The Social Life of Fluids: Blood, Milk, and Water in the Victorian Novel 9780801462382

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Introduction: Dark Ecologies: A Tale of Two Cities and "The Cow With the Iron Tail"
PART ONE: MILK AND WATER: THE BODY AND SOCIAL SPACE IN DICKENS
1. Disavowing Milk: Psychic Disintegration and Domestic Reintegration in Dickens's 1 Dombey and Son
2. A River Runs through Him: Our Mutual Friend and the Embankment of the Thames
PART TWO : DRIVING HUMAN DESTINY: GEORGE ELIOT AND THE PROBLEMATICS OF FLOW
3. Perilous Reversals: Fluid Exchange in George Eliot's Early Works
4. Merging With Others: Destiny and Flow in Daniel Deronda
PART THREE: SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS: NURSING THE EMPIRE IN GEORGE MOORE'S ESTHER WATERS AND BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA
5. Tempted by the Milk of Another: The Fantasy of Limited Circulation in Esther Waters
6. Ever-Widening Circulations: Dracula and the Fear of Management
Afterword
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX

Citation preview

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THE SOCIAL LIFE OF FLUIDS

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF FLUIDS BLOOD, MILK, AND WATER IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

jULES LAW

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

The Northwestern U11iversity Research Grants Committee has provided partial support for the publication ~f this book. We gratefidly acklwwledge this assistance. Copyright© 2010 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2010 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Law, Jules David, 1957The social life of fluids : blood, milk, and water in the Victorian novel I Jules Law. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-4930-7 (cloth : alk. paper) I. English fiction~ 19th century~History and criticism. 2. Body fluids in literature. 3. Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870-----Criticism and interpretation. 4. Eliot, George, 1819-188(}-----Criticism and interpretation. 5. Moore, George, 1852-1933~Criticism and interpretation. 6. Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912. Dracula. I. Title. PR878.B62L38

2010

823'.8093561~dc22

2010022622

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

For Wendy, Matthew, and Leah

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CONTENTS

Priface

ix

Introduction: Dark Ecologies: A Tale of Two Cities and "The Cow With the Iron Tail" PART ONE:

1

MILK AND WATER: THE BODY AND SOCIAL SPACE IN DICKENS

1. Disavowing Milk: Psychic Disintegration and Domestic Reintegration in Dickens's Dombey and Son

23

2. A River Runs through Him: Our

Mutual Friend and the Embankment of the Thames PART TW 0 :

D R IV I N G

H U MAN

46

D EST I NY: G E 0 R G E

ELIOT AND THE PROBLEMATICS

oF FLow 3. Perilous Reversals: Fluid Exchange in

George Eliot's Early Works

71

4. Merging With Others: Destiny and Flow

in Daniel Deronda PART THREE:

98

SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS: NURSING THE EMPIRE IN GEORGE MOORE'S

ESTHER WATERS AND BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA

5. Tempted by the Milk of Another: The Fantasy of Limited Circulation in Esther Waters

127

viii

CONTENTS

6. Ever-Widening Circulations: Dracula and the Fear of Management Afterword

Notes

Index

167

171

Works Cited 199

146

189

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PREFACE

To what extent is a person connected to society through his or her bodily fluids? Is it even possible to possess or to own fluids, which by their very nature circulate and flow in and out of bodies and social spaces? How might such circulations determine-or thwart-individual will, embodiment, or identity? These and similar questions acquired new and urgent emphasis in nineteenth-century Britain, owing to signal developments in the technological and bureaucratic manipulation of fluids: the embankment of rivers, the transfusion of human blood, and the pasteurization of milk. This book traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the Victorian novel. But such tracings raise troubling questions. A number of years ago, while researching my argument about the circulation of breast milk in George Moore's 1894 novel Esther Waters, I came across the following sentence in Valerie Fildes's well-respected book Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present: "Many women [in seventeenth-century Britain] used wet nurses simply because it was the custom or fashion, without thinking very deeply about it-in the same, often unthinking, way that some women today employ bottle-feeding." The analogy equated a practice commonly thought of as technological (involving plastic bottles, sterilization techniques, and formula) with an older folk practice of substitutive breast-feeding, and thus corresponded with my own instinct to regard all social practices extending the reach of the human body as "social technologies." Nonetheless, this historian's casual dismissal of not just one, but two, extensive cultural practices, and the moral judgment implied in the dismissal, induced in me a profound methodological-and I will admit, political-unease. How could one possibly rely on an historiographical observation premised on such a sweeping and prejudicial analogy? On further investigation I discovered that the empirical data necessary to corroborate either side of the analogy was sorely lacking. There was little substantial evidence-either in the early modern period or in our own-for a categorical characterization of women's motives in choosing not to breastix

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PREFACE

feed their babies. Here then was a perfect hermeneutic circle. A gap in the historical record was being filled in with assumptions derived from modern attitudes, while the motive force for modern norms was being derived from an ostensible telos gleaned in historical practice. My immediate motive in trying to reconstruct the actual historical practice of wet-nursing had been to gauge the relative degree of sentimentalization to which it was subject in nineteenth-century literary accounts. But now that historical practice itself seemed like a moving target. The immediate consequence was that I took an extended hiatus from the book I was writing on Victorian "fluids" in order to undertake a study on the contemporary scholarship and politics of breast-feeding. I was fascinated by this massive but loosely related field of scholarship (composed of epidemiology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and ecology, to name only a few) in which durable human practices were taken for "natural" ones (on evidence that wouldn't normally meet any reasonable scientific standard of proof), and in which the demonstrable consequences of such practices were ascribed to the "natural" propensities of the human body and its constitutive parts: in this case in particular, breasts and breast milk. When I returned to my work on Victorian fluids it was thus with a renewed sense both of the historicity and of the contemporaneity of our constructions of the body. In late-twentiethcentury debates I saw epidemiological and sociological readings of breastfeeding struggling against a dominant-and to my mind ideological-view of breast milk as a virtually occult substance (one that knows and adapts itself to the needs of each unique infant); in the Victorian period, conversely, I saw this vitalist view of breast milk beginning to develop against the backdrop of older social arrangements and technologies such as wet-nursing. No doubt my sense of the intractably dialectical relationship between the body and social technologies has been shaped by contemporary discourses of poststructuralism and even posthumanism. At the same time, once again, my study of Victorian culture has deepened my sense of the historical development of this dialectic. The Victorian era gave a distinctive stamp both to our privatized sense of the body and to a technocratic view of public health that increasingly demanded highly unsentimental attitudes toward even the most intimate body functions. In short, our sense of the individual human organism's perilous vulnerability to technological deconstruction was anticipated by the Victorians long before digital technology and other forms of modern information-control threatened the dissolution of the body and of individual identity. The Victorians, I argue here, were also particularly perspicacious in seeing such deconstruction as only the prelude to an inevitable social reconstruction. In every fluid, even those of the body, they saw social arrangements crystallized.

PREFACE

xi

Novels-being principally about people and relationships, and not about substances-might be expected conveniently to skew the argument in the direction indicated above. Moreover I may appear to have chosen novels whose plots explicitly make social dilemmas out of fluids, skewing the argument even further. Yet the trope of fluidity is not equally obvious in all these novels, and often the question of how centrally-or literally-fluids figure into a plot is precisely the question that leads us into the larger philosophical issues I have outlined above. Thus in the chapters that follow I have tried to show how the specific case of Victorian culture and the Victorian novel contribute not only an important chapter in the social history of fluids but a vital opportunity for imaginative reflection on the way in which "fluids" connect the individual subject to the social collective. Each of the book's three sections-covering roughly the early, middle, and late Victorian periods-pairs a novel explicitly and centrally about fluids (e.g., The Mill on the Floss or Dracula) with a novel in which fluids enter only obliquely through an apparently minor plot detail (as, for instance, in Dombey and Son, where the brief initial episode of wet-nursing metamorphoses quickly into the more dominant motif of the railway system). The former type of novel illustrates an historical point about the Victorian obsession with fluids, while the latter type illustrates more enduring formal and theoretical problems in representing the body, and in particular the distinctive way in which the novel-form encodes and distributes its raw materials. The course of this project has been shaped over the years by the comments and contributions of many colleagues and friends, some of whom may surprised to know of their influence on it. For challenging and precipitating conversations during that period I am grateful to my superb Victorianist colleagues at Northwestern: Tracy Davis, Mary Finn, Michal Ginsburg, Chris Herbert, and Chris Lane. Northwestern's exemplary interdisciplinary intellectual community has nurtured me throughout, and I would like in particular to thank Nicki Beisel, Nick Davis, Lane Fenrich, Peter Fenves, Wendy Griswold, Susannah Gottlieb, Jay Grossman, Bonnie Honig, Jeff Masten, Martin Mueller, Carl Smith, and Julia Stern, all of whom provided important intellectual encouragement and advice at key points. To my friend and colleague Chris Herbert I owe an inestimable intellectual, professional, and personal debt; to Wendy Wall, all this and more. Beyond Northwestern, various versions and iterations of the project benefited from the astute critical sensibilities of John Brenkman, Chris Castiglia, Carolyn Dever, Jed Esty, Peter Garrett, Andrew Gibson, David Glover, Lauren Goodlad, Sara Guyer, Cora Kaplan, Caroline Levine, Joe Litvak, Mario Ortiz-Robles, and Chris Reed. Liz McCabe, Jackie Murdock and Jade Werner provided expert help in preparing the manuscript. Finally, I was fortunate to receive extraordinarily

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PREFACE

attentive, incisive, and comprehensive readings of the manuscript from my readers at the press, Jay Clayton and Mary Anne O'Farrell, and to them I am immensely grateful. A portion of chapter 3 previously appeared in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender, ed. Linda M. Shires (New York: Routledge, 1992), and a portion of chapter 4 previously appeared as "Transparency and Epistemology in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda," Nineteenth Century Literature 62 (September 2007): 250-77. I am grateful to Routledge and to the University of California Press for permission to reprint these essays.

Introduction Dark Ecologies: A Tale ofTwo Cities and "The Cow With the Iron Tail"

In his sensational 1894 novel Esther Waterspublished in explicit defiance of the de facto Victorian censorship systemGeorge Moore recounts the harrowing story of an impoverished young unwed mother forced to sell her breast milk in order to support herself and her newborn baby. At the dramatic apex of the novel the guilt-stricken heroine is haunted by the intuition that she is bartering away the "milk that belongs to another," thus sacrificing her own infant's life for that of her employer's child. 1 Overwhelmed by a conviction that she is trading "a life for a life," she renounces her lucrative wet-nursing job and sends her own infant away to be raised on a bottle while she herself toils as a live-in servant on subsistence wages (146). If Esther cannot afford to give her breast milk to her own baby, she will at least confirm its unique and occult value by withholding it from "another." This strangely fetishistic attitude toward a liquid would hardly have shocked or discomfited Londoners of the nineteenth century, nor was it restricted to the private zone of the body. The Victorians were obsessed with fluids: with their scarcity, with their omnipresence. At midcentury, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to provide running water and adequate sewage, while scientists and journalists published sensational color drawings of the myriad live organisms populating London's drinking water. 2 Fluids were understood as dangerously

2

INTRODUCTION

unpredictable channels. As late as the 1880s, live eels were reported (erroneously, as it turns out) to be invading London homes through the water faucets, the city's subterranean sewer workers were frequently overcome by intoxicating runoff from London distilleries, and wet nurses had been known to sue biological mothers for custody of children. 3 Getting fluids safely into and out of the house-and into and out of bodies-provided major social challenges, and as with every act of circulation, these projects called into question the very boundaries they crossed. 4 Fluids were regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Because these substances provided limiting and transitional cases in assumptions about property (both in one's self and in one's environment), they offer an important lens through which we can reconsider the vexed problems haunting Victorian conceptions of civic order, family structure, and citizenship in a period characterized, paradoxically, by proud proclamations concerning the collective mastery of various fluid systems, and by literary representations of perils to the individual body posed by the liquids entering and emanating from it. 5 In the pages that follow I examine the dramas that developed in the novelistic fiction of Victorian England around the increasing recognition of fluids as objects of social technology, that is, as objects proper to discipline and manipulation in the name of civic and collective interests. The general argument here is that it was precisely the increasing scientific and civic claims on and about fluids that prompted an uneasy sense of their manipulability: fantasies about controlling fluids became inextricably bound up with fantasies of their infinite fungibility. 6 This leads to three more specific arguments. First, that the Victorian obsession with liquids had little to do with the ostensibly intrinsic properties of water, blood, alcohol, or milk-no matter how sensational-and much to do with the endlessly vexing question of how-in what way, and by whom-a fluid could be possessed. 7 Second, that the Victorian "solution" to the fungibility of fluids-worked out largely through the novel-was to imagine and construct circuits of limited circulation. And third, that the ideal of maternal breast-feeding played a crucial, if haunting and intermittently represented, model for this ideal of limited circulation. The attempt to link the health of a society not just analogically but literally to the health of its individual citizens' bodies-and thus to see bodily fluids as collective resources and collective threats-is largely the legacy of the nineteenth century public health movement. Yet anyone who has read Mary Douglas or Norbert Elias knows that this development was a long time in preparation: the practice of linking the portals of the individual body to

DARK ECOLOGIES

3

the contours and health of the body politic has a long history. H Nonetheless in the nineteenth century something special happened: the traditional analogy was literalized, it was institutionalized, and it underwent a technological revolution. What I focus on in this book is the first of these processes. In order for the conventional analogy of the public body to be taken with renewed seriousness, certain connections needed to be made newly visible. This included not only the connection between bodily fluids and those fluids encountered outside the body, but the connection between discourses long thought to be merely symbolic or metaphoric and their suddenly new and· literal application. The novels of the Victorian period played an important mediating role in this process. The process was neither orderly nor schematic, but it did focus persistently on the social circulation of bodily fluids and on the contested shift from a personalized to a collective, rationalized, even technocratic sense of fluids. 9 This is finally a work of literary criticism, rather than of social or cultural history. Yet it borrows from a tradition in anthropology-formalized in the work of Mary Douglas-of seeing a culture's representations of human form as expressive of its ideas about social form; and even more importantly of seeing representations of the mutability of the body as expressive of a culture's understanding of the mutability of social arrangements. 10 Indeed, social anxiety over the instability of fluids has a long history. In the early modern period, according to Gail Paster's influential The Body Embarrassed, humoral fluids within the body were seen as fungible; in other words, one fluid could metamorphose into another-blood into black bile, phlegm into yellow bile, etc. 11 The humors were also understood as fungible in another sense: fluids inside the body existed in an uneasy hydrostatic balance with fluids outside the body, with each exerting pressures on the other. By the early nineteenth century, this model had ostensibly shifted to what Catherine Gallagher calls a "bioeconomic" model in which bodies themselves (and not just their internal components) were seen as fungible components within a larger material world organized according to fundamentally economic, thermodynamic principles. 12 Fungibility here implied that the human body could b~ subjected to a rational calculus that determined its value and significance for the social body as a whole (through processes of abstraction); but also that the body was literally convertible to other kinds of matter through processes of ingestion, combustion, excretion, exchange, etc. One consequence of this latter development was to update the ages-old analogy between the body and the social body. Mary Poovey, for instance, describes the way in which new statistical methods developed in the 1830s allowed the city to be conceptualized rationally as a vast body. 13 Later in the century, according to Peter

4

INTRODUCTION

Stallybrass and Allon White, this axis was reversed, and the city was projected onto the body rather than vice versa. 14 Individual bodies as well as individual psyches were now zoned according to the rhetoric of urban gothic, with the higher functions constantly threatened by contamination from subterranean denizens and detritus. What emerges in the Victorian period, then, is an intensification of the opposition between the science of fluids out of the body and the fetishization of fluids within. As fluids out of the body are subjected to progressively greater rationalization, analysis, and manipulation, bodily fluids become increasingly the emblem and the vehicle of that which is inalienable, irrational, and individual. One familiar legacy-or at least version-of this tension finds its perverse extreme in Dr. Strange/ave: the paranoid defense of a sacralized bodily integrity over and against the claims and knowledges of modernity, technology, and the civic sphere (the individual's precious bodily fluids under attack by the architects of a fluoridated public water supply). But the heroic antithesis between an impersonal and generic fluidity on the one hand and a unique individual fluidity on the other hand is complicated in the Victorian period by intermediate circuits oflimited circulation. And it is in these images and imaginaries that Victorian culture's understanding of the relationship between private and public identity is most usefully tracked. Increasingly in the novels under consideration, we encounter an opposition not so much between public fluids and a tremulously self-contained human body, but rather between (on the one hand) fantasies of limited interpersonal fluid-exchanges governed by natural laws, and (on the other hand) a belief that the ever-increasing scientific understanding and manipulation of fluids represents (for better or worse) the supersession of older, more natural forms of sociality. At times this tension takes the simple form of a contrast between nature and technology, or between tradition and modernity, yet consistently the fearful image of technology spinning out of control and breeding its own fantastic excesses is itself haunted by the more proximate threat of women's bodies and women's labor overflowing the boundaries of domestic space. This tension, as we shall see, is particularly visible in the frequent Victorian representations of breast-feeding and wet-nursing. The concept of limited circulation imagines the body as mutable and, further, acknowledges its vulnerability to its various environments (both social and ecological), while nonetheless limiting in advance the kinds of transformations or reciprocities in which the individual body might become engaged. 15 Victorian novelists found in the social circulation of fluids a means for imagining this contingent relationship between the individual and his or her environment, even while imagining that contingency as strictly limited.

