my knowledge. Seas, rivers, lakes, and ponds. Wot is it, lambs, as they ketches in seas, rivers, lakes, and ponds?”

Shrill chorus (with some contempt for the ease of the question): “Fish!”

“Good a-gin!” said Riderhood. “But wot else is it, my lambs, as they sometimes ketches in rivers?”

Chorus at a loss. One shrill voice: “Weed!”

“Good agin!” cried Riderhood. “But it ain't weed neither. You'll never guess, my dears. Wot is it, besides fish, as they sometimes ketches in rivers? Well! I'll tell you. It's suits o' clothes.”

Bradley's face changed.

“Leastways, lambs,” said Riderhood, observing him out of the corner of his eyes, “that's wot I my own self sometimes ketches in rivers. For strike me blind, my lambs, if I didn't ketch in a river the wery bundle under my arm!”

The class looked at the master, as if appealing from the irregular entrapment of this mode of examination. The master looked at the examiner, as if he would have torn him to pieces.

(866-67)

Although payment-by-results inspections were conducted child by child, and never on such advanced subjects as “the diwisions of water,” this passage nevertheless bears a striking resemblance to the Tysoe school inspection and others like it. Riderhood's blackmailing threat fits with startling ease into the inspection scenario set up by the Revised Code.

Riderhood's examination translates knowledge into money even more directly than actual payment-by-results inspections, as he threatens to clear out Bradley's literal, as well as his scholastic, bank account:

“You can't get blood out of a stone, Riderhood.”

“I can get money out of a schoolmaster though.”

(871)

It would seem that the institution's fragility in Our Mutual Friend stems, paradoxically, from its not being institutional enough. To return to Bourdieu and Passeron's terms, when the “cultural arbitrary” inculcated by “pedagogic action” is insufficiently backed by the culture, it becomes merely—and all too visibly—arbitrary.¹⁰ Riderhood's exam raises the possibility that Lowe's “free trade” renders “pedagogic authority” a little too free. Because of its emphasis on authorized versions, the Revised Code would seem to be the perfect way to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate knowledge. Indeed, Riderhood establishes his right to question Bradley's students with his pedagogically-phrased question about “diwisions of water.” By the time his lesson becomes less conventional, it is too late. Although the class notes and objects to the unorthodoxy of the answer “suits o' clothes,” their only appeal is to the already-conquered Bradley. Despite its constant policing of the boundaries of knowledge, free-trade education lets them slip here with fatal ease: the classification of bodies of water slides into the discovery of the clue to an attempted murder, failing to mark the distinction between the things children should know and the things they should be shielded from. Riderhood can cause this slippage, replacing the “highly certificated” (265) Bradley and destroying the latter's authority over his students, merely by “pounding” his threat “to be in the way of school.”

Part of the horror in Riderhood's examination is that, while vanquishing Bradley, he also serves as his double—dramatizing (and demonizing) the class displacement Bradley himself represents. Like many Victorian advocates of increased state support for education, Dickens saw the education of the working class as a deterrent to crime (Collins 6). In Riderhood's inspection of Bradley's class, however, the ability of education to replace crime seems to be figured in a nightmare reversal: the ability of crime to replace education and of educational methods to represent the crime of blackmail. The use of market imagery to figure educational processes thus subjects education to the endless and arbitrary replacement of any commodity with any other. In fact, the novel draws many comparisons between Bradley's market-determined methods of learning and his methods of committing murder. He uses the same strategies of production and exchange when he attempts to implicate Riderhood by copying his clothing (“he must have committed [Riderhood's clothing] to memory, and slowly got it by heart” [697]) as he has used to fill his warehouse-brain with knowledge:

He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge. … The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers—history here, geography there, astronomy to the right, political economy to the left … this care had imparted to his countenance a look of care. …

(266-67)

There is even a hint that Bradley is an ineffective murderer for the same reasons that he is an ineffective teacher. In both activities, he is a slow, plodding, inflexible thinker (776).

