Introduction

Abstract

To understand the above epigraph from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, one should know first that its speaker, the self-named Jenny Wren, is neither a professor nor a mother. Her profession is a doll-designer and dressmaker, and she has just come from the funeral not of her child but of her father. What she is explaining to her friend, then, is how the clergyman at her father’s funeral provided her with the inspiration for a new doll to meet the funeral costs. She reveals in this passage the interminable nature of work for those who live upon ‘taste and invention’. While some critics have highlighted the materiality of Jenny’s work—that is to say, what it produces—or its pre-industrial organization as a cottage industry, what I want to highlight in Jenny’s speech is that she feels she must always be in the process of gathering ideas for work.² Indeed, finding ideas is part of her work. After all, without them, she would be unable to make anything, as Jenny is as much a designer of her doll-clothes as she is, in Dickens’s phrase, ‘the doll’s dressmaker’. Moreover, Jenny shows us something specific about work that can easily be overlooked if one focuses too tightly on what work makes or where work is performed: work is fundamentally a form of social discipline. It forces us to sell our time to someone else in return for the means of survival.

You must know that we Professors, who live upon our taste and invention, are obliged to keep our eyes always open. And you know already that I have many extra expenses to meet just now. So it came into my head while I was weeping at my poor boy’s grave that something in my way might be done with a clergyman.¹