Working-Class Antiquaries

I start from two familiar characterizations of the relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century. First, as scholars from Gillian Beer to Ralph O’Connor and Barri J. Gold have shown, emergent scientific discourses converged with innovations in literary form and genre, from realism to the more fantastic. Beer’s foundational study Darwin’s Plots locates unfeeling evolutionary science in the networked plots of canonical Victorian writers; Gold coins the term “thermopoetics,” arguing that physicists called on poems and novels to inform their definitions of ideas like entropy, and writers likewise explored these notions in narrative form; O’Connor unpacks the close-knit exchange between popular engagements with geology and poetic form.Footnote ¹² Second, Victorians constructed both their histories and sciences by contextualizing the material object, and these preoccupations with excavation found expression in fiction.Footnote ¹³ To these paradigms, I would like to add one more commonsense proposition. When disciplinary innovations trickle into the popular imagination, misunderstandings and misapplications are inevitable; even when writers understand these scientific schemas, they often distort them in service of literary aims.

I adopt “working-class antiquary” as shorthand for a diverse group of incidental excavators—laborers, tenant farmers, and even the desperately poor scavengers made infamous by Henry Mayhew—who recur in the complaints of established antiquaries including Thomas Wright (1810–1877) and Charles Roach Smith (1807–1890). The class status of the “working-class antiquary” is broad, and partly defined via exclusion. Working-class antiquaries were not the experts or expert amateurs of the professional and middle classes, and their incidental contributions to the historical record were not rewarded with upward mobility. They did not participate in societies like the Society of Antiquaries or the Geological Association, nor were they members of Working Men’s Clubs, midcentury innovations that promoted the civilizing effects of adult scientific education for the upstanding working class.Footnote ¹⁴ Rather, “working-class antiquary” refers to a broad swath of E. P. Thompson’s laboring poor, those who eked a living out of their relationship to the earth. Working-class antiquaries are ghosts in the archive, almost never mentioned in the records of “true” antiquarians. When they are, it is pejoratively; they are chastised for their material, rather than strictly academic, relationship to the stuff of the past. Recounting a ploughman who stumbled on gold and silver coins in lead vases, Roach Smith lamented: “how much in past times was brought to light to no purpose.”Footnote ¹⁵ The working-class antiquary’s vexed position touches on an essential irony: even as historians placed a premium on the castoffs of long-dead peasantry, living members of the lower class were often excluded from making knowledge. Building on recent work by Noah Heringman and Lydia Barnett that recovers the labor history and intellectual contributions of forgotten knowledge-workers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I take the contributions of these working-class antiquaries seriously, while reevaluating the confusions often caused by their involvement.Footnote ¹⁶ To invoke Thompson again, this is history literally from below.

In an 1859 article published by the Geological Association, Hyde Clarke seconded Toulmin Smith’s concerns about false facts and false theories before coining the term “working-class antiquary.” “Coins and antiquities are only found by chance, and must, under all ordinary circumstances, be purchased on the faith of a dealer, and with the risk of spuriousness…. Every house that is pulled down, and every foundation that is dug in the City, is attended by ingenious navvies and bricklayers’ labourers, who are ready to sell to the incautious spectators and neighbours true and spurious coins, swords, and pottery.”Footnote ¹⁷ As Clarke implied, and as Virginia Zimmerman argues in Excavating Victorians, “most of the archaeology in London was accidental: the discovery of objects was a byproduct of excavation and construction intended to improve the urban landscape.”Footnote ¹⁸ Charles Roach Smith, for example, purchased his first Roman coin from a shopkeeper after noticing it in a till, but it had been earlier recovered by “cottage goers” “grubbing in a bank” (Reflections, 101). His collection eventually became the core of the British Museum’s Romano British holdings. But how did these cottage goers—or other working-class antiquaries—apprehend and contextualize their finds? They had more casual relationships to history, in that they were not excavating with intention to construct a cohesive historical narrative. Rather, the action of sifting and sorting material objects was integrated into their routine activity (and often into their livelihoods). Thames watermen could and did stumble upon lost treasures in the river; Dickens’s Gaffer Hexam and Rogue Riderhood likewise incidentally dredge up clues that are vitally important for his plots.

Clarke’s diatribe and Roach Smith’s anecdote illustrate the intersecting anxieties around class, authority, accuracy, and disinterest that ran through these past-minded scientific disciplines. As Heringman demonstrates in his treatment of Romantic antiquarianism, these concerns were baked into the field: collection was so dependent on local guides and self-educated field-workers that “the work involved in antiquarianism and natural history had the power to unsettle class distinctions.”Footnote ¹⁹ Emphasizing the individual’s authority in interpreting the dig site and artifacts, Zimmerman figures the nineteenth-century geologist as an authoritative narrator, “exult[ing] from cliff and quarry over his authority to read the past and report its story.”Footnote ²⁰ From this perspective, defending the boundary between expert amateurs and these true, working-class amateurs—who could theoretically hijack epistemological authority without appropriate investments in scientific disinterest—was critical.

Clarke implies that the working-class antiquary is motivated only by the present and future—by the material difference that the sale of old pottery can make in their lives—rather than the past. The implied shift toward historical decontextualization is key. Clarke’s navvies saw the object as a good with commercial value first and as an antiquity second, rather than the other way around. In this way, men like these laborers posed a threat to Victorian attempts to comprehend and narrate the long past.

Frauds and fakes did abound.Footnote ²¹ Two working-class antiquaries embarked on one of the century’s biggest scandals of antiquarian knowledge-construction. William Smith and Charles Eaton were two former mudlarks, poor scavengers of the Thames embankment who resold rope, coal, and other refuse that washed ashore. Better known as Billy and Charley, they sold thousands of counterfeit medieval lead pilgrims’ badges to London antiquities dealers. Antiquarians debated the badges’ provenance throughout the midcentury, culminating in an 1858 libel trial in which Roach Smith testified for the authenticity of the badges, later arguing that it was improbable that two mudlarks could have forged such a vast and varied collection.Footnote ²² His shock at the idea that illiterates could be intimately familiar with medieval artifacts—or sufficiently inventive craftsmen to reproduce convincing forgeries—is palpable.Footnote ²³ The scandal demonstrates that many working-class antiquaries wielded a considerable amount of historical and material expertise, even if this expertise was not always turned to reconstructing the past with empiric accuracy.

