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In his classic article on the emergence of nineteenth-century thermodynamic science, Thomas S. Kuhn makes the now often-cited declaration, “History of science offers no more striking instance of the phenomenon known as simultaneous discovery” (321). The key questions of energy physics were pursued independently across Europe during the nineteenth century, and to outline the main players and strains of influence among even the British contributors would be far beyond the limits of this essay. Kuhn argues that this simultaneous discovery “suggests that in the two decades before 1850 the climate of European scientific thought included elements able to guide receptive scientists to a significant new view of nature” (321). While the discipline of the history of science has thoroughly established the emergence of nineteenth-century thermodynamic science out of the period's dominant cultural and ideological investments, literary scholars have been slow to give full consideration to the historical place of energy physics in Victorian culture. Greg Myers's important early study identifies what he calls “commonplaces” – general lines of argument writers assume their readers know – shared by the rhetorics of thermodynamics and Victorian social and moral criticism. George Levine and Tina Young Choi each propose ways thermodynamic concepts offer metaphors useful to describe narrative patterns in Victorian novels: Levine proposes entropic decline as a metaphor to describe the patterns of disorder and images of decay in Little Dorrit, while Choi argues that Victorian novels exhibit a “thermodynamic aesthetic” characterized by an investment in closure and circularity (306–07). The most recent and in-depth contribution has been made by Barri J. Gold whose ThermoPoetics (2010) focuses on “scientific affect,” the emotive content and context for the emerging thermodynamic discourse in the apparently affective opposition between the cultural perception of the first law as optimistic and the second as pessimistic. Gold views literary and thermodynamic discourses as both thermopoetic, a term she employs “to suggest mutual influence, common concerns, and even simultaneous discovery . . . [in] how poetry speaks to science, how it says in words what cannot yet be said in words” (35). While the work done by Gold and Choi is groundbreaking in offering suggestive connections between science and literary form, literary scholars have yet to consider concrete historical explanations for the parallels observed between thermodynamic science and Victorian culture.

The significant body of work done by historians of science has greatly expanded our knowledge of the social and ideological conditions within which nineteenth-century British scientists, engineers, and mathematicians worked. Kuhn argues that among the most central cultural conditions that the simultaneous discoveries in energy physics have in common was a “concern with engines” (323). In the British context, the significant contributions made by the brothers James and William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) provide a very clear example of the emergence of thermodynamic science out of the technological and ideological contexts of early nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. The Thomsons arrived at the questions of energy physics through their primary engagement in mechanical engineering and the performance of industrial engines – their ability to efficiently use energy to do work and minimize waste in escaped heat. But perhaps more vital to their scientific discoveries was the ideological framework and social position within which the Thomsons worked on these steam engines. As M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith have shown, the Thomson brothers’ complete immersion in their family's religious values and work ethic, in addition to their scientific community's social and economic concerns, provided undeniable impetus and direction for their commitment to and ability to solve the energy problems of industrial engines. The community of scientists and engineers within which the Thomsons worked had an economic investment in and ideological orientation to the region's burgeoning industrial economy, which influenced the Thomsons to see the categories of work and waste in the economic terms of value produced. Wise and Smith have also examined the influence of religion and Victorian morality on the Thomsons, showing that in the letters the brothers received from their father, for example, “The lessons of political economy, of being raised up by productive labour, of producing labor value in turn, and of minimizing waste, had entered James's and William's consciousness as the moral truths of everyday life” (249). In the case of the Thomson brothers’ and the British scientific community's investment in thermodynamic research, religious and cultural imperatives against waste predisposed them to see the waste of an engine as a similarly moral and economic problem because both kinds of wastefulness – wasting one's life by being lazy or an engine's waste in escaped heat – were underwritten by a capitalist logic of value.

