Review of Jessica Kuskey’s “Our Mutual Engine: The Economics of Victorian Thermodynamics”

摘要

It is becoming an increasingly accepted critical commonplace that in the Dickens world, a steam boat can become "an enormously magnified insect or antediluvian monster" (Martin Chuzzlewit, 1844) as effortlessly as man can acquire "a good deal of train oil in his system" (Bleak House, 1853). This image of instability, of energetic volatility, encapsulates the "thermo-dynamism" which Jessica Kuskey's article, "Our Mutual Engine," seeks to unleash. Throughout the central Victorian period, discussions of industrialisation constructed the workplace as an imagined space of porous boundaries, wherein the expending of energy and subjectivity migrated between workers, machines, and the industrial landscape itself. Kuskey conceptualises this persistent renegotiation of industrial subjectivity alongside a recycling of the 'waste' implicit in the laws of thermodynamics. The Dickensian characters of Our Mutual Friend are constantly alert, Kuskey argues, to the social pressures placed on them "to exert a constant level of purposeful, well-directed energy" (75).