DARK ECOLOGIES

Nonetheless, this is not a book about fluids in general (for instance, it does not look in any sustained way at Victorian representations of alcohol, saliva, sperm, tears or urine), but about three particular fluids (water, blood, and milk), each of which had a special role in Victorian conceptions of the relationship between the individual and the social. These three fluids represent a spectrum from the least to the most personal of those fluids that were understood to pass through the envelope of the human form and on behalf of which various claims for proprietorship and control were regularly made. For the Victorians, water was the fluid object par excellence of social technology: it was understood to exist both in and out of the body-thus linking the welfare of the individual to the welfare of the collective-and to possess few if any occult qualities that might resist or discourage social or technical manipulation. Blood, on the other hand, was still popularly represented as an occult fluid, containing within it the secret of character, ethnicity, and temperament. Its conservation and its purity were not only of medical but of social value. Yet in the absence of any reliable or sustained technology for exchanging blood, discourses about its social itinerary were bound to be largely metaphorical and symbolic (as in the preservation of blood ties and blood lines). 16 Between the traffic in fluids and the sacralized conservation of them lay the idea of a licit but limited circulation-a circulation imagined as natural yet transpersonal. The chief emblem of this, I argue, was milk, and particularly (though not exclusively) human milk. Milk is imagined by the Victorians as a necessarily transindividual fluid, a fluid whose telos-unlike that of blood-is to pass out of the body, and into the body of another. And yet it is a fluid whose circulation-it is imagined, once again-outlines relatively intimate circuits of sociality and a relatively strict conception of the natural units of sociality. These circulations turn out, of course, to be neither as strict nor as natural as imagined, but this only makes milk a particularly rich and loaded site for the contestations of and between the social and the individual. In every representation of the natural or unnatural, licit or illicit, exchange of human milk a particular social order is implied. In this introduction, as well as in the first section on Dickens, I will try to draw out some of the connections between the early and mid-Victorian "sanitarian" concern with stagnation and the displacement of those concerns into more general anxieties about social circulation and blockage-issues that are both explicitly reflected on and more implicitly conveyed through narrative figures as well. One obvious way to solve or explain this displacement might be to find the "authoritative" or "originating" discourse in the period that conjoins the physiological with the metaphysical, the body with

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INTRODUCTION

communication, matter with meaning: phrenology, for instance, or to cite a discourse more congenial to the trope of fluidity, associationist psychology. But reconstructing historical precedence, let alone causality, in such instances is a tricky matter, particularly inasmuch as it ends up reproducing on another level the paradoxical relationship between discursive autonomy and discursive influence (that is to say, the problem of iterability) at another order of generality. Indeed, looking at such writers as Edwin Chadwick, Charles Dickens, and Henry Mayhew, it would be difficult to say where, for instance, social reform discourse ends and the discourse of melodrama begins. What I want to suggest is that the set of texts with which this investigation beginstexts written in the early Victorian period-provide a mutually reinforcing reflection of a culture in which problems of personal conduct were thought of as imbricated in technological and infrastructural problems, and that this vision, though novel, was not yet decidedly either utopian or sinister (as it was to become by century's end). Among the many unexpected and idiosyncratic pockets of information in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1861-62), one of the most remarkable is surely the census of London fluids. When Mayhew performs London's first systematic accounting of the myriad substances entering the city's sewers, he gives formal expression to an idea already intimated by the literature of the previous two decades: the idea of a generic fluid, fungible, quantifiable, and manipulable. Mayhew confirms the possibility that substances previously thought of as unique and discrete may in fact be alienable and anonymous. In his zeal to reduce the city to a completely transparent, rationalizable hydraulic body, Mayhew treats the inexhaustible variety of urban fluids from a purely quantitative point of view. Differences in quality signify nothing; Mayhew's only concern is to calculate the total volume of liquid produced by London for its sewers. Rainwater, tap water, urine, distillery drainage, even the blood from slaughterhouses: all are recorded with equal dispassion in his tables (383-85). This is not to say that Mayhew does not distinguish among kinds of fluids. He simply does not do so with an interest in distinguishing their qualities: they are all one and the same, mere instances of the larger species fluid. True, for the purposes of accurate quantification, some provisional distinctions must be made. For instance, Mayhew observes that urine is already essentially accounted for in the census of rainwater, tap water, and beverages; purely in terms of fluid volume, it is entailed in these already, rather than an addition to their number (384). This might seem a nightmarish parody of humoral fungibility were it not for the fact that the very point of the census is to agitate for a sanitary infrastructure whose primary function

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7

would be to segregate healthy from unhealthy fluids and send each on to their appointed place: potable water to individual households, waste and excrement to the depleted soil of garden and farm. This delicate balance between fungibility and segregation would seem to be one of the foundational paradoxes of the Victorian ecological imagination. Consider "The Cow with the Iron Tail," an essay published by Dickens in Household Words in 1850 (145-51, vol. 2). Here, the promiscuous and unhygienic living conditions of urban cows (who live amidst one another's filth) is contrasted with the felicitous condition of rural (i.e., suburban) cows, whose individual stalls and natural modesty restrain them from mixing even their milk: "Each cow insists upon being milked in her own pail-i.e. a pail to herself, containing no milk of any other cow-or, if she sees it, she is very likely to kick it over. She will not allow of any mixture. In this there would seem a strange instinct, accordant with her extreme susceptibility to contamination" (150). One can imagine the cows to be unaware of the irony that their milk is destined to be merged with that from the rest of the herd, but the same can hardly be imagined of the participants, much less the architects, of a much darker ecological paradox depicted by Dickens a few years later in A Tale of Two Cities. The scene is Paris at the height of the Terror, where "tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine," and Charles Darnay is about to be executed. 17 But before execution there must apparently be a double partitioning. Not only are the condemned prisoners assigned to solitary cells; there is even a separate prison for the condemned, who are removed from La Force prison to the prison of the Conciergerie: In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day awaited their fate. They were in number as the weeks of the year. Fifty-two were to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless everlasting sea. Before their cells were quit of them, new occupants were appointed; before their blood ran into the blood spilled yesterday, the blood that was to mingle with theirs to-morrow was already set apart. (375-76) Here we have the same contradictory mandates of segregation and merging as in "The Cow with the Iron Tail" or Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor: the specificity of fluids versus a generic fluidity, isolation versus collectivization, purification versus defilement. But from an interpretive point of view, what permits us to conflate the metaphorics of A Tale cifTwo Cities (in which the dramatic ecology of blood is transparently a political allegory for the struggle between the claims of the individual and the claims of the collective) and "The Cow with the Iron Tail" (which seems on the contrary

s

INTRODUCTION

to treat problems in the ecology of milk in an emphatically nonfigurative way) as both literal and pragmatic? Does this newly established category of the fluid vex the distinction between figurative and nonfigurative representations as well as between particular fluids? We might answer that question by asking in turn how arbitrary or idiosyncratic-how unrelated to the larger discourse and politics of sanitarianism and urban reform-is the novel's symbolic discourse of blood? And this question in turn might be answered by turning to the character of Jerry Cruncher: by day, doorman and errand-runner for Tellson's Bank (the novel's London nerve center), by night a robber of graves. Cruncher is initially figured as the comic counterpoint to the sinister, intertwining metaphorics of blood and wine in the novel's Paris episodes. Whereas the spilling of a cask of wine in the streets of pre-Revolutionary St. Antoine at the beginning of chapter 5 prefigures the Dionysian violence of the Terror, Cruncher is associated with a far more banal leakiness. Commissioned to attend on a witness at a trial for treason at the Old Bailey, Cruncher is incorporated into a bathetic, humid miasma: Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery breath of a whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it to mingle with the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not, that flowed at him, and already broke upon the great windows behind him in an impure mist and rain. (92) That Cruncher mixes his damp exhalations with those of the other London denizens points in two directions. On the one hand it confirms-or perhaps authorizes-his indexical status in the novel. Cruncher is described as the "live sign of the house" of Tellson (85, as opposed to the dead, painted trade signs of St. Antoine which "were, all, grim illustrations of Want" [62]). Cruncher is a "live sign" both in the sense of signaling the city's liveliness and in the sense of being organically connected to that vitality. Whereas Paris fluids merge only along the sterile axis of conventional symbolism (tears, wine, blood, the river, the crowd all stand in for one another-enacting the compulsive and identity-driven logic of revenge), Jerry is connected to the rest of London by a far more heterogeneous-and less easily thematizable-ecology. At the same time, the carnivalesque dissolution of bodily integrity alluded to in the "beery breath" passage stands in uncertain relation to Cruncher's more disturbing nocturnal vocation as grave robber. Next to sewers, graveyards were (falsely, as it turns out) identified as the most notorious and sensational sources of urban miasma (bad air). This would seem to turn Cruncher into more of a dead sign, and the theme of urban ecology into a more sinister

DARK ECOLOGIES

9

one. Yet Cruncher's euphemistic and domesticating description of his work as "Agricult[ur]al" in "character" is not entirely dismissed. He is allowed to plead his case for the scientific and humanitarian value of his trade (where else would medical students get their corpses, he asks?), and the novel does not entirely discount this rationalization, allowing Cruncher a small but significant role in the narrative's denouement. Why focus on Cruncher when there are so many more explicit and sensational evocations of fluid economies in the novel? After all, this is a story in which the spilling of wine and blood, and the implacable flow of the river Seine, are invoked on almost every page. From the metaphorics of inheritance and "tainted" blood, to the poetics of revolutionary fervor, the novel revels in figures of fluidity as destiny. Yet Cruncher's "damp way of living," as the novel calls it·, is more than a bathetic counterpoint to the novel's blood symbolism. We might think of the novel as plotted along two axes: a symbolic axis of wine, blood, and the river Seine, in which people are connected metaphorically; and an ecological axis of sewers, milk, and graves, in which people are connected literally. This latter, more domestic and less sensational, axis posits not only a more literal connectedness among people, but also, importantly, a more socially regulable one. Whereas the horizon of the blood-wine-river discourse is death (with the consequence that it is governed by the simple and dramatic logic of presence and absence) the horizon of the sewer-milk-grave discourse is perversion: the infinite perversions of the social in its deviations from health and stability, and the endless dramas and narratives of social redress or social restoration that this gives rise to. These two discourses or axes make contact very rarely in the novel, but one particular instance is extraordinarily telling. It has been frequently remarked that Dickens relies on the trope of a femininity transfigured beyond recognition as his chief symbol of the French Revolution's failed humanity. The inhuman, murderous Madame Defarge knitting is the most memorable of Dickens's images of the revolution. A less frequently cited passage, however, makes the same criticism of the ancien regime: one would have found it hard to discover among the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of bringing a troublesome creature into this world-which does not go far towards the realisation of the name of mother-there was no such thing known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close, and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and supped as at twenty. (137)

10

INTRODUCTION

Now in order to register the full impact of this social critique, one has to understand that two of the most scandalous and noxious facts about Paris culture, according to mid-Victorians, were its lack of sewers and the almost universal bourgeois practice of putting babies out to be wet-nursed (though it seems to have escaped Dickens's notice that this was principally a bourgeois rather than an aristocratic practice). In the passage above, the French aristocracy have already ceded their humanity by repudiating maternity: their babies are put out to nurse with French peasants so that baronesses and duchesses can pursue their social lives both literally and figuratively unencumbered. The narrator does not mince words about the violence done to humanity by this renunciation of maternity: the very next sentence begins, "The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance" at the court (137). Apparently putting human milk into social circulation is no less grotesque or terrifying than Jerry Cruncher's traffic in human corpses. It is worth noting that Dickens also has Jerry rationalize his grave robbing in terms of child nurturance. Cruncher turns back his wife's objections to his nocturnal vocation by complaining that it feeds their son: "He's as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother, and not know that a mother's first duty is to blow her boy out?" (190). (Later, in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's Gaffer Hexam will scold his daughter for her revulsion toward his scavenging of dead bodies from the river: "As if it wasn't your living," he says. "As if it wasn't meat and drink to you!") 18 What I am suggesting here is that the discourse of sanitarianism (with its overriding mission of regulating the social circulation of biomaterials) provided a model for thinking about the individual body as a social resource, a model that was infinitely manipulable for ideological purposes-reassuring at one moment, horrifying the next. The narrator's diatribe against the alienation of maternal milk in the practice of wet-nursing provides a case in point. The hypocrisy of the zeal to criticize, and to regulate, one small, arbitrary, but symbolically freighted aspect of working-class welfare and social reproduction was a dominant theme of the mid- and later-nineteenth century. This has been well documented in relation to the Contagious Diseases Acts, whose motives and implementation have been thoroughly demystified. 19 But it remains relatively unexamined in relation to breast-feeding. In her well-respected history of wet-nursing, modern historiographer Valerie Fildes cites the 1848 diary entry of a young man who confessed his sense of guilt that "our own infant should be sustained, as it were, at the expense of the life of another infant," even though the diarist acknowledges that the wet nurse "had made up her mind to wean her infant" in any case, "being under