To take Wise's and Smith's cultural histories a step further, I argue that the pre-existing ideological and economic conditions of early nineteenth-century Britain were crucially linked to the larger cultural investment in the sciences of work and waste and to scientists’ ability to recognize – “discover” – the principles of thermodynamics as natural laws. In this argument, I follow closely Ted Underwood's important analysis of early thermodynamics in his fascinating work on the (ultimately mistaken) notions about “the work of the sun” in Romantic and early-Victorian literary culture. Underwood argues that “Thermodynamic science leapt to prominence so rapidly because Victorian scientists, lecturers, and journalists believed that it ratified a productivist conception of industry they already cherished” (Work of the Sun 182). In this assessment, Underwood advances a crucial reversal of the highly influential work done by Anson Rabinbach who declared that Hermann von Helmholtz's mid-century thermodynamic discoveries directly produced a large-scale shift across Europe toward productivism – “the belief that human society and nature are linked by the primacy and identity of all productive activity, whether of labourers, of machines, or of natural forces” (3). Reversing Rabinbach's explanation that “thermodynamic science gave rise to new theories of work,” Underwood suggests that “Victorian writers perceived the ‘circulation of force’ as a peculiarly important discovery in large part because it seemed to ratify this existing productivist interpretation of work” (“How Did” 123).

I want to extend Underwood's point by proposing a more overtly Marxist interpretation of the role of thermodynamic science in mid-century Victorian culture. In addition to laying the groundwork for cultural receptivity to emerging thermodynamic discoveries, as Underwood proposes, the capitalist economics that dominated the cultural notions of work and value in fact allowed the mid-century scientists working on engines and heat loss to “discover” thermodynamics in natural laws. Economists since Adam Smith and continuing through the nineteenth century had already naturalized cultural imperatives for individual hard work as vital to national growth according to “natural laws” of political economy. According to the labor theory of value specifically, since value is produced by labor and quantified by the labor-time involved in production, value and price are thus naturally fixed by the cost of that labor time, in other words by the cost of fueling the engine or human body that produces the value. Maximizing the value that the body or the engine could produce with a given quantity of fuel – the main project of thermodynamic research – was therefore directed by a capitalist understanding of energy wherein work and waste are measured by value produced or potential profits lost. As the case of the Thomson brothers makes clear, thermodynamic research was prompted by the specifically moral injunction that an engine's hard work not be compromised by the escape of heat as this was, quite literally, linked to national prosperity due to the steam engine's central role in the burgeoning industrial economy. The new science of energy was thus fundamentally shaped by ideologies including the necessity of hard work, maximization of efficiency, and the moral imperative against waste, all of which predisposed scientists to see the work of an engine in economic and moral terms and thus to naturalize dominant ideologies about work and waste as the natural laws of thermodynamics.

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Though the second law of thermodynamics and its concept of entropy were not fully understood by the general reading public until the 1870s and 1880s, popularizers did make the first law of conservation widely known in the 1850s and 1860s, and its seeming promise of endless convertibility made the new science of energy deeply compelling. By mid-century, the Victorians had promoted the principle of energy conservation to the “foundation and capstone of all science” (Underwood, Work of the Sun 179). Popularizers of thermodynamics regularly proclaimed the principle's centrality to Victorian science: in 1857 Michael Faraday celebrated the principle of energy conservation as “the highest law in physical science which our faculties permit us to perceive” (447), and in 1862 Herbert Spencer in his book First Principles hailed it as “the sole truth which transcends experience by underlying it” (200). Scientists including Faraday and John Tyndall were heavily engaged in publicizing the new work done in thermodynamics, and gave a public lecture series that introduced the new science to general audiences through engaging live experiments and visual demonstrations. Popular periodicals regularly featured reviews and articles promoting “the new philosophy” and describing the spectacles produced during these public lectures.