Of course, many working-class antiquaries were not attempting to exploit or falsify the past for cash; they were simply engaging with the artifacts they found in a casual, utilitarian fashion. Reporting on Wright’s 1859 excavations of the Roman city of Viroconium in Wroxeter, the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Review gives the impression of disorderly abundance: “from time immemorial the farmers have been in the habit of digging into the ground … for building materials, and the villagers and farm labourers point out different spots where, either in their own memory or according to local tradition, objects of interest have been discovered.”Footnote ²⁴ For Wright and his workers, this casual appropriation of authority was at best an interruption, at worst genuinely disruptive. In Roach Smith’s language, “it is very seldom that these hoards fall into the hands of persons competent to understand them; and thus they are continually sacrificed to ignorance” (Reflections, 101).

Roach Smith’s use of the term “sacrifice” is telling. While similar lamentations run through the private papers of other antiquaries, archaeologists, and paleontologists, Roach Smith neatly articulates interlocking concerns about sentiment, authority, and preservation. The practical recycling at Wroxeter demonstrates a failure of “sentiment which, in modern times, among educated persons, tends to the preservation of the monuments of past ages” (Reflections, 2). He opens volume 2 of Collectanea Antiqua (1852) with a call to arms against the “semibarbarous state of society … [which] in no way regards the works of ancient art”:

Roach Smith is making the case for historical disinterestedness: both the poor and the wealthy have a moral obligation to put the abstract ideals of history before their own needs. This is a variation on a common refrain, and one that cuts to the heart of Dickens’s ideas about sentiment, altruism, and recovering the past. Simon Goldhill figures the twin concepts of restoration and reconstruction as “central metaphors for Victorian thinking,” both of which assert the importance of a strong, material-historical narrative in the present.Footnote ²⁶ The ethos behind restoring archaeological and architectural sites—a “longing for wholeness and integrity to be projected from an idealized past into a sought for future”—is helpful here.Footnote ²⁷ As they engage with artifacts, working-class antiquaries are not engaged in making a “sought for future” on the national historical scale; instead, “wholeness and integrity” are recovered around the individual, at the expense of wider understandings of history.

The working-class antiquary is familiar to readers of Dickens, a subset of the British underclasses that gained new levels of representation in his novels.Footnote ²⁸ In his early picaresque The Pickwick Papers (1837), Dickens stages a fictionalized version of these encounters between the antiquary and the “poor delver of the soil”: Pickwick, an aspiring learned gentleman, notices a “small broken stone, partially buried in the ground” outside a laborer’s cottage and purchases it for ten shillings.Footnote ²⁹ This episode—known as the “Pickwick controversy”—validates the laborer’s inexpert and incidental relationship to the material past, though without linking working-class misinterpretation to narrative progress. Certain that the stone is “important … [and has] some very old inscription, existing perhaps long before the ancient alms-houses in this place,” Pickwick is elected honorary member of seventeen learned societies and publishes “a Pamphlet, containing ninety-six pages of very small print, and twenty-seven different readings of the inscription” (213, 222). One of Pickwick’s rivals, Blotton, interviews the cottager, who admits that he carved the inscription himself and that it reads “Bill Stumps, his mark” (229). This is the type of inaccuracy that Hyde Clarke fears (and that Roach Smith would later commit in his defense of the Shadwell Dock forgeries). Unlike Clarke, however, Dickens blames the would-be experts. Stumps’s forgery is accidental, carved in an “idle mood,” and he is honest when telling Pickwick that the stone itself was “here long afore I war born, or any on us” (213). Interpretive error comes from Pickwick and the other learned men, not from the cottager.

Inflamed by Blotton’s attack, the learned societies insist on the importance and mystery of the engraving and “unanimously [vote] the presumptuous Blotton an ignorant meddler” before setting “to work upon more treatises than ever,” and Pickwick’s error proliferates (231). The Pickwickian controversy does not generate the productive misinterpretations that become key for narrative resolution in Dickens’s later novels. Rather, Pickwick’s interpretive blunder gives rise to legitimized historical knowledge that is at once self-contradictory and self-perpetuating. This is Nietzsche’s category of antiquarian history to the letter, the impulse to “preserv[e] and rever[e]” the past in service of useless knowledge (72). It is also an early instantiation of the institutionalized past that ensnares so many of Dickens’s characters, like Mr. Dick in David Copperfield, who cannot write his memoir without referring to King Charles I, which “tumble[s] the Memorial out of all shape.”Footnote ³⁰ Bill Stumps, on the other hand, is ten shillings richer, and his casual, appropriative relationship to the past—deplored by experts like Clarke and Roach Smith—keeps him free from the quicksand of antiquarian debate.

Like their living counterparts, many of Dickens’s working-class antiquaries have a utilitarian rather than reconstructive relationship to artifacts and curios, one enmeshed with the struggle for personal survival. In Great Expectations (1861), law clerk John Wemmick encourages Pip to collect “portable property,” his term for the mourning jewelry, signet rings, and other “curiosities” given to him by the condemned at Newgate.Footnote ³¹ In Our Mutual Friend, the taxidermist Mr. Venus constructs and sells skeletons in the knowledge that he can “be miscellaneous” and sends an art school “a perfect Beauty … One leg Belgian, one leg English, and the pickings of eight other people in it” (85). Also in Our Mutual Friend, the Thames waterman Gaffer Hexam articulates a version of Roach Smith’s questions around selfishness, sentiment, and historical knowledge. Gaffer rescues castoffs from the Thames and skims the pockets of drowned corpses, asking: “Has a dead man any use for money? … Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, miss it?” (16).

Dickens punishes Gaffer for his parasitism—he drowns, becoming a Thames corpse himself—and he does not recover relics in service of historical knowledge. Still, Gaffer marshals his working-class antiquarianism to a dual end: he salvages the material past to care for his family and, more abstractly, to construct a narrative of his family’s life. He reminds his daughter Lizzie that “the very fire that warmed you … 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 it, I cut out [of] a piece of wood that drifted from some ship or another” (15). In this way, Dickens gives priority to Lizzie’s personal origins; it is Lizzie’s story that Gaffer assembles from the river, not some wider narrative of Romano-British cultural development.