Our Mutual Friend thus enacts a profound uneasiness about institutionalized free-trade education and the ease with which it can be perverted to private—indeed to criminal—ends. Bradley's market-classroom provides no protection against unauthorized systems of knowledge, because, in Bourdieu and Passeron's terms, it is unable to “resolve by its very existence the questions raised by its existence” (62). As fragile as the novel's other institutional enclaves, the school fails because it is too easily identified as imposing a “cultural arbitrary.” The novel instead invites us to invigilate at a series of examinations that take place outside the literal classroom, and that thus authorize legitimate agents of pedagogic action without displaying the arbitrariness of their authority.

These examinations institute a distinction between “masculine” and “feminine” pedagogical methods, one that continues to haunt discussions on gender and pedagogy. In the 1986 Women's Ways of Knowing, for example, Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule use Paulo Freire's description of the “banking concept” of education in order to develop a gendered contrast between “objectivist” and “subjectivist” (Stone, “Toward” 122-23) models of education:

Midwife-teachers are the opposite of banker-teachers. While the bankers deposit knowledge in the learner's head, the midwives draw it out. They assist the students in giving birth to their own ideas, in making their own tacit knowledge explicit and elaborating it.

(Belenky et al. 217)

Later feminist theorists of pedagogy have been rightly suspicious of the banker/midwife couple (Ellsworth; Stone, “Toward”). Like the couples subject/object, consumption/production, and gender/class, midwife/banker mystifies the mutually constitutive class and gender relations that structure both nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western culture. By placing it in a competitive relationship with the “masculine” banking model, the proponents of the midwife model allow us to forget where babies come from: the “tacit knowledge” midwife-teachers deliver is always the result of insemination by ideology. Bourdieu and Passeron critique

the spontaneist Utopia which accords the individual the power to find within himself the principle of his own “fulfillment”. … The idea of a “culturally free” PA, exempt from arbitrariness in both the content and the manner of its imposition, presupposes a misrecognition of the objective truth of PA in which there is still expressed the objective truth of a violence whose specificity lies in the fact that it generates the illusion that it is not violence.

(16-17)

All pedagogic action inculcates a cultural arbitrary. But some pedagogies may hide this fact better than others, and thus prove more effective.

In Our Mutual Friend, as in Women's Ways of Knowing, the bringing forth of preexisting ideas in female pupils is strongly valued over the depositing of information in male heads: while the latter is associated with the illicit climb to professional status of working-class men like Bradley, Wegg, and Charley Hexam, the former is associated with the happy rise to haute-bourgeois wifehood of Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam. Invigilating the novel's male and female test takers, we can catch the banking-teacher's promiscuous transmission of knowledge being countered by a midwife-pedagogy where no transmission of knowledge takes place. Bourdieu and Passeron point out that the power relations maintained by pedagogic communication remain intact “even when the information transmitted tends towards zero” (21). In Our Mutual Friend, the maintenance of these relations actually depends on the transmission of zero information; education escapes the fragility of institutional enclaves only when it does not involve the transference of knowledge from one person to another.

As feminist narrative theory demonstrates, bourgeois narratives of female education are traditionally paradoxical. Subject at once to the demands of the bildung and the retention of a marriageable inexperience, girls must become self-conscious producers of unconscious naturalness and accomplished scholars in ignorance (Abel et al., Johnson). Ruth Bernard Yeazell argues that Georgiana Podsnap's truncated story in Our Mutual Friend represents Dickens's recognition of the cultural contradiction generated by the relationship between feminine innocence and novelistic plot, while Bella and Lizzie, successfully negotiating the “vast interval” between maiden consciousness and secure middle-class marriage, suggest his retreat from that recognition. The important role played by the “teaching of ignorance” (Johnson) in their stories, however, implies that the distinction may be one of degree rather than kind. For example, Lizzie's virtue seems inseparable from her unconscious resistance to the most innocent transferred knowledge. As she and Jenny pursue their studies in Riah's rooftop garden, “they both pored over one book; both with attentive faces; Jenny with the sharper; Lizzie with the more perplexed” (332). Despite her conscious desire for it, Lizzie has no real need for booklearning. She is already amply supplied with her own form of untransferable expertise, one put to the test as she literally catches a middle-class husband by showing how little her subsequent education has affected her original skill as a waterwoman.¹¹ Bradley comments to Charley Hexam that

“[Y]our sister—scarcely looks or speaks like an ignorant person.”