DARK ECOLOGIES

11

the necessity of doing so to enable her to go into service to support herself and two children" (192). 2° Fildes also cites an 1871 British Medical Journal letter (570-71, vol. 1) complaining that employers and wet nurses were not held legally responsible for the "proper nourishing of the supplanted infants" when the mother had decided "to make a handsome profit out of her nursing powers" (196-98). Why a similar obligation ought not to be enjoined on all employers of poor women, the letter writer did not explain. It was clearly only the mother's decision to commodify her breast milk by selling it to another family, and not per se her financial compulsion to "withhold" it from her child, that created a sense of social panic, and of public proprietorship in her body and the welfare of her child. 21 In the last example cited, the mother's profit motive is almost overshadowed in this particular correspondent's representation by the hysterical vision of the wet nurse perversely reveling in the alienation of her bodily fluids. Wet-nursing was indeed profitable, but perhaps more alarmingly, it was imagined as a vicarious pleasure: "[The] sacrificed infants ... are 'farmed out,' in order that their mothers may enjoy the pleasure and profit of vicarious nursing" (197). The practice of wet-nursing thus engaged the culture's most profound ambivalences and contradictions. A mother's milk was at once the most intimate and personalized of substances (thus the scandal of its being exchanged, commodified, or alienated), and yet at the same time an essential element of social reproduction whose value as a collective resource justified regulatory intervention, or at least the fantasies of such. No wonder then, as we noted previously, that the narrator finds the French practice of wet-nursing to be as grotesque and socially destabilizing as Jerry Cruncher's grave robbing. The figure of Cruncher thus concentrates-indeed is a sign for-the novel's various discourses of fluids, suggesting that distinctions among them are perhaps invidious, or at least negligible. And with this concept of generic fluids in hand-a concept theorized by Mayhew and embodied in Jerry Cruncher-we are in a better position to assess the threat represented by "The Cow with the Iron Tail." "The Cow with the Iron Tail" is a hybrid genre, part public service announcement, part investigative journalism, part urban legend. The iron tail of the article's title refers to a public pump from which unscrupulous urban "dairymen" allegedly obtain the amount of water necessary to dilute and extend their milk supplies. The scandal, then, lies in the substitution of one fluid for another: the exchange of milk for water, or more properly the exchange of water as milk. The new urban infrastructure that aspires to deliver one fluid to the threshold of the household-if not into the household itself-may very well deliver another fluid in its stead. The infrastructure

12

INTRODUCTION

ramifies, if it does not open up in the first place, the possibility of substitution, of the fungibility of fluids. Once established, the threatening substitutability of milk and water acts as a vortex, drawing in other elements of the urban ecology. According to the local barber (who is trying to extort custom from the neighboring dairyman by threatening to expose the latter's practices), the "dairymen's" diluted milk looks too thin, so they beats up the brains in a mortar-calves' brains is best, because it comes nearer to the nature of a cow-and when they are well worked up, and mixed with the milk, they give it the thickness it has lost, and restore its colour.... Then there's some as uses chalk, or whiting, to whiten the water they put; and flour, starch, and size, to keep up the substance, and perwent the 'milk' from looking thin; and lastly, they go to a secret doctor's and buy a set of dusky orangered balls, made of mysterious stuff, which, being well worked round, melts gradually, and give the nice yellowish tint what's wanted. And I have heard-1 accuse nobody in particular-that when a nice froth is wanted to the top, they sometimes throw in a number of snails, stir them round and round, and then strains them off. (146) What is important to note here is that the fungibility of the urban ecology is mirrored at the social level by the relation of the barber's extortion to the dairyman's fraud-the barber's information coming, as it turns out, from the dairyman's landlord, who is owed three quarters' rent. As more and more materials get drawn into the milk itself, so more and more occupations are parasitical on the supplying of that milk. Finally, this fungibility is reflected at the level of narrative irony, where the "cow with the iron tail" must be deciphered by the reader, the narrator choosing a tongue-in-cheek complicity with the dairyman's fraud. All this is to say that fluids in the Victorian period were not simply a metaphoric or symbolic means of negotiating the relationship of the individual to an increasingly complex and rationalized public space, but a principal (and highly contested) medium through which social relations were actually negotiated. Mary Poovey, as we have seen, argues that the construction of a conceptual "social body" in the first third of the century responded to a need to have an object of analysis at once localizable and generalizable. 22 On this interpretation the shaping of the population into statistical aggregates allowed a satisfactorily scaled object of analysis to emerge for the urban physician, whose efforts were otherwise thwarted by the refusal of disease to confine itself to the individual body or household.

DARK ECOLOGIES

13

But the social body did not quite replace the individual body. Rather the two cohabited. The oxymoronic "cow with the iron tail" is a perfect instance of this, representing as it does the combination of two different bodies: the naturalized body of the cow that supposedly produces the liquid consumed by Londoners, and the mechanized body of the infrastructure that distributes the liquid in its actual form. The playful deciphering work that must be done by the reader in order to disarticulate these two bodies is performed in even greater earnest by the barber in the article. For when his firsthand observations are refuted by the dairyman (who refuses to acknowledge that the butcher's offal he is caught carrying is destined for the milk can), Slivers the barber confronts him with a statistical proof that the urban milk supply must be adulterated: "'You see,' pursued Mr. Tim Slivers ... 'You see, it can't be pure milk as we all drink, and I'll show you how it can't be. Say there's two millions and more of us here in London; and suppose each person, on the average, takes half-apint a-day-.'" From here, Slivers proceeds to tabulate the various forms of domestic milk consumption, and the total number and output of the city's livestock, in order to deduce that '"we're thirty thousand cows short of our proper complement-and the milk of all these has to be supplied by the Cow with the Iron-Tail, my boy!"' (147). Discursively, then, the cow with the iron tail conforms to Poovey's model of the statistical body-it is a body generated through statistics. But the cow with the iron tail is at the same time a counter-construction to the statistical body. For the other body in the story is the anthropomorphic cow, caught up in the same deadly food chain as the city's human occupants: London cows, for the most part, are fed from the offal and sweepings of the London wegetable markets, and of greengrocers' shops .... 'Stead of nice fresh wegetables, these cow-keepers feed the poor creatures with brewers' and distillers' grains, and distillers' wash; and Mr. Rugg says it's their chief article of food, whereby their livers are very much enlarged, become hard, refuse to perform their naytural hanatomical hoffice, and so the poor beasts get the yellow jaundice, just the same as with men who are always besotting themselves with beer and gin. (147-48) London cows, then are both analoJ?OUS to humans ("just the same as with men") and metonymically linked to them in the food chain, and both these relationships are articulated through fluids: the analogy via the common denominator of alcohol, and the metonymy through the medium of bodily

14

INTRODUCTION

fluids (adulterated milk being returned for human consumption from cows diseased by the refuse from human consumption). After depicting in great detail the urban ecology of milk, the narrator of the article turns to a counternarrative: the production of milk under putatively ideal conditions in London's pastoral suburbs. Here, as we saw earlier, the cows are at once freer and more modestly accommodated than in the city. They have free range over the most bucolic of pastures, but also their own individual stalls. In addition, there is a quarantine area for newly purchased cows, since "such is the susceptibility of a cow to the least contamination, that if one who had any slight disease were admitted among the herd, in a very short time the whole of them would be affected" (150). This susceptibility to disease is offered in explanation of what might otherwise seem a neurotic-or at least anthropomorphic-propensity of the cows to conserve their own milk: the refusal to let it mingle with the milk of other cows. Buttressed by the theory of contamination, is the gesture of conservation a symbolic or a biomechanical strategy? The dairy farmer tells a story that seems to split the difference. Though the average production of city cows is only ten quarts per day, the farmer claims that his cows average twelve to eighteen quarts per day. "Four-and-twenty quarts a day is not an unusual occurrence from some of the cows," reports the narrator, and one of them, we were assured by several of the keepers, once yielded the enormous quantity of twenty-eight quarts a day during six or seven weeks. The poor cow, however, suffered for this munificence, for she was taken very ill with a fever, and her life was given over by the doctor. Mr. Wright, the proprietor, told us that he sat up two nights with her himself, he had such a respect for the cow; and in the morning of the second night after she was given over, when the butcher came for her, he couldn't find it in his heart to let him have her. "No, butcher," said he, "she's been a good friend to me, and I'll let her die a quiet, natural death." She hung her head, and her horns felt very cold, and so she lay for some time longer; but he nursed her, and was rewarded, for she recovered; and there she stands-the strawberry Durham shorthorn-and yields him again from sixteen to eighteen quarts of milk a day. (149) The cow's recovery, and return to milk production, is attributed on the one hand to a purely symbolic, impractical gesture of conservation (the owner's refusal on sentimental grounds to sell a dying "friend" to the butcher) and on the other to a more biomechanical explanation: that is, after a respite from vigorous milking, the cow is once again ready to produce.

DARK ECOLOGIES

15

Thus in the Victorian fluid economy, the act of withholding is at once a powerful symbolic gesture and a perfectly mechanical, hydraulic one. Yet the symbolic gesture points to a personalization and individuation of fluids that it is the whole point of the hydraulic principle to deny. I see in this a fundamental paradox, which in the Victorian period is never quite exorcised orresolved. We began with Charles Darnay about to be executed, and with the Terror's allegedly paradoxical conservation and purging of blood, both toward the same ostensible end of ritual purification. We compared this with Mayhew's census of London fluids, which treats blood as simply one fluid among many, and refers without any sense of scandal to its merging with the rest of the city's detritus in the city streets and sewers. How do we square these two fundamentally different attitudes? Many answers leap to mind: Mayhew is not talking about human blood, whereas Dickens is; Mayhew is writing a report, Dickens a self-consciously imaginative and symbolic work. But what if we look at it differently: what if we consider Mayhew's apprehension of the ecological infrastructure of the Victorian life world as necessary for the underwriting of Dickens's macabre irony and paradox? What if symbolic acts of conservation are reactions precisely to properties fast losing their occult status in the modern world: fluids, bodies, families? Throughout the remainder of this book I examine a series of novels spanning the Victorian period from 1846 to 1897. In each novel I consider the anchoring of the plot in literal problems of fluid management and then move outward to a consideration of the kinds of social circulation and fluidity that are entwined with them. Confounding the neat symmetries of literal to figurative, bodily fluids to environmental fluids, and individual to social body, the problems in fluid management at the heart of these novels begin in some cases with contested breast milk, in other cases with contested water rights. 23 So from the beginning, the question of what it means to "move outward" is put in play, and the novel's own rhetorical practice raises the question to a philosophical level. Thus the novel's own intractable and productive problems of mediation-encountered on the borderland between literal and figurative usage, between social document and fiction-mesh with historical attempts to identify limited circuits of fluids mediating between an impossible individual autonomy or purity on the one hand and a generalized circulation and exchange on the other. Part I of this book examines two Dickens novels, written during two very different phases of the sanitarian era: the first phase (in the 1830s and 1840s) characterized by an intense scrutiny of household management and the second phase (in the 1860s) characterized by a great investment

16

INTRODUCTION

in the progressive and transformative influence of public space and public works, an investment powerfully associated with the decision to embank the Thames River. In Chapter 1 I argue that the brief episode of wet-nursing that forms the early narrative of Dombey and Son (1846-48) provides the basis for the novel's most fundamental anxieties about the autonomy of personal identity but also for its vision of renovated family structures. If the wet-nursing episode is the novel's emblem of social fluidity, as has often been claimed, it is also ineluctably associated with regimes of public health and social controi.24 It is the novel's task to establish imaginary limits to the corrosiveness of that fluidity while at the same time policing itself, and this is precisely what is accomplished by the renovated but limited forms of nuclear familiarity precipitated by wet-nursing. Thus the circulation of breast milk turns out to be both the problem and the solution in this modestly utopian and voluntaristic narrative. The circuits traced by breast milk extend beyond the family, but only barely so, and fluids reconstitute the social-if not the psychic-borders they dissolve. Chapter 2 turns to Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) and analyzes its darker representation of threats to the integrity of the body and the autonomy of the individual, associated in the novel with stark and profoundly structural shifts in the urban environment. In response to unprecedented threats from the river at the heart of London, policymakers and novelists alike anticipated modifications of social space and of human populations on a scale unimaginable in earlier eras. A novel that begins with traditional literary renderings of bodies transformed and reconstituted through immersion in the river moves outward to consider the reciprocal transformations of river and riverside environs, and ultimately to consider the reshaping of the social landscape precipitated by fantasies of controlling the river. The novel registers these changes both in its mise-en-scene and on the bodies of its characters, producing a less utopian, if more ambitious, representation of what happens when bodies are forced into mutual articulation through the public medium of fluids. Part II contrasts two George Eliot novels that display dramatically different investments in the question of fluids. The plot of The Mill on the Floss (1860) revolves insistently at almost every point around the course of a river, while in Daniel Deronda (1876), fluids seems to haunt the plot only at its margins, and even then only in phantasmatic or figurative form. Yet in the end both novels make fluids central to the task of conjoining historical and rhetorical configurations. Chapter 3 focuses on a series of Eliot texts published between 1858 and 1862: that is, in the brief period between the "Great Stink" (generally

DARK ECOLOGIES

17

understood as Victorian London's greatest moment of prostration before the chaos of an unregulated and chaotic fluid environment) and the commencement of work on the Embankment in 1864. These texts illustrate dramatically, if in different ways, the mixed hopes and anxieties attendant on emerging technological developments in the circulation and management of fluids. Eliot's earliest fictional works might be said to be plotted around a series of unexpected and catastrophic blockages and detours in the circulation of fluids-blood, water, and milk-none of which is entirely anticipated by the characters, even though in many cases the technological intervention is anxiously expected and awaited. Though emergent technology is not always the variable most directly responsible for the unexpected detours and closural difficulties experienced by both characters and readers alike, the technological manipulation of fluids is clearly under suspicion in these texts and is consistently contrasted with more humane and humanist husbanding of fluids. This latter approach is depicted both literally, as the confinement of fluids to their allegedly proper and natural channels (in particular, the confinement of bodily fluids to their original bodies), and figuratively, as the subordination of fluid management itself to the dictates and mores of sententious wisdom, according to which fluids are not irrational and unruly but predictable and self-evident. Chapter 4 turns from texts written at the beginning of the embankment period to a text written at its end-Eliot's Daniel Deronda-in which the possibilities of personal and civic renovation associated with the embankment of the Thames are embraced as signs of national and racial vocation, and then in turn redomesticated and reimagined in terms of an exclusive milk kinship mediated by the figure of the mother. Daniel Deronda thus in a sense ends where Dombey and Son had begun almost three decades earlier, entrusting to the figure of a maternally supervised circulation the burden of mediating the relationship between the individual and collective body. Yet Daniel Deronda clearly reflects a more modern comfort with the way in which the collective management of fluids might be shaping or shadowing the destiny of individual citizens. Whereas the imaginary ties of milk kinship in Dombey and Son initiate mildly renovated forms of domestic configuration, in Daniel Deronda milk kinship ends up being a figure for more modern, state-political, even world-historical reconfigurations. The final section of the book returns us to the circulation of bodily fluids: breast milk (shadowed by blood) in George Moore's Esther Waters (1894) and blood (shadowed by breast milk) in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Rather than focusing on shifts over a brief but discrete period of history as I do in

18

INTRODUCTION

parts I and II, I treat these two novels as part of a unitary cultural formation. Both these novels center on literally leaky bodies, and thus differ significantly from Eliot's mid-Victorian novels, in which the discourse of fluids tilts more toward the plasticity of social space than toward the plasticity of individual identity. In both these fin-de-siecle novels the human body seems alarmingly and quite literally to be hemorrhaging. Treating the leaky body in realist and gothic fashion respectively, Moore and Stoker try to tie the fate of that body to the management of female labor, which is itself moving outward from the (ostensibly) traditional sphere of the home. In a period where the demography of labor shifted more profoundly and dramatically than did technologies and policies regulating public health, the very meaning of threats to bodily integrity changed, and yet fluids still remained the medium through which threats (and solutions) to social cohesion were expressed. Though the novels contrast dramatically in terms of tone and emphasis, they share the common task of illuminating the evolving social circuits to which bodily fluids are exposed, and in representing social reproduction as literally vested in the husbanding of a woman's bodily fluids. In each of these novels, a reading of the more explicitly fetishized fluid (milk in Esther Waters; blood in Dracula) in light of less fetishized fluids provides the critical leverage for connecting the discourse of fluids to more general social anxieties without leaving the literalness of fluids behind. How to figure the relationship of the individual to the social totality? How to figure the relationship of the body to its material environment? These are overlapping, but not identical problems, and the discourse of fluids provided an opportunity for the Victorians to think through the relationship of the two. Fluids were thus for the Victorians a key medium in the articulation of the individual and the social, both threatening the autonomy of the individual, and at the same time allowing for symbolic gestures of conservation (that is, husbanding one's own bodily fluids). This book ends on a border of Victorian culture that endlessly returns to us with renewed familiarity. Questions concerning the dissolubility of the body and of the borders between the human and the nonhuman now seem self-evident to us as one of the principal links between nineteenth-century gothic and the science-inflected popular culture and theory oflate twentieth and early twenty-first century, including, though not limited to, the proliferation of virtual technologies and genres. 25 Thus it is specifically along the axis of exotic bodily transformations that the Victorian and contemporary eras have been ushered into greater proximity or identity. 26 Following Stallybrass and White, I assume that unsettling the borders of the human body,

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19

despite the uncanny flirtations with the nonhuman that it establishes, is nonetheless an essentially social phenomenon with a social function. The destabilizing of the body in the Victorian imagination never needed to wait, as we shall see, for the fin-de-siecle's particular brands of weird science: it never required the exotic forms of science-gone-wild that we associate with mesmerism, degenerationism, and eugenics. On the contrary, as this book tries to demonstrate (and as the final section attempts to demonstrate through juxtaposition), we can detect a fascination with the dissolution of the individual body in the social body-a fascination we might call "ecological"-in the Victorian period's most humble, prosaic, and nonfigurative narratives as well as in its most lurid and sensational ones.