Sweeping the Past Clean in Bleak House

The tangible past persists in Bleak House—in the coal soot that covers London, the tumbledown slum Tom-All-Alone’s, the endless court records of Chancery—but it obscures the narrative rather than illuminating it. Characters in these texts sink beneath the real and ideological weight of forecasted futures and accumulated history (in Nietzsche’s perspective, “modern man drags around with him a huge quantity of indigestible stones of knowledge”) (78). Material evidence of personal histories tends to be destroyed or remain concealed: a young Esther Summerson buries her doll in the garden and later burns the flowers given to her by her suitor, Allan Woodcourt; Lady Dedlock’s letters to her former lover, Captain Hawdon, burn to ash; the sadistic lawyer Tulkinghorn has documents linking Lady Dedlock to Hawdon but keeps them for private blackmail. Still, it is through these failed revelations that Dickens begins to untwist the complexities of Bleak House and trace the connections among his vast network of characters. In Bleak House, Dickens deploys the clarificatory potential of the material past in a series of feints, half-worked disclosures that function at the level of narrative but do not fully rescue textual artifacts or relics, or even affect the larger material world of the novel.

In Jo the street sweep, perhaps the most woefully downtrodden Dickensian urchin, Dickens distills the impossibility of detangling an incomprehensible past that seems to foreclose the possibility of forward motion. “What connection can there be,” he asks, “between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom… ? What connection can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!”Footnote ³² Dickens then retrains his focus on Jo, who is “unconscious of the link” but who is (197), as Caroline Levine and Emily Steinlight argue, integral to the networked narratives of Bleak House.Footnote ³³

Dickens’s use of Jo as a kind of symbolic and narrative multitool has led to a long tradition of reading the street sweep as equal parts symptom and symbol, and considering Jo as working-class antiquary loads him up with yet another representative identity.Footnote ³⁴ However, reading Jo as one of Dickens’s limit cases—as a character in whom restricted social power and profound narrative power coexist in extremity—further illuminates the ways Dickens constructs narrative via antiquarian gestures. In the first quarter of the novel, Jo leads a disguised Lady Dedlock to the pauper’s cemetery so that she can pay her respects to Hawdon (known to the reader in his adopted persona, Nemo). This is a significant moment for Jo, who is otherwise defined by his repeated protestations that he “don’t know nothink” and by his apparent lack of any epistemological standing ground (197). The cemetery gate is locked. Otherwise, Jo tells Lady Dedlock, he could “unkiver [the skeleton] for you with my broom” (202).

All of Jo’s work is futile in a practical sense—it is impossible to clear away the ever-accumulating dust and filth of Bleak House’s London, and here, Jo neither digs up Nemo’s bones nor sorts out the rest of the rubbishy remains—so this may not initially register as a scene of antiquarianism, official or working-class. Still, in his offer to “unkiver” Nemo from the pile of anonymous bones, Jo also “unkivers” Lady Dedlock’s long-denied past; his apparently futile antiquarian gesture is in fact fulfilled at the level of narrative. Hilary Schor tells us that “the constant revelation and re-encryption of the past are central to the book’s construction.”Footnote ³⁵ Though he has neither the official knowledge of an established antiquary nor the unacknowledged expertise of one of Barnett’s earth workers, Jo aids in this key revelation. Dickens’s predilection for having the disenfranchised and downtrodden usher in melodramatic reparative feeling is well established, and Jo’s feelings for Nemo (“he was wery good to me, he wos!”) lead him to the graveyard and set off a chain of sentiment in the novel, namely Lady Dedlock’s moral rehabilitation and Sir Leicester Dedlock’s change of heart (135). The graveyard scene also carries major narrative consequences: another layer of sediment is cleared from the connection between Lady Dedlock, Hawdon, and their secret child, Esther, and the two halves of Bleak House begin to knit together again. Clarke and Roach Smith warned that working-class counterparts meddled in the telling of history. For Dickens, this meddling is precisely the point. In Jo, he insists on the power of the working-class antiquary, tying their capacity for cutting through history to the limitations of their class status.

The pauper’s graveyard is illegible, a scramble of history condensed into a “scene of horror,” and Lady Dedlock cannot find meaning in the “piles of bones” that have accreted over decades (202).Footnote ³⁶ Reconsidering these rubbishy “piles of bones” as part of a tradition of antiquarian description unlocks Jo’s potential as a working-class antiquary. In his 1815 survey of Babylon, orientalist and antiquarian Claudius James Rich recounts his disheartening first encounter with the ruins: “I thought that I should have distinguished some traces, however imperfect, of many of the principal structures…. I was completely deceived…. I found … in some places … brick walls surprisingly fresh, in others merely a vast succession of mounds of rubbish, or such indeterminate figures, variety, and extent, as to involve the person who should have formed any theory in inextricable confusion.”Footnote ³⁷ In his tour of Pompeii in Pictures from Italy (1846), Dickens leads his reader to the in-progress dig at the Herculaneum amphitheater. In contrast to “the little familiar tokens of human habitation” revealed by the neater, more complete excavations, he is “perplexed by the [ash that forms] great walls of monstrous thickness, rising up between the benches, shutting out the stage, obtruding their shapeless forms in absurd places, confusing the plan, and making it a disordered dream.”Footnote ³⁸ One more example of the abundant and disorderly material past, this time from the report on Wright’s excavations of Viroconium: “the surface of the ground within it is strewed everywhere with small fragments of pottery, bricks, and mortar.”Footnote ³⁹ Each of these descriptions cries out for what Goran Blix terms the “archaeological gaze,” which “replace[s] artifacts in their original setting” and resuscitates the past, subduing disorder into cohesion.Footnote ⁴⁰

Dickens further inscribes the importance of the pauper’s graveyard via a malapropism: Jo mistakes “consecrated ground” for “consequential ground” (202). Only Jo can sort out consequential knowledge from this rubbishy disorder and extract narrative meaning from inscrutable remains like the antiquaries at Pompeii or Viroconium. Lady Dedlock “skrinks into a corner,” overcome by wordless horror. Jo, however, immediately locates Nemo’s burial place “over yonder. Among them piles of bones and close to that there kitchin winder … wery nigh the top.” Then, like a docent at a museum or a guide at a dig, he “thrusts the handle of his broom between the bars of the gate, and with his utmost power of elaboration” points out Nemo’s remains (202). Jo may not excavate Nemo, but he appropriates Blix’s archaeological gaze—normally associated with the project of national pasts—on an intimate scale.