Dickens was among the audience at one of Faraday's lectures, after which he wrote to Faraday asking for copies of his notes for use in Household Words. Faraday obliged, and Dickens assigned staff writer Percival Leigh, who had some previous scientific training, to produce short stories in which characters who had attended Faraday's lectures reproduced his experiments and explained his theories to their uninformed friends and family. The resulting series of four articles appeared between August 1850 and February 1851 to educate readers on “The Chemistry of a Candle,” “The Laboratory in the Chest,” “The Mysteries of a Tea-Kettle,” and “The Chemistry of a Pint of Beer.”Footnote ²Household Words publicized additional works of thermodynamic science in 1859 with an article titled “Physical Force” after the two works it summarized, W. R. Grove's The Correlation of Physical Forces (1846) and Alfred Smee's The Monogenesis of Physical Forces (1857). This article is typical in celebrating the material process of the convertibility of energy and in viewing the scientific principle of the first law as a promise of the magical endlessness of energy conversion:

Dickens introduced even newer discoveries in All the Year Round. Whereas the Household Words articles engaged readers by transforming Faraday's scientific presentations into fictional stories and made scientific concepts accessible by turning them into casual discourse between lively characters, the articles in All the Year Round display a greater confidence in readers’ interest in and ability to process the now more familiar premises of the new energy science. From 1865–1866 – overlapping the serialization of Our Mutual Friend – the magazine featured a series of five articles on John Tyndall's Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion (1863), which was based on his popular lecture series delivered the year before at the Royal Institution.Footnote ³ The All the Year Round articles summarize material straight out of Tyndall's book, often directly copying passages with little or no modification. Dickens's choice to feature his work likely cemented Tyndall's position as the popular authority on the principle of energy conservation which by this point was immediately “associated in the popular mind with the name of John Tyndall” (Myers 42). The first article in the series, “Is Heat Motion?,” announced the book as a literary as well as scientific achievement, “more entertaining than a novel; being, to most other books of its class, what a dramatic judicial trial is to a printed romance; what a self-experienced adventure is to a tale that is told” (534).

Tyndall's book and its reproductions in All the Year Round endeavor to reconcile the physical and moral aspects of work, a concern that troubled most popularizations of thermodynamics of the 1860s. At this point, it was becoming clear that an individual's energy was merely the transformed state of a pre-existing energy already present in the universe, and many worried that this merely material explanation for energy discounted individual will, effort, and character. John Herschel, for example, in articles for the Fortnightly Review, wrestled with the problem of where the human will fit in with the material sources of energy: “The control we possess over the external world we are sure must arise from a capacity somehow inherent in the intellectual part of our nature” (“On the Origin of Force” 439); “When we know we act, we are also conscious of will and effort: and action without will and effort is to us, constituted as we are, unrealisable, unknowable, inconceivable” (“On Atoms” 84). As the explanations derived from Tyndall's book proposed, while the individual cannot take credit for possessing energy, as all animals and machines can consume fuel, the human will must play an important role, if not in creating or generating energy, then in dutifully directing it so as to minimize waste. One article from All the Year Round titled “Might and Magnitude” affirms, “We do not generate our own strength, as we are apt, in our pride, to fancy we do” (255). Another article, “Heat and Work,” elaborates:

As the discoveries of the new physical science made clear, since individual effort has a purely material source in “our stock of fuel,” then we all have the same potential to work hard and expend useful energy. The fact that energy is accessible to all therefore means it is up to the individual to choose to use his or her energy wisely for useful work. The facts of the new energy sciences and the new scientific ideas about energy, work, and waste were thus assimilated into the pre-existing ideological notions that the moral and dutiful expenditure of energy revealed character and morality. The knowledge that, according to thermodynamics’ first and second laws, energy could never be lost or created thus heightened the moral duty of humanity to choose to use energy wisely before it became irrecoverably lost to entropy.Footnote ⁴ The moral connotations of the laws of thermodynamics are likewise visible in the work of William Thomson who wrote, “transformations take place which remove irrecoverably from the control of man sources of power which, if the opportunity of turning them to his own account had been made use of, might have been rendered available” (qtd. in Wise and Smith 250). Here we see the central role ascribed to human agency – to the choice to make good use of the opportunity to use energy on its way to inevitable and irreversible energy – which remained central to Victorian articulations of the laws of thermodynamics.