Ji PART ONE

Milk and Water The Body and Social Space in Dickens

Ji

CHAPTER

1

Disavowing Milk Psychic Disintegration and Domestic Reintegration in Dickens's Dombey and Son

From the latter half of the twentieth century on, economic and social arrangements in Western industrialized democracies have not been overly propitious for the practice of maternal breast-feeding. The breast-feeding advocacy movement, viewing this development with alarm, has generated two lines of argumentation for promoting the importance of maternal breast-feeding, one based on an antifunctionalist ideal of intimacy and female autonomy and the other based on global-economic and ecological rationales. It is easy to see how these two arguments-one fiercely individualist and one unabashedly technocratic-might sit uncomfortably with one another. 1 Arguing for breast-feeding as an expression of personal intimacy or autonomy in many ways strains against the implications of treating breast-feeding as a public-health issue or breast milk as a logistical resource. Although the social division of labor in Victorian England was more congenial to the practice of maternal breast-feeding, ideologies surrounding the practice were no less vexed, in part because of a social practice that ramified the very same contradictions we have witnessed at the turn of the twenty-first century. Wet-nursing-the practice of breast-feeding someone else's baby for pay-was a significant cultural practice in Victorian England. While not the dominant mode of infant feeding, it was commonplace enough for cultural commentators to rail against it and for 23

24

PART 1: MILK AND WATER

domestic handbooks and manuals to help new mothers in the delicate task of negotiating it. Wet-nursing both reinforced the cultural value of a highly sentimentalized and deeply symbolic bodily fluid and at the same time acknowledged its potential commodifiability and circulation beyond the strict circuits of the nuclear family. In a society with no safe artificial infant-feeding substances or devices (indeed with no theory of germs or germ sterilization) and with rates of infant mortality that were extraordinarily high by our standards, neither infancy nor maternal breast-feeding were viewed as sentimentally as they are now. Nonetheless, breast-feeding was still unlikely to be regarded from any more functionalist a perspective than it is today, and breast milk itself was far from being regarded in the light of a collective social surplus. Rousseau railed against the allegedly unnatural and socially pernicious practice of wet-nursing, and "by the end of the [eighteenth] century," writes Susan Greenfield, "being a good mother meant that a woman had to suckle her own children." 2 The iconic image of a mother suckling her baby becomes a touchstone for romantic ideas of imaginative spontaneity and natural innocence, most famously in Wordsworth's "Bless'd the infant Babe" passage from The Prelude, and Tennyson's similar meditation in section 45 of "In Memoriam." 3 Thus the tension between a commodified and a sacralized conception of breast milk, central to the history of infant feeding in the twentieth century, may be traced back to an incipient intuition of that paradox in Victorian culture. According to Janet Golden, "Wet nursing cast a long shadow over twentieth-century efforts to make human milk a commodity." 4 Golden's implicit argument is that the twentieth-century discomfort with the commodification of breast milk derived more from the lingering and stigmatizing association of commodified breast milk with underclass providers than with an antagonism to commodification per se. (Accordingly this dilemma was ideologically resolved in the second half of the twentieth century by redefining shared breast milk as a "gift," and accepting it only from middle-class women who were immune from suspicion of financial motive.) But is it the case that the principal anxiety incited by wet-nursing in the Victorian period derived from the practice's exposure of middle-class families to underclass bodies? Or did responses to the practice betoken a more fundamental apprehension of emerging patterns in the relationship of individual to social identity? To explore this question we may usefully turn to Dickens's work. Dombey and Son is an early and key text in the development of modern attitudes toward the commodification of bodily fluids. It represents the transit of breast milk outside the strict circuit of the nuclear

DISAVOWING MILK

25

family, and it places this circulation explicitly in the context of urbanization, industrialization, and public health concerns. According to Laura Berry, the novel outlines and intervenes in a "drama of social fluidity," and its key rhetorical strategy is to link wet-nursing to the railway boom of the 1840s: The wet nurse circulates her body fluids upward; in the doctor's words, they flow from the "poorer classes" and are "admitted into wealthier families." The railroad laborer represents the socially leveling effects of the expanding railway system as it constructs a circulatory network of arteries and veins throughout the geographic and social body of England. Each of these figures is tensely poised over a fissure seen as necessary but dangerous. 5 In underscoring the novel's metonymic connection of wet-nursing to the railroad, Berry sketches out a crucial link in the discourse of fluids: the reciprocal relationship between the mutability of the body and the mutability of social relations. Just as the wet nurse Polly Toodle represents a threatening cross-class alliance for her employer, her husband's work as a railroad stoker aligns wet-nursing with yet other kinds of social dislocation and upheaval in the eyes of the novel's middle-class characters. The practice of wet-nursing undoubtedly opens up the nuclear family-and the ideal of the self-possessed individual on which the fetishized image of that family's insularity is based-to the vicissitudes of "social fluidity" and cross-class mobility. But the link between the itinerary of bodily fluids and the vicissitudes of social fluidity maps out only one part of the discourse of fluids, and in this chapter I will try to fill in the psychologically and socially critical consequences introduced by Dickens's decision to situate the wetnursing plot in the larger context of public-health debates. I argue that that the vicissitudes of bodily fluids are both more corrosive than Berry suggests (striking at the roots of psychic and not just social autonomy) and at the same time linked to powerful fantasies concerning the prosthetic extension of human power through sanitarian and state-bureaucratic transformations of the environment. As we shall see in this chapter, Dickens's decision to frame the wet-nursing plot in the larger context of public health speaks on the one hand to anxieties of identity that go deeper than social mobility, and on the other hand to fantasies of social ties and arrangements newly renovated in the space opened up by the regulation and manipulation of fluids. In Dombey and Son such change is imagined in the limited domestic terms pursued by the early sanitarians, who tried to renovate the space of individual households, albeit on a massive scale. But in Our Mutual Friend, change is imagined much more radically as the plastically transformative

26

PART 1: MILK AND WATER

encounter of individual bodies with the environment, unmediated by the sheltering figure of the home. But follow the good clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at every breath he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the echoes of our carriage wheels .... Look round upon the world of odious sightsmillions of immortal creatures have no other world on earth-at the lightest mention of which humanity revolts, and dainty delicacy living in the next street, stops her ears. (Dombey and Son) 6 In a singular twist at the climax of Dombey and Son the narrator suddenly and inexplicably pauses to link the central driving element of the plot-the mystery of Dombey's misogynistic "master vice"-at great length to the scandalous sanitary conditions of the working class. The "unnaturalness" of Dombey's behavior is depicted as the inevitable consequence of failed circulation: of "foetid" bodies and domiciles that "channel" disease inward, only to produce "poisoned fountains" that in turn "flow" outward into public institutions (738). The passage revels in sanitarian rhetoric, describing the heroic efforts of doctors and ministers to probe and ameliorate the decaying bodies and households of the underclass. Yet the entire passage seems oddly tangential to the initial question of whether or not Dombey's will-to-power is to be attributed to "nature." The extended trope linking Dombey's perversity to the "moral pestilence" of the working class seems highly digressive, and its bizarre interpellation of him as victim of sanitary neglect seems hardly convmcmg. Yet what, after all, is so strange about this juxtaposition? In a similar passage from Bleak House, Dickens outlines more schematically the double spectrum-from physical to moral disease and from underclass to ruling class-that links the fates of the widest possible range of characters, from the aristocratic Dedlocks to the crossing-sweep Jo: What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? ... It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and the corner of streets, and on the doors, and in the windowsF In this famous passage, however-as in many similar ones from Bleak House-it is an explicitly metonymic chain that connects extreme points on

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the social scale. This faithfully reflects the nursery-rhyme structure of the narrative, in which Sir Leicester Dedlock marries the woman who gave birth to the girl who nursed the boy who contracted the disease from the slum. But the "mystery" of Sir Leicester's character is never laid at the feet of Jo. By contrast, the passage from Dombey and Son operates much more radically and metaphorically by identifying Dombey's very "nature" with the victims of social and sanitary neglect. A first clue to the source of this peculiar conflation may be found in the metaphor of the "poisoned fountain," for it is another fountain that lies at the heart of Dombey's troubles: the "common fountain" of Polly Toodle's breast milk, which exposes Dombey to the vicissitudes of social circulation from the very beginning of the novel (73). Thus the novel appears to associate the domestic circulation of bodily fluids with the state management of public or common fluids, and to suggest that serious crises of identity are somehow precipitated by this connection. But what exactly connects wet-nursing to sanitarianism, and how are family structure and personal identity called into question in the process? In order to answer this we need to compare Dombey and Son with Dickens's other great novel of fluids-Our Mutual Friend-a novel almost obsessively plotted around a series of immersions in and rescues from the Thames River. It is a commonplace of Dombey criticism that the novel is chiefly concerned with articulating the relationship between the domestic and public or economic spheres. This is a project that by most accounts has disappeared by the end of Dickens's career. Jonathan Arac and Terry Eagleton each in different ways lament Dickens's renunciation of any ambition to represent the relationship of individuals to "community" or "social totality" in Our Mutual Friend, and more recent interpretations testify to the attenuated roles of family and bureaucratic structures in a novel that seems to stage relatively stark, unmediated encounters of individual bodies with the overwhelming physical environment of London. 8 This shift in Dickens's career has been theorized by D. A. Miller, whose influential 1983 article on Dickens's Bleak House identifies a "post-carceral" logic that at once sustains and intricately dismantles the novel's distinctions between private and institutional space. 9 Miller sees a subtle but important disjunction between Dickens's earlier novels, which localize power by distinguishing between spaces of subjection to, and spaces of refuge from, authority; and the later novels, which disseminate state power and thus deconstruct the relationship between interior and exterior, private and public, domestic and institutional. By the time Miller finishes tracing Bleak House's multiple dissolutions and reinscriptions of these fundamental binaries, however, it is

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difficult to see how a carceral landscape or logic could ever have been sustained, and indeed, Miller is careful to emphasize that the subtle metamorphosis of discipline into self-discipline is characteristic both of the newer, more nebulous social forms and of the older carceral organization. Miller's diachronic scheme, then, would seem somewhat to undo itself after having posited the ideal against which postcarcerality works. It is not surprising, then, that subsequent critics have worked alternately at deconstructing the relationship between the domestic and public spheres in earlier Dickens novels, and relocalizing and rehabilitating sociality in general (and social institutions specifically) in the later novels. 10 What Miller shows us, nevertheless, is how the question of the relationship between the individual and the social is perpetually kept open. Domesticity and the family are crucial internal fronts in a continually fluctuating binary system, and they can be assimilated alternately to one or the other side of the spectrum-as attested to by the fact that the crucial opposition appears alternately as a distinction between the individual and the social and as a distinction between the domestic and the social. What this suggests is that the problem is not so much localization of the entities in this system as localization of the boundaries. And this is where fluids come in. In 1842 Edwin Chadwick published his Report on the Sanitary Condition if the Labouring Population of Great Britain, a document that portrayed England as a vast, chaotic network of fluids linking city with countryside, private households with institutions, and bodies with public space. Two chief axioms guided Chadwick's depiction of this fluid economy: one, that fluids-ever on the decay when not in motion-were unrelenting in their assault on all structures of human sociality; two, that fluids, like human sociality, could be regulated. Most often, this regulation meant correcting some disequilibrium through a coordinated system of supply and drainage. 11 Cities rich in raw sewage but crying for clean water could be connected with rural districts starving for soil nutrients but moldering in excess moisture. 12 And in the cities themselves, an "arterial-venous" system would articulate private and public space: in homes where water was piped in and human waste piped out, the pull of gin and the public house would disappear and people would remain at home to cultivate superior domestic habits. 13 Regulating fluids thus meant establishing and guarding the boundaries between the insides and outsides of bodies, of homes, and even of cities. At the same time, of course, the regulation of fluids implied, and indeed depended on, techniques for the very interpenetration of space, the very suspension of boundaries, and the very inversion of interior and exterior, which fluids threatened to create in the first place.

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Chadwick's report seems to support Miller's intuitive-if not explicitly stated-sense that the boundary between domestic and public space was already under pressure in early Victorian Britain. Conceptualizing bodily and social space in terms of interpenetrating systems of fluids, Chadwick laid the groundwork for an essentially techno-ecological apprehension of the Victorian lifeworld. As with the cyborgs of the modern "Terminator" films ("flesh and blood over a stainless steel chassis"), infrastructure and ecosystem would be imperceptibly welded in Chadwick's scheme. As we have seen, this vision had a double, even contradictory effect. While on the one hand it was the ultimate incarnation of capillary relations, on the other it resolved itself into nodes of consumers (essentially households) and centralized providers. But if the underlying principles of sanitarianism worked from the beginning both to strengthen and to undermine the autonomy of the domestic household, there were important historical shifts in that conceptualization. In the 1840s, while parliament rejected one after another of Chadwick's blueprints for vast integrated systems of water supply and sewerage, sanitarian inspectors and doctors still plodded on with the normal science of fieldwork, visiting tens of thousands of impoverished homes and turning the description of household conditions into one of the dominant journalistic and novelistic genres of the period. 14 If the Thames was sensationally polluted and the subterranean infrastructure of the city sensationally mysterious, it was still the individual household-the failed valve in the social mechanism-that lay at the center of the reformist vision. Two decades later, however, in a substantially different economic and ideological environment, the city and the river had become the dominant imaginary objects of reformist energies. 15 In both the earlier and the later phases of sanitarian reform, fundamental questions about how to control the circulation of fluids prompted far-reaching questions about the nature and limits of individual identity, and about the relationship between the body and an increasingly rationalized and commodified environment. But in the earlier phase the most pressing questions had to do with the relationship between individuals and domestic structure, while in the later phase the question was how to locate individuals in the context of a rapidly transforming social infrastructure. This trajectory emphasizes aspects of Miller's scheme that Miller himself underplays: the shift from discrete and enclosed to open and permeable spaces. At the same time it suggests that the very symbolic and material vehicles whose circulations outlined the boundaries of domestic autonomy in the earlier period were responsible for outlining the contours of more large-scale, public, and institutional pressures on the individual only a couple of decades later.