Jo’s broom is the single locus of his understanding, the exception to his “nothink.” A few chapters before the cemetery scene, he testifies about Hawdon’s death: “Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don’t know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don’t know that Jo is short for a longer name…. Spell it? No. He can’t spell it…. Never been to school. What’s home?” (134). Jo’s own origins, his upbringing, the correct way to be a boy: all these pieces of the past and provisions for the future are blank. But Jo “know’s a broom’s a broom, and knows it’s wicked to tell a lie” (134). Dickens condenses foundational epistemological categories—knowing, truth—into a single line of testimony, overloading the broom with representational meaning. Later, Lady Dedlock asks Nemo to “show [her] all those dreadful places” where Nemo lived and died, and Jo “tells off [her instructions] on his broom-handle” before mapping out the dead man’s life (201). Dickens builds out the resonances between the broom and narrative understanding in order of ascending complexity: the broom is all Jo knows, and his knowing is linked to the idea of truth; it is the locus of his interpretive capacity; and, in the cemetery, it is a tool with which he brings Nemo’s bones to the surface of the narrative, if not to the actual surface of the graveyard. (In this way, Jo aligns with Esther, who is also nicknamed “Dame Durden” by Rick and Ada and associated with sweeping and scouring, though she often withholds what information she uncovers.) While the broom is not an archaeologist’s delicate, handheld brush for clearing away fine grit from amphorae, it is still a tool with which Jo helps clear away narrative rubbish.

While Jo’s testimony and death scene involve higher authorities coaxing him into repetition, the cemetery scene is a strikingly different demonstration of directed knowledge; his work here is not the same as Roach Smith’s cottage goers “grubbing in the bank” and accidentally uncovering a hoard (Reflections, 101). In this sense, Jo is making history in accordance with the larger guidelines of past-oriented sciences. On one hand, he has no authority and is uninterested in unpacking the intricacies of the other remains, apprehending them only as “piles of bones.” This is an extreme version of the farmers living among the ruins of Viroconium. And Jo does not understand the larger import of his gesture. He is, for instance, unaware that his work in the cemetery threatens the Dedlock reputation, which, as Mufti argues, chimes with the “dissolution of social structures” in the larger novel, or that it could lead to the resolution of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.Footnote ⁴¹ On the other hand, it is Jo’s unknowing pantomime of antiquarian action that sets the recovery of Bleak House’s submerged plot in motion. Lady Dedlock vanishes before Jo is sure that “he has made himself intelligible,” but he has already made himself intelligible to the reader, whisking the inscrutable “scene of horror” into (some) order, fitting it into the novel’s larger concerns around Hawdon, Lady Dedlock, and Esther’s parentage (202).

Dickens offers a counterpoint to Jo in Krook—Rag and Bottle man, hoarder, gin-drinker, and victim of spontaneous combustion—whose explosive end demonstrates what happens when the “disordered dream” of the unprocessed material past is left to fester.Footnote ⁴² Like Jo, Krook is illiterate and unwittingly privy to the intricate backstory of Bleak House: he owns the most recent Jarndyce v Jarndyce will, which could resolve the case, and he steals Lady Dedlock’s letters to Nemo and is attempting to sell them to Tony Jobling when he explodes. Unlike Jo’s, Krook’s working-class antiquarianism is about accumulation and inertia, and his shop is a monument to historical uselessness. As Esther remarks, “everything seemed to be bought, and nothing to be sold there” (48). His stock is uniformly run down, “dirty,” “second-hand,” “old [and] crackled,” “rusty,” “rags,” and he cannot abide “any sweeping, nor scouring, nor cleaning, nor repairing,” preferring “rust and must and cobwebs” to any material or narrative restoration (50). In Nietzsche’s terms, the antiquarian collecting impulse has “encased” Krook “in the stench of must and mold” (75). Krook impedes the unraveling of Bleak House until his combustion, an inflection point when the possibility of change meets the weight of the past just as a match meets a bottle of gin. This is a failed antiquarian revelation in both practical and narrative terms—some of the letters burn with Krook, and the disputed inheritance has long been consumed by legal fees by the time Jarndyce v Jarndyce is finally settled.

Even as Jo’s excavation of Nemo offers the beginning of an emotional, ethical recuperation of a repressed past, it threatens the stability of the Dedlock family chronicle. “As old as the hills, and infinitely more respectable” (12), the Dedlocks are, along with Chancery, one of the main representatives of what Choi terms “official, or institutional, practices of scripting history.”Footnote ⁴³ Later in the novel, Skimpole figures the Dedlock portrait gallery as a staid museum: “the whole race [had been in life] ‘stuffed people,’—a large collection, glassy eyed, set up in the most approved manner on their various twigs and perches, very correct … always in glass cases” (469). Lady Dedlock’s boredom is a symptom of being “deadlocked,” and her horror at Nemo’s grave is the first crack in the ice: emotion is released, vitality begins to return, and the museum narrative starts to topple.

Jo’s “unconsciousness” is his great tragedy, but it is also key to understanding Dickens’s response to conventional models of established historical knowledge. On one hand, Bleak House is dominated and choked by official historical discourses: biological inheritance, legal history, geological time, even Lamarckian evolution. In Mr. Gridley’s words, “I can’t undo the past, and the past drives me [to waste away in Chancery]” (194). On the other hand, characters who are unconcerned with these larger narratives and endpoints of history may sweep and cut their way out of the tangle. Jo’s offer in the pauper’s cemetery is motivated by personal sentiment, not some larger interest in reconstructing the past. In a more attenuated fashion, Esther must turn away from Lady Dedlock and the Jarndyce v Jarndyce case in order to achieve her happy ending. Seen from this angle, Jo’s working-class antiquarianism is almost miraculous. In granting him narrative and emotional power via this archaeological turn, Dickens underwrites the working-class antiquary’s misappropriation of scientific authority and discourses. Though he does not recover Nemo’s physical remains, Jo paves the way for a version of the past that eventually topples official discourse and precedent. This is an early version of the casual, sentimental, and erroneous relationship to history that finds its full expression in Boffin. Jo does not trick the reader, but neither does he explicitly articulate the subterranean backstories that he unearths; after all, he knows “nothink,” and Dickens’s third-person narrator is likewise reticent on the matter. Dickens’s readers must put aside rigorous historical knowledge-making and instead intuit the facts of the past. Excavating these prehistories grants a partial legibility to Bleak House’s buried connections, but details remain inscrutable and resolution is deferred.