Tyndall's comparison between the body of the climber and the steam engine, as reiterated in All the Year Round, was a common trope in Victorian discussions of thermodynamics.Footnote ⁵ It originated with James Prescott Joule, whose loyal popularizer P. G. Tait was fond of quoting and expanding upon Joule's image of the animal-engine and his assessment that, as an engine, the human body was more successful than any man-made machine: “the animal frame, though destined to fulfil so many other ends, is, as a machine, more perfect than the best contrived steam-engine; that is, is capable of more work with the same expenditure of fuel” (qtd. in Tait 181).Footnote ⁶ For these scientists, the human body was said to be “more perfect” than an actual steam engine in both its physiological efficiency and in possessing an intelligent and conscious will. Unlike steam engines, human engines can moderate their expenditure of energy and choose to direct it to perform useful work. This celebration of human will over the unthinking and incessant activity of mechanism finds a similar articulation in John Stuart Mill's expression of nineteenth-century liberalism, On Liberty (1859):

In Mill's assessment, it is not simply the possession of energy that indicates character, but the constant direction of this energy to accomplish carefully chosen work. As the first law of thermodynamics makes clear, no new energy can be created; therefore, it is the human responsibility not only to design mechanical engines to minimize heat loss (the energy lost to entropy before it performed any useful work), but also to minimize their own waste as well. In the case of both engines and human exertion, work and waste were measured by the efficient use of fuel to produce economic value. Hard work, in other words, diligently pursued with an eye to intended returns, was how the moral individual could endeavor to become a perfected engine.

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In the same way that, as the law of energy conservation makes clear, we never lose energy, it only becomes unavailable for our use to do work, in Our Mutual Friend, we likewise never lose any matter – nothing disappears but only becomes dispersed, unavailable for useful work because it is disorganized in the river or the dust mounds. As Nancy Aycock Metz established in her classic essay, “waste is the most visible and dominant problem that the novel sets out to solve” (69). This focus on sorting and re-sorting, on recycling, reusing, and repurposing, is part of the novel's larger concern with the economic and moral imperatives to minimize and undo waste. The most prominent example of recycling in Our Mutual Friend is of course the dust mounds. Like Lizzie and Gaffer who make their living dragging refuse from the Thames, these trash heaps employ many sifters who sort through other people's waste. Reclaimed from the dust mounds, filth becomes wealth, just as for Lizzie and Gaffer a recovered corpse becomes their “meat and drink” (3; bk. 1, ch.1).Footnote ⁷ This link between recycling and re-sorting with the economics of thermodynamic waste was proposed by mid-century thermodynamic science as well. James Clerk Maxwell proposed the theoretical idea of a “demon,” an imaginary being or device that could intercept molecules on their way to diffusion and dissipation and re-sort them by separating hot from cold. By reinstituting order and disequilibrium, Maxwell's demon offers a theoretical way out of the material irreversibility of entropy. Though it was to be proved impossible in the twentieth century, Maxwell's desire to re-sort dispersed energy so that heat lost to waste could be reorganized and made available to do useful work demonstrates that scientists were motivated to avoid waste along the same economic and moral logic found in Our Mutual Friend.