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Fluids are the principal symbolic and material vehicles of sociality in Dickens's novels. From the dislocations of identity revolving around breast milk to the dislocations of identity revolving around the Thames River, Dickens explored the vexed relationship between symbolizations of personal identity and mechanisms of socialization. Without the incipiently ecological understanding of fluids provided by the sanitarian movement during the 1830s and 1840s, the pervasive nineteenth-century analogy between the human body and the body politic would have remained an abstract allegory. But the sanitarian conceptualization of fluids as a generic category integrating public space with bodily functions made the connection between individuality and sociality newly literal and concrete. 16 The same questions that revolved around fluids (How to regulate their invasiveness and pervasiveness? How to establish property in them? How to determine their boundaries and composition?) were precisely the questions that were being asked about individual human bodies. Yet within this basic analogy there were decisive shifts. The great social drama in Dickens's novels involves the relationship between voluntarism and bureaucracy, a relationship that his most astute critics have seen as an ambivalent one, oscillating between antagonism and collusion. If we pay attention tothe way in which fluids mediate the relationship between the individual and the social, we can see that Dickens moved from an early, heroic-sanitarian fascination with the relationship between bodies and households to a later, technocratic fascination with the relationship between bodies and public landscape. In this chapter I will examine two novels that center on contested fluids, that is, on fluids that provide the site for contestation not only between individuals but between the very concepts of individuality and privacy on the one hand, and public space, public property, and public good on the other. Though sharing many of the same tropes and preoccupations, these two novels-the Dombey and Son (1848) and Our Mutual Friend (1865)-belong to two very different moments in the Victorian conceptualization of fluids, bodies, and public space. As we shall see, the fascination, respectively, with breast milk in Dombey and Son and with · the Thames River in Our Mutual Friend, corresponds to a shift from "public health" to "public works" as the overarching context for Victorian thinking about fluids. I have divided these decades somewhat schematically and artificially; obviously, domesticity continued to be a concern in the 1860s (as the spirit of private, voluntaristic solutions to large-scale social problems persisted). Similarly there were, as we shall see, technological solutions proffered in the 1840s. But there was a shift in the emphasis or weight given to these solutions. And in either case-in either era-solutions tended to disarticulate

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what sanitarian reformers in theory saw as interconnected: the relationship between body, household, and public space. To the extent that it is the business of the novel to work through the relationship between rhetorical figures, narrative tropes, and social material, one might expect novels of this period to be particularly successful in symbolizing the trajectories that lead from individuals, through the family and household, to the larger arena of social relations and infrastructures. But every novel has its own life and its own preoccupations. Dickens explored the household, and then later the idea of public space, in his attempts to localize the arena for social change, without a considerable interest in the flow between the two. Though his novels always, as Miller implies, betray a relationship between domesticity and the infrastructural concretizations of state power, individual novels tend to emphasize one or the other of these aspects of social life, and thus in some ways to mystify or foreclose any investigation into their relationship. Dombey and Son is written in the shadow of the Chadwickian publichealth movement, which for all its emphases on technological fixes, relied on a fundamentally domestic and anthropomorphized view of the world, with public health inextricably tied to individual conduct and individual testimony. The kitchen, the bedroom, and the cellar are the principal dramatic sites of Chadwick's 1842 report on the sanitary conditions of the working class, just as the panoptical household is the dramatic space of Dombey and SonY Our Mutual Friend, by contrast, is written during the dawning of a new Victorian confidence in the public management of fluids, a movement that begins with the water-supply acts and the sewering of Greater London in the 1850s, and with the commencement in 1863 of Victorian London's monster public-works project: the radically transformative embankment of the Thames River. The riverside that is disappearing even as Dickens writes his novel is the dominant mise-en-scene of Our Mutual Friend. Corresponding to two proximate but distinct historical moments, then, are two very different, if related, kinds of novel: the first of which imagines human community in voluntaristic and familial terms as the gradual expansion of kinship ties initiated by the communion of bodily fluids that are themselves inalienable and unalterable essences; the second of which imagines change as a function of emplacement and of the plastically transformative power of technology. In Dombey and Son the novel's pervasive domestic and bodily fluids are the medium for an ever-expanding network of social relationships, virtually all of which reproduce the circuits of the nuclear family. Although the novel is haunted by a parallel economy of public, commercial, imperial fluids, this second economy is largely ghostly and phantasmagoric. JH The individual

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household and the individual body remain at the center of all processes of social renovation. The central social and imaginative task in the novel is the management of fluids; household and body are conceived of, both, as input/ outflow mechanisms. Though the novel goes to great rhetorical lengths to emphasize a microcosm-macrocosm relationship between domestic melodrama on the one hand and a host of providential, spiritual, capitalist, and imperial frameworks on the other hand, the relationship between the two levels remains purely allegorical. The novel's two central sites each represents the project of regulating, subordinating, and rationalizing fluids: private fluids in the case of the Dombey household; public fluids in the case of Solomon Gills's shop. And both sites are, at least initially, symbols of a failure or breakdown in the economy of fluids. The death of Mrs. Dombey imperils the circulation of fluids necessary to sustain the family heir; and the absence of customers at Solomon Gills's nautical-instrument shop suggests a breakdown or transition in Britain's systems for rationalizing its merchant marine economy. Accordingly, both households generate compensatory circulations: the wet-nursing of Paul Dombey, and the "flow" of Walter Gay through successive horizons of the imperial economy. The domestic spaces of Dombey and Son are virtually under siege by forces of dampness. In Dombey's mansion the invasion is stayed off only by a tenuous vitality. After the first Mrs. Dombey's death, "every chandelier or lustre, muffled in holland, looked like a monstrous tear depending from the ceiling's eye. Odours, as from vaults and damp places, came out of the chimneys," and after Paul dies, "keys rusted in the locks of doors. Damp started on the walls, and as the stains came out, the pictures seemed to go in and secrete themselves. Mildew and mould began to lurk in closets. Fungus trees grew in corners of the cellars" (75, 394). But it is not only the Dombey household that is so assaulted. Miss Tox's house is afflicted by a "prevailing mustiness," which Miss Tox combats with regular applications of "turpentine" (144-45). The homes on Mrs. Pipchin's street are besieged by snails; the MacStinger household is in a perpetual "artificial fog" and "clammy perspiration" from obsessive washing; and the Skettles's home is periodically flooded by the river (160, 180, 417). Even the novel's commercial establishments are not immune, though it is implied that dampness here is smuggled in by the characters themselves. The "mouldy," seabed ambience of Dombey's place of business is implicitly attributed to Dombey himself, who is said to haunt his office "like damp, or cold air" (237-38). This is indeed the oppressive, pervasive dampness that, according to Virginia Woolf in Orlando, invaded and altered the "constitution of England" in the nineteenth century. 19

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The initial chapters of the novel are awash in bodily and domestic fluids. The novel opens with the newborn Paul drying out before the fire-the sole polite allusion to the fluids that drench the surrounding birth room, from which his mother will shortly be borne "out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world" (60). The postpartum ordeal little affects Mr. Dombey, whose "cup of satisfaction was so full at this moment" that he "could afford a drop or two of its contents" for his daughter (51). But it does affect his sister, Mrs. Chick, who alternately drinks and cries her way through the crisis (55). If Dombey appears to be associated more with metaphorical than with literal fluids, this should hardly be surprising. Most of the men in the novel seem to exist in a state of mystified ignorance in relation to the dynamics of domestic circulation. When Mrs. Dombey's death sends the family scurrying to provide a wet nurse, Mr. Chick appears ignorant of even the most basic facts of female reproductive physiology. When apprised of the new crisis, the "hydrophobi[ c]" Chick remarks casually to his wife, "I hope you are suited, my dear." On being informed that she is not, he inquires whether "something temporary" might not "be done with a teapot?" (62-63). A less laconic version of the same vexed masculine relationship to the domestic circulation of fluids is later expressed by Dombey's messenger Perch (who is afraid even to mention Captain Cuttle's ominous hook to the pregnant Mrs. Perch lest she miscarry [303, 309]). Perch expresses his horror of the free mention which Rob Toodle makes of his mother's wet-nursing: it's hardly to be bore, Sir, that a common lad like that should come a prowling here, and saying that his mother nursed our House's young gentleman .... I am sure, Sir ... that although Mrs. Perch was at that time nursing as thriving a little girl, Sir, as we've ever took the liberty of adding to our family, I wouldn't have made so free as drop a hint of her being capable of imparting nourishment, not if it was never so! (377) Perch's mixed shame and fascination differ from Chick's cultivated ignorance, but both attitudes derive from the same anxious relationship to the circulation of fluids in the domestic sphere. On the spectrum from blissful ignorance to deliberate mystification, however, Mr. Dombey himself clearly stands at one extreme. In the novel's most powerful scene of disavowal, Dombey explains to his son (who has tacitly disparaged "money" for being unable to save his mother's life) that money "could, very often, even keep off death, for a long time together." As proof of this Dombey adduces the fact that money had "secured to his [Paul's] Mama the services of Mr. Pilkins, by which he, Paul, had often profited himself; likewise of the great Doctor Parker Peps, whom

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he had never known" (153). This ostensible object lesson in the literally vital power of money is astonishing, of course, for its elision of the wet nurse Toodle-whose breast milk quite literally saves Paul's life. Why does Dombey disavow the single most important thing his money can buy-another person's bodily fluids? His dissimulation passes over the novel's most powerful testimony to the essentially social nature of the fluidexchanges that sustain the household economy. As we shall see, it is not so much the idea of fluid expenditure (Dombey, after all, can "afford a drop or two" for his daughter) or of fluid invasion that threatens Dombey, as it is the idea of fluid economies, lodged in hearth and heart. But water is not the fluid around which the Dombey world revolves. That distinction is reserved for breast milk, the "mean want" of which initiates and configures the entire plot of the novel (67). The infant Paul's "want" of breast milk is "mean" not only because it forces his father to cross class barriers, but because it shatters as well Dombey's illusion of psychic autonomy. Consider the sequence of passages in which Dombey reflects on the alteration in domestic structure activated by the hiring of the wet nurse Polly Toodle. Dombey's first reflection is, not surprisingly, on the humiliation of cross-class dependency: "That the life and progress on which he built such hopes, should be endangered in the outset by so mean a want; that Dombey and Son should be tottering for a nurse, was a sore humiliation" (66-67). Dombey recoils from "the thought of being dependent ... on a hired serving-woman" (67). But this initial, straightforward anxiety is quickly transformed into a more horrifying fantasy: "My God," says Dombey to himself, thinking of Polly Toodle's own children, "to think of their some day claiming a sort of relationship to Paul!" (67). As Laura Berry has observed, Dombey settles on a program of linguistic prophylaxis in order to insulate his household against the claims of milk kinship. The wet nurse may enter the household only pseudonymously, to emphasize the disjunction between her world and his: "While you are here, I must stipulate that you are always known as-say as Richards-an ordinary name, and convenient" (67). But in initiating the connection between linguistic and fluid substitution, Dombey ironically triggers a far more vertiginous series of reflections and substitutions: It may have been characteristic of Mr. Dombey's pride, that he pitied himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, ... but poor little fellow! Those words being on his lips, it occurred to him ... that a great temptation was being placed in this woman's way. Her infant was a boy too. Now, would it be possible for her to change them?

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Though he was soon satisfied that he had dismissed the idea as romantic and unlikely-though possible, there was no denying-he could not help pursuing it so far as to entertain within himself a picture of what his condition would be, if he should discover such an imposture when he was grown old. Whether a man so situated would be able to pluck away the result of so many years of usage, confidence and belief, from the impostor, and endow a stranger with it? (71) Here, the wet nurse's hypothetical act of substitution-in which names and identities are exchanged in the place of milk-precipitates a crisis of self-alienation on Dombey's part. It is not simply that he imagines not recognizing his own son; more critically, he contemplates the self-division, the unimaginability of his own condition, that this would produce. Forced by the relay of substitutions to contemplate the inevitable propping of identity on identification, Dombey tries to bring the play of signifiers to a halt by establishing a kind of internal panopticon in his own household: But it was idle speculating thus. It couldn't happen. In a moment afterwards he determined that it could, but that such women were constantly observed, and had no opportunity given them for the accomplishment of such a design .... As his unusual emotion subsided, these misgivings gradually melted away, though so much of their shadow remained behind, that he was constant in his resolution to look closely after Richards himself, without appearing to do so. (71) This solution-shadowing the fluid economy that it both abhors and mimics-produces the novel's distinctive dynamics of inspection, which turn specifically on the regulation of fluids. 20 Breast-feeding is established as the phenomenon that at once prompts and crucially exceeds regulation, being defined by the narrator as "an Emergency that will sometimes arise in the best-regulated Families" (61). Immediately after Dombey hits on his panoptical solution, Polly Toodle is instructed to cease crying over the separation from her own children (lest her breast milk turn acidic), and promised "unlimited" supplies of porter to stimulate and enrich her supply of milkwhich is shortly described by Miss Tox as a "common fountain" (72-73). At the same time, Dombey institutes the Chinese-boxlike structure of living arrangements that enables him to observe his son and wet nurse from the recesses of his own chambers: The apartments which Mr. Dombey reserved for his own inhabiting, were attainable from the hall, and consisted of a sitting-room; a library ... and a kind of conservatory or little glass breakfast-room

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beyond .... These three rooms opened upon one another. In the morning, when Mr. Dombey was at his breakfast in one or other of the two first-mentioned of them, as well as in the afternoon when he came home to dinner, a bell was rung for Richards to repair to this glass chamber, and there walk to and fro with her young charge. (75-76) The inversion of the private/public relationship, whereby Toodle's bodily fluids become available for "common" inspection and use, has its counterpart in the inversion of the panoptical relationship between Toodle and Dombey. Toodle, on display for Dombey, nonetheless regards him as "a lone prisoner in a cell," and when Florence is added to the family's command performance in the glass chamber, Dombey "almost felt as if she watched and distrusted him" (76, 84). Thus the structure of surveillance that is supposed to halt the play of substitutions opened up by the traffic in bodily fluids is turned back on itself and produces a mirroring structure uncannily like the fluidity it was intended to arrest. This paradox echoes throughout the novel, as the dual implications of wet-nursing-new kinship configurations and new efforts at regulation-are reproduced in household after household. The milk kinship that Dombey abhors becomes in fact the guiding principle of sociality for the remainder of the novel, which is dominated by adoptive relationships. Solomon Gills's shop is perhaps the clearest instance of this. This is the site where Walter plays the role of surrogate brother to Florence and surrogate son to Gills (and then to Cuttle); Cuttle plays the role of surrogate father to Florence; and Rob Grinder (Toodle) plays the role of substitute for Walter, and ward to both Gills and Cuttle. But the household is not endlessly flexible about kinship transformation. Cuttle is so terrified of being apprehended (and forcibly espoused) by his former landlord Mrs. MacStinger-to whose children he has become a sort of surrogate father-that he modifies the physical structure of Gills's establishment to guard against discovery: What the Captain suffered ... whenever a bonnet passed, or how often he darted out of the shop to elude imaginary MacStingers, and sought safety in the attic, cannot be told. But to avoid the fatigues attendant on this means of self-preservation, the Captain curtained the glass door of communication between the shop and parlour, on the inside; fitted a key to it from the bunch that had been sent to him; and cut a small hole of espial in the wall .... On a bonnet appearing, the Captain instantly slipped into his garrison, locked himself up, and took a secret observation of the enemy. (438)