Falling off the Past with the Golden Dustman

Dickens anchors the complex inheritance plot of Our Mutual Friend in old Mr. Harmon’s dustheaps, mounds of refuse that contain both valuable treasures and his will, and in so doing collapses the distance between the material past and the narrative construction of the novel. These dustheaps are the down-market, commercial version of an archaeological site: Harmon has made his fortune by sifting and sorting dust, and Boffin must excavate the wills from the mounds. Moreover, Boffin practices a carnivalesque version of antiquarianism, sealing Harmon’s will in a Dutch bottle and burying it in a mound. In this way, he obscures the past’s “will,” keeping it from determining Bella’s and John’s futures until they can grow beyond moral corruptibility. This antiquarian fraud also allows Boffin to manipulate the novel’s timeline in a kind of analepsis, generating a chaotic mirage of plot via misdirection.

Boffin is the apotheosis of Dickens’s working-class antiquaries. In his manipulation of the mounds, he displays both expert archaeological precision and a uniquely cavalier attitude toward accurately reconstructing the past. As the villainous ballad-seller Silas Wegg attempts to blackmail Boffin, he tracks him through his dustheaps, driven by the fear of what he might “fraudulently unearth” (643). While Wegg’s fears about “fraudulent unearthing” are disingenuous, the phrase resonates with the warnings of Hyde Clarke and Joshua Toulmin Smith and is useful as a larger guideline for understanding the workings of the novel’s plot (which I will return to in the next section). Dickens confers real antiquarian and scientific authority on Boffin, a laboring man with no historical knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁴ Boffin’s excavations are distortions of antiquarian practice, and surprising analogues between his homegrown approach and popular representations of antiquaries. Driven by altruistic sentiment rather than fidelity to the past, Boffin is willfully in error; he mobilizes the fluidity of the dig site rather than disciplining it. Through Boffin, Dickens turns historical rigor to different account.

Boffin’s apparent lack of interest in grander questions of history and chronological narrative is key to his abilities as a working-class antiquary. While he knows more than Jo’s “nothink,” he is illiterate (“all print is shut to me”) (57). We first meet Boffin when he engages Wegg to read Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire aloud so that he may better himself through education. In one of Dickens’s better-known malapropisms, Boffin refers to the volumes—“eight wollumes. Red and gold. Purple ribbon in every wollume, to keep the place where you leave off”—as “Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan Empire” (59). Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, published between 1776 and 1789 and revised throughout his lifetime, is one of the paradigmatic grand narratives of empire, partly constructed through attentive, antiquarian detail.Footnote ⁴⁵ But Boffin is unanchored in the stream of historical process and blithely transposes a familiar, foundational narrative of national continuity between the British Empire and its Roman antecedents.

Dickens is making a joke at Boffin’s expense (and is referring to the growing tensions between Russia and Britain over Russian expansion). But at the same time, Dickens establishes Boffin as a man with both an attenuated historical vision and a cavalier attitude toward accuracy and fact. As the novel progresses, the scope of the historical joke narrows from the national to the individual: readers watch Boffin “decline and fall” into miserhood. However, as Boffin eventually reveals, this apparent decline and fall has been a gambit. Emperors are convenient models of iniquity, and the Roman Empire becomes a signifier for personal development and schemes.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dickens appropriates history to the personal scale, reworks it via misinterpretation.

This attitude toward authoritative written history translates into Boffin’s practical, working-class version of antiquarianism. To recontextualize Boffin as an antiquary, it is helpful to recall his antecedents in the nineteenth-century imagination.Footnote ⁴⁷ By the time of Our Mutual Friend, antiquaries were alternately portrayed as eighteenth-century survivals, voracious collectors with inexpert knowledge, and trash collectors (and, in The Pickwick Papers, as all three). In George Cruikshank’s satirical cartoon “The Antiquarian Society” (1812), squabbling groups of elderly gentlemen thrust papers at each other, ignoring their speaker and his pile of random artifacts.Footnote ⁴⁸ In 1845 Punch feigned sympathy while reporting on tensions in the Society of Antiquaries: if the society dissolved, “there should be no body in existence to decipher unintelligible hieroglyphics, scrutinize old bottles, furnish teas to classical conundrums, and find solutions for the sundry bits of rag, tobacco-pipe, or brickbats, which the Antiquarian Society has always been ready to sit upon.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1878 Punch was singing the same tune about archaeologists William Greenwell and Walter Money, who uncovered a diverse assortment of grave goods in a Celtic tumulus: “although they are Antiquaries, and not Costermongers, it may not be improper to say to those assiduous examiners of ancient British tumuli, ‘Go on with your Barrow!’”Footnote ⁵⁰ As Rosemary Sweet shows, these types of caricatures diminish antiquarian contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical discourse. Still, the idea of antiquary as costermonger—a rubbish seller slinging his wares from a wheelbarrow—emphasizes the larger convergence between the notion of antiquary and garbageman.

Dickens sets up Boffin as an accidental keeper of history in all regards. The Boffins live up “Maiden Lane, Battle Bridge” (60). As engraver and antiquary John Wykeham Archer explains in his Vestiges of Old London (1851), this was the site of a “congregation of knackers’ yards, tile-kilns, dust-heaps, and rows of dingy houses.”Footnote ⁵¹ Archer reproduces “a fragment of [inscribed Roman stone from Suetonius’s camp] … placed in the front of one of the gardens belonging to a row of cottages … in a field on the eastern side of Maiden Lane, Battle Bridge … placed there with the other rubbish, for the purpose of keeping the entrance to the garden dry.”Footnote ⁵² Here is an echo of Boffin’s casual appropriation of things past as it was practiced by his living London analogues, and it is easy to imagine him recontextualizing a chunk of Roman archaeology to beautify and weatherproof the Bower.