“Lizzie has as much thought as the best, Mr Headstone. Too much, perhaps, without teaching. I used to call the fire at home, her books, for she was always full of fancies—sometimes quite wise fancies, considering—when she sat looking at it.”

“I don't like that,” said Bradley Headstone.

(281)

Many observers besides Bradley have noticed that, indeed, Lizzie “scarcely … speaks like an ignorant person” (Morris 130). But here the novel codes her middle-class diction not as the result of class-bound classroom training but as an inherent virtue. It comes as no surprise that Bradley, exemplar of free-trade education, should have objections to such a relation to knowledge. Lizzie will not provide her more successful suitor Eugene with a return on an investment of transferable knowledge (sexual favors for the lessons he pays for), but with the gift of her intrinsic worth.

Before her test in disinterested loyalty, Bella frequently proclaims her greediness for money, but most often as a joke in the quasi-flirtation the “lovely woman” carries on with her father, and “she is always shown as partly affecting her mercenariness” (Hardy 49). Rather than learning goodness, the novel suggests, Bella simply needs to unlearn the surface knowledge that interferes with what she already knows. Bella's final triumph, for example, is throughout a triumph of ignorance. Whirled down to the Fellowship Porters for the identification and vindication of her husband, she is

perfectly unable to account for her being there, perfectly unable to forecast what would happen next, or whither she was going, or why; certain of nothing in the immediate present, but that she confided in John, and that John seemed somehow to be getting more triumphant. But what a certainty was that!

(833)

The narrowing of her awareness to this single certainty is what finally convinces John to reveal the ruse and present Bella with her reward.

If Bella is not really mercenary, at least on a metaphorical level her examiners would seem to be. Boffin expresses his faith in Bella's innate unselfishness and love for John: “She may be a leetle spoilt, and nat'rally spoilt … by circumstances, but that's only the surface, and I lay my life … that she's the true golden gold at heart” (843). The “Golden Dustman's” choice of metaphor here draws attention to the central contradiction of Bella's education. Bella is the “true golden gold,” rather than wishing to possess the Golden Dustman's—with which she will be rewarded for her preciousness (Barbour 65-66). Boffin and Harmon wish (like Gaffer Hexam as he turns corpses' pockets inside out, like Wegg and Venus as they explore the dust heaps) to displace the spoiled “surface” and uncover the “true golden gold.” Bella's “certainty” is thus assigned a value, but one that—like a scavenger's find—cannot easily be subjected to a valuation based on the labor theory of value. Whereas Bradley's knowledge is currency to be passed from hand to hand, Bella's “certainty” is a treasure buried within the heart. The novel's gendered opposition of pedagogies achieves what recourse to the doctrine of separate spheres cannot: the paradoxical figuring of a reified knowledge that nevertheless escapes commodification.

Much of the criticism on Our Mutual Friend returns over and over to the question of whether or not—and how—Dickens presents an escape from the imagery of capitalist exchange that dominates the novel.¹² But if, as we have seen, intellectual labor must balance on the line between the market and transcendence, then an economics that blurs that division may be more valuable than transcendence itself. The testing of Bella and Lizzie provides such an economics for John and Eugene, one that supplements the exchange of commodities with the finding and keeping of treasure. It is perhaps appropriate that the novel's most brilliant examiner, Noddy Boffin, is also its “Golden Dustman.” The novel's famous crowd of scavengers—dustmen, corpse-pickpockets, articulators of bones, etc.—serves to illustrate the dangers and benefits of the borderland between the economic and the extraeconomic for those who must also inhabit it, its equally numerous intellectual laborers—lawyers, secretaries, “literary men,” and schoolteachers.¹³

Notes

1. On the relationship between Victorian professionalization and gender roles see also Hearn, Sawyer, and Witz.

2. For the relation between Dickens's own professional career and the production and content of his fiction, see Feltes, Welsh (Copyright), Poovey, and Duncan. Here, my goal is to connect the intellectual workers of Our Mutual Friend to the institutionalization of qualifying practices (i.e. the proliferation of the examination) rather than to the professionalization of authorship.