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This panoptical structure is reproduced elsewhere in the novel both more and less innocently. Dombey, described at one point as "the beadle of private life; the beadle of our business and our bosoms," turns out to have his place of business organized in much the same way as his household: as a series of inner and outer offices, with his own being the innermost (113). (As in his domestic life, though, Dombey finds himself perhaps more surveyed than surveyor: from his office he is "stared at, through a dome-shaped window," and his ostensible vantage point does not prevent Carker from laying bare "the whole anatomy of the iron room" in order to master the "transactions of the Firm" [238, 722].) Florence, at the more positive end of the same spectrum, gazes innocently into the home of her next-door neighbors through her bedroom window, and vicariously experiences the thrill of a daughter adored by her widowed father (318-19). The ambivalence about domestic surveillance, and resulting uncertainty about the relationship between surveyor and surveyed, is hardly surprising in a novel written between the new Poor Law of 1834 and the Public Health Act of 1848. Reactions to these two pieces of legislation, respectively, mark out a transition from extreme hostility to general acceptance of the very idea of state inspection and regulation of the home in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It was, ironically, in his capacity as administrator of the much reviled Poor Law that Chadwick instituted the regime of domestic inspection that led to sanitary reforms-which, for all their ideological patronization of the underclass, still championed poor tenants and consumers at the expense of landlords, water companies, ratepayers, and vestries. The very idea of an inspector was undergoing complex revision during this period, as the home came to be seen as a potentially dangerous site of fluid management and exchange. Health inspectors entered where beadles and police inspectors either couldn't or wouldn't tread. (In Dombcy and Son the beadle threatens to "keep an eye" on Cuttle but does not actually enter Solomon Gills's shop; and in an excess of mediated and voyeuristic energies, the police keep a watch on Mr. Toots as he keeps a watch on Florence Dombey's window [790, 671].) Not surprisingly, inspectors aroused the same ambivalent response as did the later figure of the detective. Inspectors are both the villains and heroes of a grand social drama in Dickens's novel. The novel's first instance of domestic inspection confirms all the suspicions and hostilities raised by the new Poor Law. Mrs. Chick is engaged in "inspection" of the mourning preparations in the Dombey household when Miss Tox enters with news of the wet nurse Toodle (61). After testifying to the hygienic conditions of the Toodle household ("the cleanest place, my dear! You might eat your dinner off the floor," [64]) Miss Tox hands Polly

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Toodle over to Mrs. Chick for "a close private examination of Polly, her children, her marriage certificate, testimonials, and so forth" (66). Rob Toodle is produced "as a certificate of the family health" (680). Once employed in the Dombey household, Polly's intake and output of fluids are constantly monitored. Of course, Polly is not only a site of fluid exchange herself, but a part of a larger fluid economy. "Little Paul, suffering no contamination from the blood of the Toodles," grows "stronger and stronger every day," but apparently at the expense of his nurse: almost "superintended to death" by the "constancy and zeal" of Miss Tox's "domestic militia," Polly "los[es] flesh hourly under her patronage" (100). Even the aptly nicknamed "Floy" is a threat to this economy of fluids, her tears treated as yet one more substance that will "worrit the wet nurse" (78). The work of inspection is not only about the discipline ofbodies, but about the discipline of spaces as well. Part of the health inspector's work involved the cataloguing of domestic interiors for future reference. The panoptical eye of the Dombey household is thus calibrated to take note of physical as well as human details, as in this scene where Dombey makes a mental snapshot of his recalcitrant wife's room: He looked back, as he went out at the door, upon the well-lighted and luxurious room, the beautiful and glittering objects everywhere displayed, the shape of Edith in its rich dress seated before her glass, and the face of Edith as the glass presented it to him; and betook himself to his old chamber of cogitation, carrying away with him a vivid picture in his mind of all these things, and a rambling and unaccountable speculation (such as sometimes comes into a man's head) how they would all look when he saw them next. (657) These sinister scenes of domestic surveillance contrast dramatically with the heroic regime of health inspection portrayed later in the novel: "The good clergyman or doctor ... with his life imperilled at every breath he draws, goes down into [the] dens" of the "outcasts of society," where he must "breathe the polluted air, foul with every impurity," while others "study the physical sciences" in order to "bring them to bear upon the health of Man" (737-38). Of course, the contrast between selfless and self-interested domestic inspection parallels other oft-noted ambiguous contrasts in Dickens's work: between hypocritical and genuine charity; between humane and sinister detectivework; between constructive and corrosive acts of dissimulation. As we have noted, domestic surveillance is only one side of the increasing attention to the social circulation of household fluids. That circulation also ushers in an economy of substitutive relationships: witness not only the host

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of foster relationships concentrated on Solomon Gills's establishment but also Miss Tox's surrogate parenting of the Toodle children, Cuttle's surrogate parenting of the MacStingers, and Edith and Florence Dombey's reconfiguration as erotic "sisters" (617-26, 588). The text constantly plays on Dombey's fear that the wet nurse will substitute her own children for his. When Polly Toodle hints that Florence would be a good companion for Paul, Dombey misunderstands the reference, ironically substituting her children for his own: "I believe nothing is so good for making children lively and cheerful, Sir, as seeing other children playing about 'em," observed Polly, taking courage. I think I mentioned to you, Richards, when you came here," said Mr. Dombey, with a frown, "that I wished you to see as little of your family as possible." (82) The exchange eventually takes place at an even more literal level. The moment Toodle escapes the surveillance of the Dombey household with Paul in her arms, she "changes" him for her own baby: "She set off down the Gardens at a run, and bouncing on Jemima, changed babies with her in a twinkling" (122). The trope of substitution is always on the horizon as Dombey broods on his son's ill health and strange ways: He had settled, within himself, that the child must necessarily pass through a certain routine of minor maladies, and that the sooner he did so the better. If he could have bought him off, or provided a substitute, as in the case of an unlucky drawing for the militia, he would have been glad to do so, on liberal terms. (150, my emphasis) Like the claim of milk kinship, with which it is inextricably intertwined, the trope of substitution, once broached, seems to insinuate itself everywhere, so that Paul seems always already to have been substituted: He (Paul) had a strange, old-fashioned, thoughtful way ... of sitting brooding in his miniature armchair, when he looked (and talked) like one of those terrible little Beings in the Fairy tales, who, at a hundred and fifty or two hundred years of age, fantastically represent the children for whom they have been substituted. (151, my emphasis) Thus the economy of milk that inaugurates the pattern of extended kinshipthe important if provisional haven through which Florence must detour before being recuperated into the "natural" nuclear family-is also responsible, as we can see, for crises and confusions of identity. Dombey's sense of both possession and self-possession are clearly shaken by the hiring of Toodle. But

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Dombey is hardly the only character afflicted by self-dispossession. Everywhere one looks in the novel, language and domestic institutions conspire to interpellate the characters into new identities. On occasion, language alone is capable of doing this, as in the following scene, where Bagstock is overheard talking to himself: "Well, Sir!" panted the Major, "Edith Granger and Dombey are well matched; let 'em fight it out! Bagstock backs the winner!" The Major, by saying these latter words aloud, in the vigour of his thoughts, caused the unhappy Native to stop, and turn round, in the belief that he was personally addressed. (451) More often, though, specific ceremonies and institutions are the mechanisms for sea changes in identity: Florence signs [the wedding register] too, but unapplauded, for her hand shakes. All the party sign; Cousin Feenix last; who puts his noble name into a wrong place, and enrols himself as having been born that morning. (524) The Captain's concern for his friend, not unmingled, at first, with some concern for himself-for a shadowy terror that he might be married by violence, possessed him, until his knowledge of the service came to his relief, and remembering the legal obligation of saying, "I will," he felt himself personally safe so long as he resolved, if asked any question, distinctly to reply "I won't"-threw him into a profuse perspiration. (952) Just as the renaming of Toodle is both antidote and corollary to the promiscuous implications of her breast milk, so too do the novel's frequent misadventures in naming and saying point to the strange power of domestic institutions to compel new identities and identifications. But perhaps no interpellation is so strange-or so interconnected with the politics of domestic fluids-as Dombey's. For, as we have seen, in the novel's climactic scene the perversity of Dombey's will to power is explained analogically as the inevitable consequence of failed circulation. Not only does the passage itself represent social ills as issuing both literally and symbolically from the cultivated neglect of bodily and household fluids; it further underscores the relationship between domestic and public spheres by casting social ills in precisely the same terms as the earlier nurturing of Paul Dombey by his wet nurse (i.e., the metaphor of the public "fountain"), the very development that had unsettled Dombey's identity in the first place. Thus Dombey is identified with the victims of sanitary neglect through a

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metaphorical conflation that itself reflects a deep structural understanding of fluidity's impact on intersubjective relations. The human body, the physical household, and the institution of the family are all understood by the novel as mechanisms that admit and dispense fluids more or less efficiently. Circulation has a double edge here, for failures in circulation lead to morbidity, but circulation paradoxically is responsible too for the spread of morbidity once it has developed. Yet if Dickens intuits a connection between the management of bodily and household fluids, on the one hand, and the public circulation of both literal disease and metaphorical (i.e., moral) contagion on the other, this is not to say that he imagines a form of large-scale social engineering corresponding to the internal regulation of the household. Or rather one might say that whereas the circulation-and correlatively the regulation-of fluids in the household is productive as well as invidious, fluid management on a more macro-environmental scale (i.e., sewers, rivers and seas) is either unimaginable or unwelcome to Dickens. This would at first glance seem to be a counterintuitive conclusion about a novel that centers on two businesses (Dombey's and Gills's) intimately connected to England's imperial maritime economy, a novel in which every illness, death, and premonition is figured as envelopment by the "unknown sea that rolls round the world," and in which characters do not so much leave their domestic spaces as "flow" out the doors of their homes into the great "stream of life" (60, 90,431, 759). Paul Dombey Jr. and Walter Gay are the negative and positive figures of this scheme, respectively, Paul futilely trying to stop the river "flowing through the great city" and Walter-he of the "flowing" hair-figured as a virtual poster boy for the merchant marine, "a lad of promise-one flowing ... with milk and honey" (293-95, 139, 196). (We might observe parenthetically that much of the imagery associated with Walter throughout the novel is drawn from those great proto-capitalist anthems to the Thames as a vehicle of imperialism, "Cooper's Hill" and "Windsor Forest.") It should be clear from this very outline, however, that most of the public fluidity of Dombey and Son is phantasmatic, even allegorical. Water is rarely engaged or encountered outside the home; it is, rather, an imaginary horizon, and the ubiquitous rivers and oceans of the novel are in fact mere phantasms, intuited mostly through daydreams. Though Walter and Florence do meet at the actual riverside, Walter immediately transforms the scene into an imaginary site, conjuring up a "man-of-war" and a "desert island" for the frightened Florence (134-35). And though Walter nominally makes his fortune on the sea (nominally, since his real achievement lies in merging his own "t1ow" with the perpetually tearful "Floy"), he tends to get regarded in the novel as akin to pure capital itself, one step of abstraction

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and rationalization further away from the actual ocean than even his uncle's failed trade in nautical instruments. Thus other characters constantly testify to Walter's embodiment of surplus and expectation: Uohn Carker's] interest in youth and hopifulness was not extinguished with the other embers of his soul, for he watched [Walter Gay's] earnest countenance as he spoke with unusual sympathy ... [136, my emphasis] "something of what a father feels when he loses a son, I feel in losing Wal'r. For why?" said the Captain. "Because it ain't one loss, but a round dozen." (545) The Captain looked upon the bronzed cheek and the courageous eyes of his recovered boy; ... he saw the generous fervour of his youth, and all its frank and hopeful qualities, shining once more, in the fresh, wholesome manner, and the ardent face. (786) The characterization of Walter at once confirms the novel's preoccupation with fluids and domesticates it. A number of critics have observed that the novel secures its domestic ideology only on the ground of the exotic and the oriental: that its erotic energies must in effect be routed through Walter's voyages across the water. 21 It is not entirely clear, however, whether Walter ever really gets beyond the front door, or needs to. The lad "flowing with milk and honey" always already embodies the fluidity that, as Suvendrini Perera points out, links him to empire and to capital; his adventures outdoors and abroad are highly sketchy (compared to the detail with which streets, rivers, marshes, and mountains are rendered in later Dickens novels), and his livelihood far less concretely tied to empire than in the classic cases of, say, Mansfield Park or Vanity Fair. This is, of course, not to say that the novel doesn't perform the work of ideological mystification for capitalism, imperialism, or colonialism. But this mystification lies precisely in locating the essential exchanges that define both individuality and sociality in domestic fluids, and in the home as a mechanism for regulating those fluids. In later novels, as we shall see, Dickens imagines both the forces of social change and the objects of those forces to lie in the regulation of public fluids and the transformation of public space. Before we examine the historical juncture with which this shift in Dickens's work can be connected, we must look at the most important and notorious exception to Dombey and Son's domestication of the powers of social transformation: the railroad. As we shall see in the next section, the rail boom of the 1840s-one of the novel's leitmotifs-was in many ways responsible for diverting public attention and resources away from the ultimate sanitarian goal of renovating London's fluid infrastructure (e.g., water supply pipes,

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sewage, public fountains, etc.). Beyond its symbolic, almost cannibalistic, task of exacting retribution from the relentlessly ambitious Carker, the railroad is responsible for the novel's sole representation of transformed public space. This can be seen most clearly in the famous, and highly ambivalent, description of the disappearance of Staggs's Garden: There was no such place as Stagg's Gardens. It had vanished from the earth. Where the old rotten summer-houses once had stood, palaces now reared their heads, and granite columns of gigantic girth opened a vista to the railway world beyond. The miserable waste ground, where the refuse-matter had been heaped of yore, was swallowed up and gone; and in its frowsy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and costly merchandise.... Bridges that had led to nothing, led to villas, gardens, churches, healthy public walks .... To and from the heart of this great change, all day and night, throbbing currents rushed and returned incessantly like its life's blood. Crowds of people and mountains of goods, departing and arriving scores upon scores of times in every four-and-twenty hours, produced a fermentation in the place that was always in action .... But Stagg's Gardens had been cut up root and branch. Oh woe the day when "not a rood of English ground"-laid out in Stagg's Gardens-is secure! (289-90) The transformation of public space wrought by the railroad is hardly unconnected to the novel's economy of fluids, though. The rhetoric and imagery of the metamorphosed cityscape are drawn directly from sanitarian discourse of the 1840s: "refuse matter" turned to "rich goods" like manure to fertilizer; "waste ground" converted to "healthy public parks"; and the city as a gigantic organism, interconnected and fed by "throbbing currents," "life's blood," and processes of "fermentation." At the same time, the anxiety generated by this passage is intimately connected to the private, domestic economy of fluids that entrepreneurial city planning would ostensibly supersede. For what has been lost is not only a "rood of English ground": what Walter and Susan Nipper are searching for frantically in this episode is the wet nurse Polly Toodle, locus of the novel's domestic circulations, whose home, like the cottage industry it represents, is under threat of becoming obsolescent. Rail and fluids are also connected by the novel's rhetorical texture, as in the immediately ensuing (and chronologically prior) scene, which interweaves the two topics both literally and metaphorically. Paul Dombey is on his deathbed:

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One night he had been thinking of his mother. ... The train of thought suggested to him to inquire if he had ever seen his mother? for he could not remember whether they had told him, yes or no, the river running very fast, and confusing his mind. "Floy, did I ever see Mama?" "No, darling, why?" "Did I ever see any kind face, like Mama's, looking at me when I was a baby, Floy?" He asked, incredulously, as if he had some vision of a face before him. "Oh yes, dear!" "Whose, Floy?" "Your old nurse's. Often." "And where is my old nurse?" said Paul. (295, my emphasis) Here the metaphors of the train of thought and the stream of life converge on the figure of Polly Toodle, who represents quite literally both fluids (her commodified breast milk) and the railway (her husband's occupation). All trains of thought, so the passage implies, lead to the pervasive economy of domestic fluids that lie at the heart of the novel, and which Dombey senior tries to disavow. Laura Berry suggests that the novel's connection of wet-nursing and railroad points to Dickens's preoccupation with (and ambivalence about) "social fluidity." In her reading of the novel, the railway is an agent of horizontal social relations, which works metonymically through the fact and the trope of "proximity" to produce cross-class coupling. Wet-nursing, by contrast, is an agent of vertical relations, and works synecdochically through the fact and the trope of milk to produce relations of maternal surrogacy (which are "good" or "bad" in accord with the quality of the fluids being exchanged). This reading responds admirably to the novel's subtle expansion of kinship ties, but it falls short of identifying the most radical dimensions of social fluidity. As we have seen, Dombey's anxieties about milk kinship exceed the simple fear that the cash nexus could be misinterpreted as entailing personal relations. Beyond even his concrete fear that Paul could be exchanged for Polly Toodle's own child lies the more profound concern that his own identity might be alienable. Thus it is not enough for Dombey simply to deny any personal relation to the Toodles. In his consummate moment of praise for the power of money, Dombey paradoxically must disavow his supreme purchase: Polly Toodle's breast milk, and provisionally, his son's life. The apparent revulsion of personal claims motivating this repression is in fact only the

