Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T20:48:44.687Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

OUR MUTUAL ENGINE: THE ECONOMICS OF VICTORIAN THERMODYNAMICS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2013

Jessica Kuskey
Jessica Kuskey*
Affiliation:
Syracuse University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Early on in Charles Dickens'sOur Mutual Friend (1865), the pair of characters Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood glibly recount the years they have spent doing nothing, with no business, no efforts, no cares. They have jobs – one is a barrister, the other a solicitor – but neither has done a scrap of work, ever.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 75 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Choi, Tina Young. “Forms of Closure: The First Law of Thermodynamics and the Victorian Narrative.” English Literary History 74 (2007): 301–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. 1865. Ed. Poole, Adrian. New York: Penguin, 1998.Google Scholar
Dixon, Edmund Saul. “Physical Force.” Household Words 19.468 (12 March 1859): 354–59.Google Scholar
Faraday, Michael. “On the Conservation of Force.” 1857. Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics. London: Taylor and Francis, 1859.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Force and Matter.” All the Year Round 16.378 (21 July 1866): 35–38.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic: Life, Death and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Pamela K.Mapping the Victorian Social Body. Albany: SUNY P, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gold, Barri J.ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge: MIT P, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Heat and Work.” All the Year Round 14.328 (5 Aug. 1865): 29–33.Google Scholar
Herbert, Christopher. “Filthy Lucre: Victorian Ideas of Money.” Victorian Studies 44.2 (2002): 185–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herschel, John. “On Atoms.” Fortnightly Review 1.1 (15 May 1865): 81–84.Google Scholar
Herschel, John. “On the Origin of Force.” Fortnightly Review 1.4 (1 July 1865): 435–42.Google Scholar
House, Humphrey. The Dickens World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1960.Google Scholar
“Is Heat Motion?” All the Year Round 13.323 (1 July 1865): 534–38.Google Scholar
Jarvie, Paul A. Ready to Trample on All Human Law: Finance Capitalism and the Fictions of Charles Dickens. London: Routledge, 2005.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery.” Critical Problems in the History of Science. Ed. Clagett, Marshall. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1959. 321–56.Google Scholar
Levine, George. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.Google Scholar
Metz, Nancy Aycock. “The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34.1 (1979): 59–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Might and Magnitude.” All the Year Round 15.361 (24 March 1866): 255–57.Google Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. 1859. In Mill: The Spirit of the Age, On Liberty, The Subjection of Women. Ed. Alan Ryan. New York: Norton, 1996. 41–132.Google Scholar
Myers, Greg. “Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy.” Victorian Studies 29.1 (1985): 35–66.Google Scholar
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Basic Books, 1990.Google Scholar
Scoggin, Daniel P. “A Speculative Resurrection: Death, Money, and the Vampiric Economy of Our Mutual Friend.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30.1 (2002): 99–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help. 1859. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Smith, Crosbie. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. 1862. New York: The De Witt Revolving Fund, 1958.Google Scholar
Steig, Michael. “Dickens's Excremental Vision.” Victorian Studies 13 (1970): 339–54.Google Scholar
[Tait, P. G.] “Energy.” North British Review 40 (1864): 177–93.Google Scholar
Thomson, William, and Tait, P. G.. “Energy.” Good Words 3 (Dec. 1862): 601–07.Google Scholar
Tyndall, John. Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion: Being a Course of Twelve Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in the Season of 1862. London: Longman, 1863.Google Scholar
Underwood, Ted. “How Did the Conservation of Energy Become ‘The Highest Law in All Science’?” Repositioning Sciences: Shifting Centres in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Thinking. Ed. Clifford, David, et al.London: Anthem, 2006.Google Scholar
Underwood, Ted. The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760–1860. New York: Palgrave, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wise, M. Norton, and Smith, Crosbie. “Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Part III. History of Science 28 (1990): 221–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Robert M. Darwin's Metaphor: Nature's Place in Victorian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.Google Scholar