Dickens writes the dustheaps as carnivalesque antiquarian sites.Footnote ⁵³ Intervening decades have not yet legitimized them as historical, but they are ripe for excavations “like an old volcano… its geological formation was Dust. Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery dust, rough dust and sifted dust,—all manner of dust” (24). While the mounds contain geological evidence (coal-dust) and archaeological evidence (bone-dust, crockery dust), Dickens emphasizes that the mounds are not to be carved up according to precise disciplinary distinctions but rather heaped together, making them well suited to the generalist antiquary. By the end of the novel, both Wegg and the reader are attuned to the possibility of “a spot rich with some secret” lurking in the dust yards (643). Similarly, a will in a Dutch bottle invites the reader to dream of buried treasure while underscoring the connection between garbage and artifact.

While Boffin has no education and no postnominal F.S.A., he is an adept excavator with real, practical expertise. Wegg asks Venus if he knows where and how Boffin found the Harmon will: “‘Did you ever hear him mention how he found it, my dear friend? … For instance, where he found things? Or, for instance, how he set about it? Whether he began at the top of the mounds, or whether he began at the bottom. Whether he prodded’; Mr. Wegg’s pantomime is skilful and expressive here; ‘or whether he scooped? Should you say scooped, my dear Mr. Venus, or should you—as a man—say prodded?’” (298). Wegg’s pantomime may be “skilful and expressive,” but it is ultimately a useless gesture, just like his attempts to meddle in Boffin’s schemes. Venus responds that Boffin neither “scooped” nor “prodded.” Instead, “what was found, was found in the sorting and sifting” (298). “Sorting and sifting” imply care and the capacity to categorize, and Dickens sets apart the clumsy prodding of the amateur from Boffin’s practical expertise.

As Wegg and Venus watch, Boffin demonstrates his excavatory skill: approaching a mound, he “tucked up his cuffs and spat on his hands, and then went at it like an old digger as he was. He had no design upon the pole [which he takes around the mounds], except that he measured a shovel’s length from it before beginning, nor was it his purpose to dig deep. Some dozen or so of expert strokes sufficed. Then, he stopped, looked down into the cavity, bent over it, and took out what appeared to be an ordinary glass bottle” (482). After finding the bottle containing the will, Boffin turns off his lantern and “fill[s] up the hole in the dark,” moving the ashes with his “skilful hand” (482). As Wegg remarks to Venus, “he knows how to use [his shovel] … fifty times as well as either of us” (480). Here, Dickens fulfills the promise of Jo’s archaeological gesture with the broom. While Boffin is efficient—an “expert” so “skilful” that his digging does not disturb the mound’s stratigraphy—it is important to note that this excavation is not the same as a navvy incidentally discovering an amphora in the foundations of a house. Instead, Boffin has buried the Dutch bottle there himself. This is bad antiquarian praxis, though it has surprising antecedents. Zimmerman, for example, points to renowned archaeologist Austen Henry Layard’s report on Pompeiian excavations, in which he claimed that antiquaries would rebury “interesting objects so that visitors could have the satisfaction of uncovering them.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Whereas these interventions confirm a familiar narrative for tourists, Boffin’s meddling keeps Our Mutual Friend in chaos. Like Jo, his misappropriation of antiquarian authority allows him to work within the plot, but he does so to mystify, rather than to clarify. What is productive for individual characters is unproductive for any readers attempting to accurately reconstruct the novel’s truth. Charles Roach Smith would, no doubt, glance sideways at Boffin’s cavalier willingness to turn legal and national history, as well as antiquarian practice, to “selfish ends.” But in the logic of the novel, Boffin’s expert interference seems to be the only escape from the misery of the past. At his first session with Wegg, Boffin is baffled by the “confounding enormities of the Romans [and is] so severely punished that he could hardly … articulate ‘Tomorrow’” (66). This reading experience echoes Nietzsche’s comments on stifling, “indigestible” history and, more ironically, recalls complaints of Dickens’s contemporary critics and their dismay over the rambling complexities of his later novels. But here, Boffin is defeated by a conventional narrative history. “Articulation” is a key metaphor for Our Mutual Friend, linked to the taxidermist Mr. Venus’s passion for assembling (“articulating”) skeletons. Boffin’s ability to “articulate ‘Tomorrow’”—to say the word and, more broadly, to “articulate” a vision of a future—is threatened by an accurate reconstruction of the past.

Unearthing and Restoring the Subterranean Plot

Our Mutual Friend ends rapidly and somewhat implausibly, with a strike of Boffin’s shovel at the Gordian knot of plot. Boffin’s “decline and fall” was a blind, and he was only pretending to be a “hard-hearted miser” to teach Bella the perils of greed (753). As Sean Grass explains, Victorian reviewers singled out Boffin as a cartoonish “bizarre and unlifelike prop,” and were largely unconvinced by the final, redemptive act of his miser pantomime.Footnote ⁵⁵ Dickens’s biographer and friend John Forster was the exception: “if we look back to those scenes in which Mr. Boffin enacted the part of the miser, we shall be surprised to see how skillfully and freely the novelist scattered what, with the key to it all in our possession, we see clearly enough to be indications of the case.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Boffin’s reveal is less deus-ex-machina and more a culminating gesture of working-class antiquarianism. Regardless of whether we can follow the “indications of the case,” the reader has already spent the better part of four books watching and buying into Boffin’s blind. But here, Boffin excavates a subterranean plot, presenting a neat, compact counterstory and radically rewriting our understanding of events.Footnote ⁵⁷ Dickens describes Boffin’s blind as a “pious fraud,” suggesting that the errors and false theories that so unnerved Joshua Toulmin Smith and Hyde Clarke are critical to creating a satisfying resolution (751).Footnote ⁵⁸

Boffin, then, serves as a kind of undernarrator, who blurs the distinction between the ordering of the story and the way it is told. As Zimmerman argues, Dickens often defaults to an excavatory model of narrative; it is significant that Boffin is carrying out his deception through the same means. There was a performative aspect of British archaeology and antiquarianism, in which the scientist neatly subsumed the confusion of the past for the public. Think again of Layard’s account of Pompeii, in which tourists brought up the material past, seemingly perfectly legible, into the present. Boffin’s revelation can be read as a fictive version of these performances, which denaturalizes antiquarian performances of mastery over the past. More importantly, it illustrates that while Boffin’s final revelation is in line with some aspects of antiquarian praxis, he gets there via deliberate error and manipulation. In this way, Boffin constructs a radically counterfactual narrative, one that allows him to evade and subdue the difficulties of the legal past.