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cruder, more readily apprehendable symptom of a more profound reluctance to recognize the malleable and constructed nature of domestic relations. It is tempting to think that Dombey is afraid not so much that money can (to a certain extent and no more) buy affection as that it can (to a certain extent and no more) buy life-but that too would understate the dilemma. What discomfits Dombey is the contingency of domestic relations: the fact that any particular alignment of kinship terms, affective ties, and household arrangements is but a convention. Wet-nursing exemplifies this social fact because it testifies to the alienability of certain ostensible human "properties" from their conventional social uses (e.g., as properties given by a "mother" to "her" children). Commodification heightens the sense of this process as a form of alienation, but in the end is only one particular social mode of extracting human properties or products for social use. It would be a mistake to think that Dombey is more horrified at being able to purchase breast milk than at the thought of human properties and social roles being configured in completely alterable ways. In the end, what the social fluidity of breast milk points to is precisely those substitutive relationships we have already seen, in which nonbiologically and nonmaritally related characters live together in domestic arrangements of varying emotional and erotic intensity, designated variously, and interchangeably, as "mother," "father," "brother," "sister," "son," "daughter," etc. 22 Such a vision presupposes the flow of individuals in and out of households even as it preserves the household as the privileged site of identity-making and identity transformation. In the end it is the fluids of household economy (both literal and metaphoric) rather than of public or geographical space that determine the rhythms of the novel. This is hardly surprising in a novel whose solution to social ills (not that many structural ones are presented) is perhaps the most individual and voluntaristic of all Dickens's work. But this hardly means that the topic of fluids was intrinsically connected to the domestic. If Dombey is only fleetingly connected to spaces outside the home (via the mutation of the "common fountain" into the "poisoned fountain"), there were still other, less domestically centered ways of construing the social implications of fluidity in the middle of the nineteenth century. Some of these, though, required a new public discourse for their activation.

Ji

CHAPTER

2

A River Runs through Him Our Mutual Friend and the Embankment of the Thames

The vision of a finely interconnected relationship between the individual body and public space, sketched out by the sanitarians in the 1840s and filled in by Mayhew in the 1850s, was incarnated and in curious ways superseded by the massive project to embank the Thames River in the 1860s. As sheer spectacle, of course, nothing could have topped the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition of 1851. But like the fairgrounds of major American "world fairs" over the next century, the Crystal Palace remained an essentially suburban white elephant. By contrast, the Thames Embankment (which included the equally ambitious London "Main Drain" sewer as well as the city's first underground rail system) dramatically transformed the contours and meaning of the urban landscape. The embankment was the nation's first major urban public-works program, and as such it responded to both the theatrical and logistical imperatives of an imperial capital. Though less glamorous than the 1851 exhibition and less explicitly ominous than the rail boom that permanently altered the English countryside in the 1840s, the embankment of the Thames profoundly transformed the reality and the perception of embodied social life for nineteenth-century Londoners, transforming a muddy tidal wash and sewer basin into nearly 1 billion tons of sculpted concrete, brickwork, and granite, interlaced with dozens of acres of new public park land, opening up new spaces for public leisure, accelerating and rationalizing commercial life, exiling thousands of 46

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people from traditional livelihoods on the river, and intimating new forms of technological and social control. Most important, the embankment constituted a grand experiment in biotechnology, establishing the social circulation of fluids as the domain of the state. The embankment of the river was itself a response to important-if less sudden and dramatic-developments in the meaning and nature of the Thames over the first third of the nineteenth century. London in 1800 was a city of 1 million people, whose central artery was still essentially the imperial river celebrated by Denham and Pope. Flanked by centuries-old bridges and wharves, and still supporting a healthy salmon fishing industry, the river was neither the principal source of London's potable water (which was obtained from other rivers, streams, and springs) nor the principal destination for the city's sewage (which was largely carted away, either from the street or from cesspools). As the population of the city doubled over the next five decades, however, Londoners entered into an increasingly symbiotic-if not intimate-relationship with the river. By 1850, most Londoners drank and washed with water drawn from the Thames and its tributaries, which in turn, received 40 million tons of raw sewage annually as the city began to sewer its privies. 1 The water that nominally supported human life in the area became poisonous to salmon, which could no longer cross a deoxygenated zone of the Thames around London to spawn upstream. The scale of human development altered not only the purity of the Thames but its flow as well. The old London Bridge, whose massive stone arches and narrow openings had presented a navigational hazard for centuries, was demolished and rebuilt slightly upstream between 1825 and 1834 to facilitate greater flow, with the unintended result that the river's tide velocity and reach increased tremendously, leading to greater swings in the low- and high-water marks. The more vigorous scouring action of the current began to erode other bridges and to accelerate the endlessly shifting pattern of shoals along the shoreline. Compounded by the extraordinary variations in the river's width (from 600 to 1,480 feet within the city alone) and the extraordinarily uneven development of the waterfront (a hodge-podge of disconnected wharves, piers, stairs, pilings, terraces, bridges, and arches), the newly intensified tidal patterns created ever more unpredictable whirlpools, eddies, countercurrents, and accumulations of mud and debris. It was the increasing navigational hazards of the river that led to the first embankment proposals-by Sir Frederick Trench in 1825 and Thomas Page in 1844-ostensibly for the purposes of regularizing the river's flow. Once embankment was proposed, however, it attracted new rationales and agendas. Among these were the sanitarian goal of diverting sewage downstream, the

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commercial interest in streamlining urban traffic patterns through rail and boulevard development by the river, a growing public interest in the idea of recreational space, and a growing state interest in developing monumental architecture reflective of the capital's imperial status. 2 All of these ambitions were doubly spurred and enabled in the early middle decades of the century by the exponential growth of the city combined with the migration of much of the working port of London from the central city downstream to the Isle of Dogs. Equally important were the array of interests and agendas opposing the drive to embank. Large-scale public-works programs were hardly considered feasible in the crisis-ridden economic and political climate of the 1840s, and the decade-long railway boom simultaneously provided a strong countermodel of private development while diverting most of the country's speculative capital to itself. 3 But by far the single most important obstacle to the embankment was the vexed question of just who owned the river. Both in 1825 and in 1844, detailed proposals to embank the river were endorsed by one state agency, only to be opposed vigorously by others. Historically, ownership and regulation of the Thames (including, variously, its water, banks, bed, and infrastructure) were laid claim to by various crown, parliamentary, and municipal institutions, ranging from the Admiralty and the Office of Woods and Forests to the city of London's Navigation Committee. In the context of the sanitarian debate in the 1840s, with its generation of new regulatory institutions and interests (e.g., sewer and water commissions), further claims were made, most immediately on behalf of specific municipal boards, but in principle on behalf of the "public," to whom the ostensibly natural resource of flowing water "naturally" belonged. 4 The sanitarians helped provide the most sensational rationale for embanking the Thames, since an embankment could provide housing for a sewage line that would divert the city's millions of tons of waste to an outfall far downriver from the intake pipes of the water companies. But the sanitariansadmittedly a loosely defined group-had ambiguous credentials when it came to the politics of the river: Chadwick had been notoriously indifferent to the purity of the river when it came to the question of sewage. 5 Eliminating the hazardous cesspools that lay beneath most households in the city was his top priority during the 1840s and 1850s, even if it meant pouring untreated sewage directly into the river. (In Chadwick's defense, it is important to note that he never regarded the Thames as the ideal source of water for the city and long advocated a water supply drawn from hills north of London.) As a result, claimed Mayhew, when London decided to sewer its privies (as was required of most new buildings after Chadwick's landmark 1848 Public Health Act),

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"instead of poisoning the air that we breathed, we poisoned the water that we drank." 6 The sanitarian movement's notion of a "public good" intersected with the drive toward embankment in more than one way. For it was not only the water of the Thames but its banks that could be claimed in the name of the public. Quite aside from the thorny question of compensation for riverside merchants and landowners who would have to be bought out in order to build the embankment, the embankment generated controversy over who would lay claim to the fifty-two new acres of prime urban real estate that would be reclaimed from the river. The sanitarian response to cholera epidemics in 1833 and 1848 had stressed the importance of public parks for the health of the city's residents, and many inspired by the sanitarian movement were intent on seeing that landfill from the Thames was returned to the citizenry rather than sold off by the state to cornmercial and real estate interests. 7 Costly legal disputes among the relevant parties lasted from 1840 to 1856, when management of the Thames was theoretically assigned to five different bodies, with the Metropolitan Board of Works taking over effective control of engineering decisions under the supervision of a royal commission on embankment, convened in 1860.H But the resolution of the question of who owned the Thames was less the outcome of a legal, or even parliamentary, process than the result of a complex shift in material and ideological conditions. The same rail projects that competed with embankment plans for capital in the forties and fifties came also to legitimize the very idea of infrastructural transformation. Successful large-scale engineering projects, whether privately or publicly financed, helped create an environment in which the ideas of public interest and public space converged in the idea of public works. So if it is true, as Dale Porter has argued, that only in the period 1830-50 did the scale and organization of human enterprise around the Thames intensify sufficiently to constitute a readily perceived ecological problem, it is also true that this period saw the development of a new ideological confidence in technology as the solution to "public" problems. This was not a confidence to which the sanitarians of the 1840s could have appealed. Chadwick, Mayhew, Kay-Shuttleworth, and Southwood Smith were identified with the house-to-house survey, the interview, and the pathetic record of individual circumstance (even if amplified by statistics). Theirs was not a technological ethos, nor did they appear to the public in the light of technicians, but rather as heroic individuals willing to delve personally into the heart of urban disease and poverty. Though Chadwick was enamored of technological fixes to urban infrastructural problems,

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his technical innovations were the most fiercely resisted and ridiculed of his proposals. Historians disagree on whether it was the imperiousness and inflexibility of Chadwick or the parochialism and jealousy of the engineering profession that led to the rejection of almost all Chadwick's technological proposals (e.g., integrating the water supply and sewers in a single "arterio-venous" system; replacing large brick sewers with fourinch diameter pipes), but what is certain is that the time was not right for such proposals, even though they were for the most part implemented in later decades, and even though the technology for them existed at the time of their initial proposal. It is certainly the case that the embankment of the river did not present any technical or engineering challenges that could not have been solved as easily in 1840 as in 1860. We might conclude, then, that the sanitarians helped prepare the way for embankment of the Thames by establishing the river as symbiotically connected to the domestic lives-and bodies--of ordinary Londoners, but that this perception did not in and of itself suggest any particular solution to the problem. The technological, epidemiological, navigational, and commercial means and motives for embanking the river were for the most part in place a decade, and even two, before embankment began. What changed between 1840 and 1860? It has been plausibly suggested that the "Great Stink" of 1858 was the single most important instigating factor for the embankment of the Thames and construction of the London Main Drain. As a national scandal, the Great Stink was second only to the India Mutiny in 1858. Record heat and drought lowered the level of the river and increased the concentration of sewage to an extraordinary 20 percent of the river's volume. The Thames became almost unapproachable: commerce on the river and traffic over its bridges declined to a trickle; the Parliament buildings were shuttered up and lime-soaked cloths draped over the windows even as response to the mutiny was being debated; and tens of thousands of Londoners were said to have succumbed to nausea, cramps, diarrhea, and faintness from the poisonous fumes of sewage baking on the shoreline. 9 Yet for all the discomfort and revulsion, the summer of 1858 did not produce exceptional rates of morbidity or mortality (Hamlin, 131; Lewis, 42-43; Luckin, 17-18). 10 What was more crucial was that a national symbol had been defiled, precisely at a time of perceived threat to imperial authority. In many ways the Great Stink was perceived as a revisitation of all the political and epidemiological horrors of the 1840s, which a decade and more of sanitarian success had not managed fully to dispel. According to historian Bill Luckin,

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The political and social collapse which had been envisaged and feared by the ruling class in the 1840s had not materialised. But the images and taboos associated with it-uncontrolled urban growth and inmigration leading to massive and alien flows of waste into rivers long idealised as fundamental symbols of the healthy and the orderly-could not be eradicated solely by the development of a new corpus of scientific knowledge. (49) The embankment represented not so much scientific, as symbolic, control over the unruliness of urban life in the metro pole. "To save the river," writes Luckin, "was to consolidate the new urban-industrial order" (20). Luckin notes that it was precisely in the late 1850s, "during an important era of rampant colonial aggression," that ministers began to "[refer] increasingly and rhetorically to the 'imperial' rather than the 'national' Exchequer." As a result, "the Thames itself now came to be perceived in an explicitly 'imperial' context" (17). 11 Luckin argues that we should regard the embankment and Main Drain not so much as the apotheosis of sanitarian science as the assertion and apotheosis of imperialist bureaucratic and technological self-confidence. What was important to the politicians who approved the massive project was not so much that technological means were now available for addressing an epidemiological crisis (for this much had been clear for at least a decade, and perhaps two), as the intolerable fact that an imperial capital could have the appearance of being incapacitated through the shortcomings of its own infrastructure. And once the embankment and Main Drain were under way, confidence in the stability and health of the capital in fact exceeded any significant empirical gains in epidemiology and public health (20-24). Dramatic milestones in river management and development became the symbolic means through which scientific progress-in fact, rather pedestrian and incremental-was apprehended and consolidated (29-30). What was most significant about the embankment was its dramatization of the state's commitment to intervention in the physical and social problem of pollution. This is again ironic, since fully integrated state management of London's water ecology did not really take place until the 1890s. But the embankment functioned as a crucial symbol in the shift from a rhetoric of helplessness and crisis in the 1840s and 1850s to the "measured tones" of regulatory agencies toward the end of the century (20, 29). Like many equivalent developments of urban waterfronts in late-twentiethcentury America, it was perceived as "cleaning up" the inner city in more ways than one. This was not simply a function of the sweeping concrete

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walls, the monumental architecture, the rows of gas lamps, the broad treelined boulevards, or the gleaming public parks, but of waterfront sociology as well. The embankment displaced an entire riverside economy, including not only gasworks, ferries, and barges but as well a host of more notorious occupations, many mythologized by Mayhew: dredgers, mud-larks, flushermen, and petty thieves. 12 Mayhew had already noted, in 1851, the disappearance of a certain scavenging community from the city waterfront with the migration of large shipping downstream, but the myriad remaining workers in the fringe economy of the riverbank had at that time still operated freely, with no license required for, and no regulations limiting, their activities. 13 This rapidly ceased to be the case after embankment. Luckin observes that the Thames at midcentury was polluted, yet integrated into the lives of the working poor at its margins; while by century's end it was substantially cleaned up, but also inaccessible, an object both of scientific and regulatory knowledge. By late in the century the river was closed territory to all except those who had a legal and bureaucratic right to work on or near it. A formidable accumulation of official and scientific literature-proto-environmental and socio-medical surveys, engineering reports and geological research-had transformed the river into an object of study and simultaneously distanced it from everyday structures and processes. (Luckin, 180-81) The legacy of the embankment is thus contradictory: on the one hand it monumentalized the technological and bureaucratic ability of the state to manage social problems associated with the river; on the other it did not succeed fully in eradicating a traditional perception of the river as both victim and symbol of the unruliness of human ecology, and thus as a perilous zone requiring regulation. In some ways this paradox was tied to an ideological shift represented by the embankment. The embankment represented a shift in state disciplinary focus away from individual households to the cityscape at large, from private to public, and from bodies and homes as input-outflow mechanisms to the river as the principal mechanism of social circulation. One might say that by the 1860s, attention had shifted from the management of personal to the management of public fluids. But as a symbol of the decision to manage the city's ecology by managing its public infrastructure (as opposed to its bodies and households), the embankment nonetheless testified to the convergence of two themes: the regulation of bodily fluids and the management of public space.