3. An uneasiness about the role they play in capitalist relations still haunts the self-examination of twentieth-century intellectual laborers. One of the most significant problems in Marxist thought after Marx has been the need to account for the phenomenon of the professionalization of intellectual labor and its disturbance (real or apparent) of nearly all the crucial concepts of historical materialism: the class struggle, the historical succession of modes of production, and the relation between the economic and the extraeconomic (or base and superstructure). See, for example, Gramsci, Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, and Block and Hirschhorn.

4. Cotsell notes that “despite the relative success of the Crimean War (1854-56), the British continued to mistrust the ambitions of the gigantic and illiberal Russian Empire” (58-59).

5. The bourgeois nuclear family is, of course, rarely celebrated in Dickens, where it is usually the site of disorder, lovelessness, and conflict, and where happy domestic groups are more likely to be formed by chance than blood ties. Welsh reminds us that Dickens's famous snug interiors are most often created by additions to or variations on “the conjugal family” (City 151). Ingham notices a pervasive “disturbance of family relationships, which are overwritten by new and more highly valued bonds” (118). In Our Mutual Friend, however, this disturbance seems to extend from the family itself to the very idea of domesticity: one need only compare Lizzie Hexam's ineffectiveness to the almost superhuman effectiveness of Dickensian angels like Hard Times's Sissy Jupe or Little Dorrit's Amy Dorrit.

6. Bourdieu and Passeron define “pedagogic action” (PA) as a form of “symbolic violence” that inculcates “cultural arbitraries,” or culturally established categories of knowledge, through its command of “pedagogic authority” (PAu), an authority always granted by a particular political entity (such as a social class). I am arguing here that gender categories play an important role in the process by which pedagogic authority is granted to the Victorian professional in the novel.

7. See Fraser's discussion of both public/private splits, where she critiques Habermas's opposition between the “lifeworld” of familial relationships and the “official economy” (119).

8. According to Althusser, the “educational apparatus” is the dominant Ideological State Apparatus for the reproduction of capitalist relations of production (153-54). In Our Mutual Friend, the Victorian school, with its complex and tenuous relation to the Victorian state, is also the paradigmatic state institution.

9. While Britain's first state-run schools were created by the 1870 Education Act, universal, compulsory, free elementary schooling was not implemented until 1891. On the development of the British educational system, see Digby and Searby, and Midwinter.

10. See note 6 for a brief account of Bourdieu and Passeron's use of these terms.

11. David points out that “Lizzie affirms in her words and in her actions a powerful determinant of social situation [the class difference between her and Eugene], and her affirmation leads to its ambiguous transcendence” (57).

12. For example, Miller cites Jenny's famous rooftop cry, “come up and be dead,” as the novel's model of transcendence, and David argues that “Our Mutual Friend both represents and transcends the social reality which is a pervasive determinant of the restlessness and dissatisfaction of its characters” (55). For Gallagher, the novel's “Bioeconomics” provide an escape from commodification for the novel's heroines. Jaffe (Vanishing) argues that the novel privileges a different kind of transcendence of reification for a male character, John Harmon, in the disembodied subjectivity of omniscience.

13. This way of signifying the professional's place in capitalism seems to extend beyond Dickens: Jaffe demonstrates that in Mayhew and Conan Doyle, beggars and gentlemen (including financiers and authors) share a participation in an “illegitimate production” of representation rather than products (“Detecting” 109).

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