Boffin’s skills as a working-class antiquary grant him a kind of authorship: he pieces together a story by rearranging fragments of the past. It is helpful to return to the conceptual overlap between the construction of literary narrative, on one hand, and the construction of historical knowledge through material culture on the other. Antiquaries and archaeologists turned material culture to the service of larger historical narratives. In recovering a cache of pilgrims’ badges in the Thames, they added another tick to the timeline of medieval Britain. But the telling of antiquarian knowledge is dependent on what artifacts are recovered. If those badges were never found—or if they were contemporaneous forgeries worked by two former mudlarks—the story of medieval Britain would be deformed. At the risk of repetition, this is part of the threat that working-class antiquaries posed to official knowledge discourses.

Similarly, Dickens treats Harmon’s various wills as artifacts with real narrative power: whatever is unearthed determines the running of the story. Russian formalism’s classic distinction between fabula (the chronological order of events) and sjuzhet (the way those events are presented to the reader) is helpful here. As Brooks reminds us, “a moment’s reflection shows us that most often we know the fabula, what happened, only by way of the sjuzhet.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In Boffin, Dickens gives us a character who seems to blur the distinction between the order of relation and plot chronology: by rooting in the dustheaps, Boffin manipulates both the raw material of the story and our readerly experience of it.Footnote ⁶⁰ As readers, we expect characters to manipulate and construct our experience of the narrative. But as Dickens shows, Boffin’s near-implausible capacity for subtle intervention in the narrative derives from his experience as a working-class antiquary. Dickens tips his hand on this in a piece of metacommentary: as Wegg recruits taxidermist Mr. Venus to his mission, he emphasizes Venus’s capacity for “delicate manipulation … [and his] skill in piecing little things together” (300). Continuing on, Wegg stresses both the importance of manipulating the mounds and concealing those interventions: “I am not good at it. Whether I gave myself up to prodding, or whether I gave myself up to scooping, I couldn’t do it with that delicate touch so as not to show that I was disturbing the mounds” (300).

These “delicate manipulation[s]” preserve the illusion of an untouched past, from which a rational and intelligible narrative can be brought up whole cloth. This was a common antiquarian and archaeological gambit, in which “mounds of rubbish” and “inextricable confusion” were overlaid with tidiness and the promise of order and understanding.Footnote ⁶¹ Henry Ogg’s 1842 illustration of a round barrow dig in Iffin Wood, Canterbury, for Archaeologia shows an excavated trench magically unencumbered by debris and backfill. Five urns are removed from their find spots and evenly spaced across the foreground, and a pickaxe and shovel are carefully balanced against the back wall of the trench. This sketch—and many like it in the records of the Society of Antiquaries—evinces the work involved in excavation while preserving the illusion of a miraculously legible megalithic past.

An 1855 piece from The Watchman and Wesleyan Advertiser details an archaeological picnic on the Isle of Wight. After weeks of preliminary spadework and excavation, local antiquarian George Hillier invited Roach Smith to view the disinterment of the remaining undisturbed tumuli. In front of an audience of “about 100 in number” of local gentry, who sat down to “a substantial and elegant lunch spread in a hollow and very convenient spot upon the down,” Hillier performed a magic trick: “the company were delighted to see grave after grave laid open, to witness the gradual removal of the chalky soil, and see extended skeletons” and their grave goods.Footnote ⁶² The audience watched as the buried past emerged into coherence. These public and semipublic representations of archaeology transform a chaotic past into something museum-ready, laid out and contextualized as if already encased in glass.

Dickens reworks these fantasies of a suddenly legible past in one of the novel’s final chapters, “Showing How the Golden Dustman Helped to Scatter Dust.” In stark contrast to the comparatively convoluted reading experience of Our Mutual Friend, the Boffins recount their deception with tidy efficiency, overwriting an entire book in the space of a few pages. In a now-familiar conflation of plot and (metaphorical) artifact, Mrs. Boffin remarks to her husband that it is “as if [Harmon’s] money had turned bright again, after a long long rust in the dark, and was at last beginning to sparkle in the sunlight” (757). The “long long rust in the dark” refers to the corrupting influence of the Harmon fortune but also to the preceding action of the story, which are revealed as so many layers of sediment to be cleared away. As Blix explains, “the experience of the museum in the nineteenth century … involved reanimating the artifacts and reconstituting the worlds to which they belonged.”Footnote ⁶³ Boffin’s archaeological gaze, then, has allowed him to transform the novel’s secret plot into a museum-ready narrative. From the disorder of the dustheaps—and from a complex past that lurks just beneath the surface—comes a neatly synthesized narrative of moral development.

In response to these revelations, Bella calls Boffin “the dearest and kindest fingerpost that ever was set up anywhere, pointing out the road that I was taking and the end it led to” (755). This idea of Boffin as a “fingerpost” works on multiple levels. By playing the miser, Boffin “points” out a potential future for Bella and keeps her from corruption. At the same time, he “points” away from the truth, systematically misleading both her and the reader. To return to the analogy between plot and dig site: antiquarians and other practical historians occasionally misrepresented the dig site in order to bolster a wider ideological narrative. The idea that a tourist to Pompeii could miraculously recover paradigmatic artifacts from the ashes, or that a tumulus could speak its history to the casual observer, is a fantasy sustained by deliberate intervention. Boffin, however, systemically distorts both antiquarian practice and the legibility of the past. He achieves this final, compact correction by generating false theories and sustaining the reader in error. While the Boffins do brush the dust away from the preceding plot, Dickens reminds us that Boffin is the one who “helped to scatter [the] dust” in the first place.