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53

The shift from private to public was thus neither a stable nor a permanent one, and this paradoxical ideological legacy was confirmed, most notoriously, shortly after work had begun on the embankment, when the government passed the notorious Contagious Diseases acts. The Contagious Diseases acts allowed police to inspect prostitutes (but not their customers) on the grounds that their role in the social circulation of bodily fluids opened them to state regulation. This was far more drastic than any state regulation of fluids envisioned even by the arch-Benthamite Chadwick, and one might argue that the embankment played a crucial symbolic role in consolidating the state's management and social-engineering ambitions in ways that prepared for future acts of social control. Indeed the Contagious Diseases acts were hardly anomalous. A decade after the embankment, parliament passed a series of Canal Boats acts regulating the lives of the country's "floating population." By 1875, almost 100,000 citizens made their residence quite literally on the water, that is, on boats and barges in the country's inland waterways. In addition to creating a census problem-and undermining the stability of electoral and juridical districts-these boat people were perceived as representing a significant social problem. Social reformers portrayed the canal-boat population as largely illiterate, drunk, irreligious, hygienically negligent, and disdainful of such basic institutions as marriage and public education. Living on the demographic margins, the "floating population" came to represent both literally and metaphorically the social extravagance of fluidity. Residing in the liminal spaces of border and transit, the floating population was understood to display a social unruliness that was imaginatively intertwined with the relative instability of the very physical element that distinguished their material existence. The 1877 act, vigorously opposed as an intrusion on civil liberties by the Times, mandated the registration of all boats and inhabitants, as well as compulsory inspection by local sanitation authorities and school board officials. It was accordingly, in the words of historian Roy MacLeod, "the first instance of legislation which proposed to regulate completely the family lives of 'ablebodied', self-sufficient, contributing members of society. As such, it suggested an almost unconscious denial of personal liberty for the sake of enforcing human happiness, and ultimately, the implicit right of the state to prescribe conditions of life for free individuals." 14 The Thames Embankment, then, inaugurated and prefigured a new era in the ideological configuration of bodies, fluids, and public space. A public eye at one time focused on urban slums, and the fluids that circulated through individual households was redirected to the Thames River as the dominant-and most contested-site of circulation in London. In the

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large-scale transformation of the river and its human ecology, politicians and public alike could find a model for the "progressive" state management and regulation of entities straddling the boundary between public and private. The embankment thus both symbolized and consolidated one of the most profound shifts in relations between bodies and public space in mid-Victorian Britain. Public space, rather than the private body, became the focus of reformist energies. At the same time, the body in theory remained susceptible to the ambitions of social engineering, but now on a more frightening scale and a more public stage. These simultaneously more utopian and more chilling set of possibilities are reflected in Dickens's 1865 novel Our Mutual Friend. If Dombey and Son is about fluids in the body, Our Mutual Friend is about the body in fluids. The latter novel begins, bizarrely, with a body that alternately materializes and dematerializes from out of the murky waters of the Thames River. The mysterious corpse which, through a sleight of hand, both will and will not lie at the heart of the plot, hovers in uncertain status from the beginning of the story. Before it even appears, a place is prepared for it in the form of a damp stain, which testifies to the iterative, repetitive nature of the commerce between bodies and river. As Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie scavenge the river, a slant of light from the setting sun glanced into the bottom of the boat, and touching a rotten stain there which bore some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form, coloured it as though with diluted blood. (14) As soon as the body appears, with a sudden jerk, it takes on a character which, paradoxically, both emphasizes and threatens to negate its dreadful materiality. As Catherine Gallagher has noted, Gaffer Hexam's defense of his occupation cannibalistically identifies the human body with food. 15 When his daughter objects to sitting alongside the corpse retrieved from the river, Gaffer exclaims: "It's my belief you hate the sight of the very river." "I - I do not like it, father." "As if it wasn't your living! As if it wasn't meat and drink to you! . .. How can you be so thankless to your best friend, Lizzie? The very fire that warmed you when you were a babby, was picked out of the river alongside the coal barges. The very basket that you slept in, the tide washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it upon to make a cradle of

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it, I cut out of a piece of wood that drifted from some ship or another." (15, my emphasis) As soon as the corpse is identified as "meat and drink," it is immediately placed in a larger context, in which the act of cannibalism itself is part of a more general economy, and the human body part of a more general ecology. For it is, of course, literally the river, not the body, which Gaffer aims at with his analogy. But once broached, the trope of ingestion trespasses the boundary between body and environment, between materiality and discourse, between literality and figurality. When Rogue Riderhood confronts the two returning scavengers, he hails them, predictably, as "wulturs" (16), but quickly the trope broadens in scope. When Gaffer rebuffs Riderhood's wheedling interrogations, the latter asks him "-Arn't been eating nothing as has disagreed with you, have you, pardner?" to which Gaffer responds "Why, yes, I have ... I have been swallowing too much of that word, Pardner. I am no pardner of yours" (16). Ingesting the river, ingesting human byproducts (both material and discursive), and ingesting the human form quickly become indistinguishable. Later, Eugene Wrayburn will complain that his sherry at a riverside tavern "tastes like the wash of the river" (to which Mortimer will inquire rhetorically, "Are you so familiar with the flavour of the wash of the river?" and attribute Eugene's sentiment skeptically to "the influence of locality" [166]). And at the novel's end, river, wine, and human tears converge as Eugene reports on his father's "blessing" of the union between the scavenger of the river and the scion of the gentry: "Really," said Eugene, "I mean it. When M. R. F. [my respected father] said that, and followed it up by rolling the claret (for which he called, and I paid), in his mouth, and saying 'My dear son, why do you drink this trash?' it was tantamount-in him-to a paternal benediction on our union, accompanied with a gush of tears. The coolness of M. R. F. is not to be measured by ordinary standards." (790) The human form is continually decomposing and recomposing, consuming and being consumed throughout the novel. From the opening chapterwhich ends with a prosopopoeiac transfer of characteristics between corpse and river ("the ripples passing over it were dreadfully like faint changes of expression on a sightless face")-bodies in the novel are placed in circulation, and fluids are the medium of that circulation. Despite the hesitant temporal specificity of the novel's opening sentence ("In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise") Our Mutual Friend is a text set insistently against the

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backdrop of-and often set in-a rapidly transformed and transforming Thames River, whose concrete locality is emphasized (as attested by the continuation of the opening sentence-"on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge, which is of stone" [13]). As we have seen, the river is being transformed during this period from a disreputable site of both labor and waste to an imperial monument and modern infrastructural artery. Though the novel opens in the heart of the city (a zone identified by Franco Moretti as the middle-class zone of resolution and progress between the violent, proletarian East End and the aristocratic West End), Hexam quickly rows eastward, since the shipping industry on which his work is parasitic had been gradually exiled downstream in recent decades. 16 There are no longer bodies to be found in the river between Southwark and London bridges by the 1860s; this particular waterside economy has been displaced. The political and ideological milieu is also changing, from one characterized by the heroic individualism of the sanitarian movement, with its emphasis on self-regulated households, to one characterized by bureaucraticcorporate entrepreneurship, with its emphasis on a rationalized public sphere. Our Mutual Friend is set in the midst of this change. Eugene Wrayburn observes that "the staring black and white letters upon wharves and warehouses" by the river "'looked ... like inscriptions over the graves of dead businesses"' (173). As indeed they were. The novel chronicles the fate-death or migration-of those who have traditionally made their livelihood on or by the river, while hinting at whole new kinds of investment and vocation for those who know how to capitalize on the river's transformation. The river is not, of course, the only focal point of the novel's materializing bent. As a number of brilliant critical readings have noted, the novel is also intensely preoccupied with the human body. Yet as the opening chapter makes clear, that body is inseparable from the river. The novel opens by situating the human body in the river, and then proceeds to unravel the meaning of that metaphor. Traditionally such a trope alludes to concepts of rebirth and transmutation, whether spiritual or secular in orientation. But the renewed critical emphasis on the body points less toward transmutation than resistance: the uneven resistance of consuming and waste-producing bodies to Malthusian rationalization (as in Gallagher's reading), and the graphic resistance of sexually and racially marked bodies to idealization (as in Sedgwick's and Poovey's readings). In this section I want to show how the novel connects the fate of the body-one might say indissolubly-with the fate of the river. Such a reading points to the profound, dialectical engagement of the body with its material environment, to the crucial role of social

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space, and to the fluidity of the river as the very embodiment of a host of philosophical, legal, and political dilemmas. Corresponding to a palpable shift in public priorities, energies, and aspirations between the sanitarian heyday of the 1840s and the great public-works period of the 1860s, Our Mutual Friend imagines the lives of individuals enmeshed in public space, no longer confined to the dialectic of the domestic and the institutional (whether the latter is conceived of as localized-e.g., the workhouse, the Marshalsea-or dispersed, e.g., Chancery, the Circumlocution Office). To the significant extent that Our Mutual Friend is about the project of managing fluids, it displaces the drama of social regulation and control from the household to the river. The battle over the river, though, turns out to be a battle over its banks, its beds, and the livelihoods and vocations it sustains and destroys. In other words, the trope of fluidity in this novel connects the body not only to particular bodies of water but to the entire realm of materiality and sociality, which it locates outside the household. Our Mutual Friend is not about the transformation of domestic spaces, but about the violent transformation of both bodies and urban space. The axis of the novel is not body/house but body/landscape. The voluntarism and meliorism of the earlier novels-rippling outward from nodal points in individual households and individual acts-gives way in the latter novel not so much to a darker individualism shadowed by implacable institutional forces, as to a sense of the mutually, plastically, transformative power that body and space have over one another-a power at once concentrated in the fluids that society tries to regulate, and dispersed among the heterogeneous regulating agents. While it is individual households that are under siege by the forces of dampness in Dombey and Son, in Our Mutual Friend the hostage is the entire city of London, which the narrator describes as "a beleaguered city, invested by the great Marsh Forces of Essex and Kent" (147). The intensity with which this sense of besiegement is felt can be gauged by an extraordinary passage in which the "spoiling influences of water" are held to be more destructive than the most graphic acts of violence that a malignant animism could dream up: As they glided slowly on, keeping under the shore and sneaking in and out among the shipping by back-alleys of water, in a pilfering way that seemed to be their boatman's normal manner of progression, all the objects among which they crept were so huge in contrast with their wretched boat, as to threaten to crush it. Not a ship's hull, with its rusty iron links of cable run out of hawse-holes long discolored with

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the iron's rusty tears, but seemed to be there with a fell intention. Not a figure-head but had the menacing look of bursting forward to run them down. Not a sluice gate, or a painted scale upon a post or wall, showing the depth of water, but seemed to hint, like the dreadfully facetious Wolf in Grandmamma's cottage, "That's to drown you in, my dears!" Not a lumbering black barge, with its cracked and blistered side impending over them, but seemed to suck at the river with a thirst for sucking them under. And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water-discolored copper, rotten wood, honey-combed stone, green dank deposit-that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event. (173, my emphasis) The river is getting everywhere, spoiling everything. Even human tearsthose most ubiquitous of fluids in Dombey and Son-are replaced by the river here, as evidenced by the scene in which M. R. Fs gesture of rolling bad wine (already associated with the "wash of the river") on his tongue is accepted as "tantamount" to a "gush of tears" (790). It is easy to see this passage as a satire on M. R. Fs callousness (as it no doubt is), but to see it as only that would be to miss the point that personal fluids have largely been replaced in this novel by public ones. There are very few tears in Our Mutual Friend; the river has become the measure of all things. But who measures the river? If Dombey the patriarch is the "beadle of private life," supervising and disciplining the domestic economy of fluids, who regulates the public fluids that dominate Our Mutual Friend? That task is left to a host of agents from Britain's emerging tertiary economy: the managers of capital and of the capitol. These were not industrialists or merchants, but bankers, insurers, consultants, engineers, and public contractors. Such is the assembled cast at the Veneerings' society dinners, where Mortimer constantly searches for the "voice of society." Though a good deal of the novel goes to satirize the frantic and illusory economy of "speculation" and "shares," many of the Veneering guests are engaged in the more concrete tasks of rationalizing, reforming, and administering both the economy and the physical environment. 17 These are the managers of the waters that surround and press on London. They include Podsnap (whose fortune is made in marine insurance [131]) and the "Engineer," as well as the "Contractor" (employer of 500,000 men), who virtually concludes the novel by explaining how Wrayburn's moral debt to Lizzie Hexam can be rationally and materially calculated: It appears to this potentate, that what the man in question should have done, would have been, to buy the young woman a boat and a small

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annuity, and set her up for herself. These things are a question of beefsteaks and porter. You buy the young woman a boat. Very good. You buy her, at the same time, a small annuity. You speak of that annuity in pounds sterling, but it is in reality so many pounds of beefsteaks and so many pints of porter. Those beefsteaks and that porter are the fuel to that young woman's engine. She derives therefrom a certain amount of power to row the boat; that power will produce so much money; you add that to the small annuity; and thus you get at the young woman's income. (795) This is a remarkable display of what Catherine Gallagher has termed the novel's "bioeconomics," in which human well-being is paradoxically both abstracted from and returned to the body. 1H What is crucial here, though, is that it is the imaginative resituation of Lizzie in the river that becomes the condition for imagining her connection to the material world. In this formulation it is not only the annuity (and implicitly Lizzie) but the river itself that "is in reality so many pounds of beefsteaks and so many pints of porter." From a public contractor's point of view, it is the very plastic possibilities of the river that imaginatively underwrite the fluid equivalencies of bioeconomics, about which Dickens is so profoundly ambivalent. Managing the river provides a model for managing human beings. The fate that the contractor has in mind for Lizzie-a fate from which the novel tenuously rescues her through marriage to the mutilated Wrayburn-contrasts sharply with the more conventional fate of Silas Wegg, who is disposed not into the river but into the scavenger's cart, presumably for return to the "mounds" (790). The contrast is instructive because, as Mary Poovey has pointed out, Lizzie is a prototype of the "new woman," a character who reconfigures the meaning of embodiment in an increasingly rationalized economy. If Wegg's farcical exit from the text points in the direction of both historical and generic anachronism, the final discursive battle over the status of Lizzie is proleptic in figuring profound anxieties over the increasing embodiment and fluidity of social roles. The novel concludes with Twemlow and Mortimer rebuking the values of the public contractor; nonetheless it is this debate, and not any image of Lizzie herself in domestic bliss, that holds the stage in the end. London may be beleaguered by water, but the enemy has been met, measured, and assessed by a corps of emergent professionals who, perhaps more than Dickens realizes, constitute the "voice of society" which Mortimer searches for in vain. No list of the Veneering dinner-party cast would be complete, however, without its presiding spirit, the "Analytical Chemist," at once the most reassuring and most sinister of the new professionals presiding over Victorian Britain's haunting fluid environment:

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Revived by soup, Twemlow discourses mildly of the Court Circular with Boots and Brewer.... Meantime the retainer goes round, like a gloomy Analytical Chemist: always seeming to say, after "Chablis, sir?"-"You wouldn't if you knew what its made of." (20) With typical Dickensian surrealism, the Analytical Chemist becomes a fixture in the text, hovering over the guests "gloomily" and "diabolic[ally]" (253) and ministering to their physical constitutions (a "worn out" Mrs. Veneering is "revived with cura