Like Maxwell's demon, characters in the novel constantly resist the disorder associated with entropy by re-sorting items to reinstate them with economic value. Re-sorted, material may be recovered from waste by being removed from the river or trash heap; re-sorted, it becomes available for social use and takes on value: individual bones and teeth are gathered together and, rearticulated by Venus's skill, become valuable merchandise in his shop. Similarly, a scrap of fabric is waste until it is recuperated from the trash and recombined with other scraps to become useful to Jenny Wren in making doll's clothing. As Riah explains, Jenny comes to their establishment “to buy of our damage and waste. . .. Our waste goes into the best of company, sir, on her rosy-cheeked little customers. They wear it in their hair, and on their ball-dresses, and even (so she tells me) are presented at Court with it” (278; bk. 2, ch. 5). In that same house of business, Fascination Fledgeby instructs Riah to keep an eye out for queer bills which, once gathered together in a “lump,” possess if not an accumulated pecuniary worth, then perhaps a material value: “Half the lump will be waste-paper, one knows beforehand,” says Fledgeby; “Can you get it at waste-paper price? That's the question” (562; bk. 3, ch. 14). Even the waste materials produced by Jenny's doll-making become recycled yet again when she reincorporates those even smaller scraps into “pincushions and pen-wipers, to use up my waste” (223; bk. 2, ch. 1).

While these images of waste are most often read in terms of a simply symbolic transference between filth and money, recycling in the novel may also be seen as relying on a material, thermodynamic promise of the endless convertibility of energy. The first law's promise of energy's seemingly endless convertibility is articulated in Victorian culture as simultaneously a promise of energy conversion and a promise of the endless economic possibilities of hard work. One of the scientific articles from Household Words explicitly links the recycling of filth to the new science of thermodynamics:

Thermodynamics' first law of energy conservation and the industrial practices of recycling waste materials both seemed to offer the same promise of endless convertibility and endless national productivity and economic profit. As the cycle depicted in this passage proposes, the fact that all waste can be endlessly reincorporated into a market economy not only infuses waste with value but also promises that value need not be wasted – it is merely up to human ingenuity to find new ways to reclaim the value “latent” in seemingly wasted materials. The emphasis on re-sorting, reclaiming, and recycling in Our Mutual Friend, as interpreted through the lens of energy physics, can therefore be seen as demonstrating the same economic and moral imperative to minimize waste as is apparent in mid-century thermodynamic science.Footnote ⁹

Eugene Wrayburn, whose character development is modeled on the improvement of the human engine, provides another example.Footnote ¹⁰ To begin with, Eugene is a close anagram of engine, and both his last name and Mortimer's – Wrayburn and Lightwood – call up images of burning, heat, and expended energy. He is initially characterized as over-burdened with his moral obligation to perform useful work and is in this way quite the opposite of Mrs. Boffin, who Mr. Boffin repeatedly declares is a “steam-ingein” in her almost mindless diligence: “What a thinking steam-ingein this old lady is” (105; bk. 1, ch. 9); “And she is a steam-ingein at it . . . when she once begins. It mayn't be so easy to start her; but once started, she's a ingein” (329; bk. 2, ch. 10). In her unthinking persistence, Mrs. Boffin is like a bee, the animal perhaps most emblematic of diligent hard work and which Eugene resents for casting a shadow by comparison on his failure to perform:

According to Mill's assessment, Mrs. Boffin and the bee have no character, whereas Eugene has a poor character: though avoiding their mechanical persistence, Eugene makes wasteful and therefore immoral choices. He wastes energy, first by lying around complaining instead of doing useful work, and later in his overly energetic but ultimately mechanical pursuit of Lizzie Hexam, fixating on her with “the monotony of a machine” (721; bk. 4, ch. 10). The energy he expends on Lizzie is also misdirected into physical pursuits and antagonism with Bradley Headstone, which result in the two men expending great quantities of energy through Eugene's “unusual heat” (172; bk. 1, ch. 14) and the schoolteacher's “red and white heats of rage” (291; bk. 2, ch. 6).Footnote ¹¹

Eugene reaches his turning point on what seems to be his death bed. No longer wasting energy but at this point almost depleted, the couple marry and Lizzie asks Eugene to make her a promise:

Lizzie endeavors to teach Eugene how to correctly expend his energy, and with this moral redemption he comes back to life rejuvenated.Footnote ¹² But despite his albeit hesitant pledge to try to work hard, the issue of the couple's current extreme poverty remains and is the last unresolved thread debated by several characters in the novel's closing chapter. The group wonders together what sort of employment is suitable for a former “female waterman” (795; bk. 4, Chapter the Last). Finally, a character simply named the Contractor proposes the following:

Now, the Contractor's plan would not work for just any girl. Putting fuel into a body is not enough; but they know that Lizzie will use it to produce useful work because she is a hard worker and a good girl possessing “a wonderful energy” (794; bk. 4, Chapter the Last). She is the moralizing influence that can recuperate Eugene's waste – his wasted life, wasted social position, wasted education – by teaching him to redirect his expenditure of energy toward dutiful work.

The Contractor's mention of beefsteaks, a jab at Lizzie's past as a “female waterman,” emphasizes that in addition to directing her to useful work, he intends to put good fuel into her so that as an engine she can most efficiently produce energy and as a laborer she can produce her maximum value while minimizing waste.Footnote ¹³ Directed by the productivist logic that saw bodies and machines as equivalent in their production of value, Victorian energy theory evaluated both human and steam engines by the maximization of their labor power. The link to nutrition is emphasized by Catherine Gallagher, whose extensive work on the body economic thoroughly examines what she identifies as “a pervasive pattern of mid-Victorian thought, a widespread insistence that economic value can be determined only in close relationship to vital power” (87). This image of Lizzie's body as an engine run on beef-steaks – as opposed to the “meat and drink” it used to find in a corpse dragged from the Thames – exemplifies Gallagher's argument about the centrality of biological needs to the labor theory of value as the basis for nineteenth-century political economy: “Since labor was the source of exchange value, and, according to some, its own value could be calculated by the value of the commodities (primarily the food) necessary to replenish it, the exchange value of any commodity was rooted not only in the worker's body, the primary nexus of exchange, but also in the larger biosphere” (89). Gallagher thus interprets Our Mutual Friend's concern with garbage as an emphasis on the economic necessity that biological matter, especially bodily remains, be salvaged (104–05).

Parallel to Gallagher's assessment of the economics of biology, I argue that the Victorian cultural imperative that all energy should be wisely employed for useful work is a reification of capitalist economics as the natural laws of physical science. As Robert M. Young asserts in his important statement for Marxist approaches to the history of science, the work of nineteenth-century science was to produce “a reifying perspective of unvarying and inescapable natural law”:

According to Young, facts become discoverable and important only as they can be understood in terms of extant ideologies and are made “science” so as to reify the social as natural law. Within this “science” are, of course, the actual facts of thermodynamics, but examination of the material and ideological conditions of their discovery and the cultural investments of their popularization demonstrates how establishing them as science involves a reification, the misrecognition of the social as natural law. In the case of the Thomson brothers, thermodynamic science made the imperatives of religion and capitalism visible in natural laws. While the particular class interests of the industrial north did not direct the entirety of nineteenth-century British thermodynamic science, the particular historical conditions which prompted the pursuit and enabled the recognition of thermodynamic discovery are fundamentally inextricable from the larger ideological and material contexts of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism.

In Our Mutual Friend images of recycling are clearly directed by moral imperatives to minimize waste and to recuperate lost value back within a national economy of profit and progress. Though the parallels between Dickens's novel and thermodynamics are abundant, Our Mutual Friend was not influenced or shaped only by scientific knowledge. Rather, these parallels – the images, metaphors, and concepts that the novel and the science share in common – reveal the extent to which thermodynamics as a body of scientific inquiry emerged out of an ideological and cultural field which was already dominated by particular notions of work and waste. The connections between Our Mutual Friend and thermodynamics therefore illustrate most prominently the already existing ideologies that championed hard work against idleness, progress and productivity against waste and dissipation, and therefore they force us to emphasize the larger cultural field and ideological commitments that inspired Victorian scientists and novelists to ascribe a moral imperative to engines and to see interference with entropy as linked to personal character.