Most of Our Mutual Friend is an expression of the type of chaos that real-world antiquaries were working to subdue. Boffin is not concerned with accuracy, with unpacking the seriality of Harmon’s will, or with grasping Rome’s decline and fall. Instead, to borrow from Nietzsche, he turns from the “extremely restricted field of vision” of antiquarian history and toward “that which is becoming” (although again, for Dickens “becoming” is located in the personal rather than the national-historical) (75). This is not to say that Boffin cannot understand these things—more that he deprioritizes them, manipulating historical materiality and narrative to his own ends. Like that of his real-world working-class antiquarian counterparts, Boffin’s work with the mounds is driven by intimate, personal concerns. He abuses historical methodology in scope as well as in practice, doing it all to “make [Bella] a little better” (756). According to Brooks, “the anticipation of retrospection is our chief tool in making sense of narrative, the master trope of its strange logic … even traditional nineteenth-century ends are subject to self-conscious endgames, yet still we read in a spirit of confidence, and also a state of dependence, that what remains to be read will restructure the provisional meanings of the already read.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Via the actions of his working-class antiquaries, Dickens exploits this “strange logic,” straining it to the breaking point. Through Boffin, Dickens sacrifices some of the novel’s coherence for the sake of Bella’s moral rehabilitation. Boffin remakes the past, present, and future according to what should be, rather than what is; the satisfying and curative end cannot derive from a hyperaccurate chronological narrative. In this way, Dickens demonstrates the concealed meddling that is necessary for the happy ending, self-reflexively exposing the artifice and constructedness of the moral plot.

Imaginative History and the Pleasures of False Theories

In handing the broom to Jo and the shovel to Boffin, Dickens was playing with major nineteenth-century assumptions and anxieties about historical narrative and scientific authority. Victorian England was, self-consciously, a nation built from the remnants of many pasts. If educated geologists and archaeologists were the heroic narrators of the deep past, what could happen when an uneducated working man—without a vested interest in creating and maintaining a cohesive vision of the past—assumed authority over a potential dig site? As Dickens’s characters and real-world working-class antiquaries demonstrated, the answer to this question was a radical deconstruction of official historical praxis and narrative in favor of flexible, casual, and anachronistic self-construction.

To conclude, I want to briefly consider the readerly pleasures of Dickens’s narrative tricks and to draw out some implications of his radical misuse of official discourses. In the preface to Bleak House, Dickens mounts his iconic defense against charges of implausibility: “I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things” (4). In his postscript to Our Mutual Friend, he explains the impulse driving the deception around John Harmon’s death: “to keep for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out, another purpose originating in that leading incident, and turning it to a pleasant and useful account at last, was at once the most interesting and difficult part of my design” (798).

“Romantic,” “pleasant,” “useful”—in his novels, Dickens extends an invitation to warp, to invent, to restring the past in a process of misuse and misinterpretation. Dickens frequently critiques the joyless accounting of hard-line knowledge, most completely in Hard Times (1854). Early in Our Mutual Friend, Lizzie Hexam sits scrying over a piece of coal, imagining that she can see her past and future in the play of gas and flame. She tries to share her visions with her brother Charley, who immediately translates them into cold fact: Lizzie is only looking at “a bit of a forest that’s been under the mud that was under the water in the days of Noah’s Ark” (37). Charley’s education has taught him that the past exists as a series of dry truths to be recalled. Dickens fully realizes the danger of this approach in Charley’s mentor, the unbalanced and murderous Bradley Headstone, who “had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher’s knowledge … his mind … [was] a place of mechanical stowage” (218).

To further contextualize the ways that Dickens privileges imaginative misinterpretation, it is helpful to briefly sketch a familiar arc of scientific progress across the nineteenth century with a few new points of emphasis. The archaeological and geological revelations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—most notably, the discovery of geological time—unsettled the stable standing ground of history. In Thomas Carlyle’s words in “On History” (1830), the past was “Chaos, boundless as the habitation and duration of man, unfathomable as the soul and destiny of man.”Footnote ⁶⁵ By midcentury, however, Carlyle’s confidence that “the historian [would] depict, and scientifically gauge [this chaos] … by threading it with single lines of a few ells in length” was well earned.Footnote ⁶⁶ As archaeology, geology, evolutionary biology, and other new sciences of history emerged, they wove tighter nets across the past, undergirding one another (and many specialists worked across fields). This is not to deny the serious debates around these new sciences, particularly evolution. Still, methods of historiography—what Carlo Ginzburg calls the “divinatory model”—seemed to confirm and extend themselves.Footnote ⁶⁷

In a way, Dickens’s narrative tricks reactivate earlier nineteenth-century fears about the impossibility of knowing the past: What if we get it wrong? What if we misread the clues? Jaffe suggests that Boffin’s altruistic, subterranean plotting completely unsettles the reader’s faith in their capacity to gather knowledge (and their faith in the omniscient narrator): “it is precisely at the moment of surprise, when we become aware of how misled we have been, that we glimpse the potential depth of our insecurity: the possible existence, always, of knowledge we haven’t got.”Footnote ⁶⁸ This is not quite the straightforward push to reenchant knowledge, a major midcentury project championed by scientists including Dickens’s friend Robert Hunt in The Poetry of Science (1848), and anemically replicated by Charley Hexam in the passage above. Nor is it the accurate translation of sciences or historical knowledge into literary form, which we see in realist and historical fiction of the period. Rather, Dickens offers a fictionalized alternative to Charley’s method. While we may gnash our teeth at his narrative sleights of hand, they also delight and enchant us. He enacts a return to the disorderly imagination, in which anarchic confusion is both necessary and productive. The implausible happy endings that cap Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend are created by twisting history away from “correct” courses to the individual’s purpose. In so doing, Dickens mobilizes the instabilities of time and history, rather than disciplining them.

Early on in Our Mutual Friend, Wegg corrects Boffin—it’s “Roman,” not “Rooshan”—and Boffin rejoins with “what’s the difference?” (65). “What’s the difference” between historical truth and historical confusion? Ultimately, the difference does matter—Mrs. Boffin must explain the entire plot and clear up the deception. But for Dickens, it takes time and confusion to get there. Wegg cannot answer Boffin. While he has noticed the difference between the words, he cannot articulate the meaning of it. In these later novels, bare fact is inert; effective knowledge emerges from the chaotic, imaginative reprocessing of history. Dickens is advocating for an inventive, novelistic, and hands-on treatment of history—one modeled on the actual practices of antiquaries, both official and unofficial.