Hristo Boev1

THE CHRONOTOPE OF “THE BEGINNINGS” IN DICKENS’S OUR MUTUAL FRIEND:

TWO HOUSES

Abstract: This paper examines the significance of the house for two female city inhabitants in Dickens’s
“Our Mutual Friend”. The analysis of these women’s movements in city spaces is based on their progress
through rooms and houses in London realized in their inhabitant rhetoric. Their first house stands in a
topical relationship to the successive rooms and houses that they inhabit, which can be established by
analyzing the chronotope of “the beginnings” in the city. This analysis refrains from exploring other
beginnings in London such as immigration and concentrates, instead, on exploring the importance of
house space forming the two women as city consumers, which results in the topical plurality of the
examined time-space whose essence is also established by applying topoanalysis to it. The proposed
approach makes use of Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope as a motif, which presupposes the existence of a
pattern for transcultural and (trans)historical comparative analyses of cities and/or their literary
representations.

Key words: inhabitant, rhetoric, chronotope, house, room, space, time, beginnings, city, urban, London,
topoanalysis, topical.

In his essay “London Calling: The Urban Chronotope of Romanticism” (2011), Walter Reed
reviews the representations of London by writers from the period of Romanticism (Blake,
Wordsworth, De Quincy) and claims that they can be explained by Bakhtin’s idea of the
chronotope. This idea was developed in the essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
Novel” (1975) and defined by Bakhtin in the following manner: “We will give the name
chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). Reed considers the application of
the idea of the chronotope to the city very important as it allows seeing urban representations “in
a usefully synoptic and generic way.” He also argues that:

... the chronotope helps us hear London calling, articulating a version of urban experience
through imaginative writers of this period and persuasion with distinctive and
distinguishable intonations, a type of urban utterance quite different from the ones we find
in earlier Neo-classical representations or later Realist renderings of the city.

He, as stated by Baktin himself in his introduction of the term, also cautions against the co-
existence of different chronotopes in the same epoch, or even in the same literary work.
Moreover, Michael Holquist in analyzing a short story by Gogol, goes even further, proving that

1
Ovidius University of Constanţa, Romania
all texts intrinsically contain a plurality of chronotopes based on the different perspective through
which we look at time-space (140). As regards the representation of London under scrutiny, this
statement is also confirmed, most notably by David Wilkes’s discussion of clashing chronotopes
in “The Mudworm's Bower and Other Metropastoral Spaces: Novelization and Clashing
Chronotopes in Our Mutual Friend" (2011), which explores the conflicting variations of time-
space experienced by different city dwellers at identical places.
As city dwellers inhabit different spaces in Dickens’s representations and appropriate
them differently, we cannot but agree with Bachelard who sees the city as poetics of multiple
durées coming together. We can also see the chronotope as friction of different temporalities in
Baktin’s definition of it as unity of time and place adapted to “temporalized place” – timed space
or spaced time (e.g. the chronotope of the threshold and the staircase in Dostoyevsky) or as Jon
May terms it, “a constellation of temporalities at a singular place” (190). Another useful view of
the chronotope applied to cities, could be Lefebvre’s idea of rhythmanalysis. Thus, he conceives
of the city as being “diverse spaces affected by diverse times or rhythms (33). Related to the
everyday, they reconstruct the rhythmic pattern of the city “linked to homogeneous time” (73).
The examples of the theoretical approaches above suggest a complexity of the matter with
possible ramifications, which would render a chronotopical analysis inconclusive in its findings if
it aims at the larger picture of the city. Instead of examining the chronotope of movement in
street space or specific places as done by David Wilkes or suggested by Walter Reed, I propose
taking the city inhabitants one level up to movements within the time-space of the urban
representation through their code of appropriation of specific urban spaces (Augoyard 79). This
approach will allow me to examine the urban chronotope in Our Mutual Friend as topical,
returning to the classical view of the chronotope as a motif (Holquist 109) as its deeply symbolic
and functional essence is crucial for the manner in which city inhabitants appropriate city spaces
imbuing them with topicality. This analysis also incorporates the idea that the chronotope can be
transcultural and at the same time (trans)historical – a structure “not unique to particular points in
time” (Holquist 111-3), thus proposing a pattern applicable to a large number of urban
representations within different historical periods.
For the specific purpose of this analysis, a common motif for the city dwellers is to be
established, around which space-time is organized in cinematic sequences. The proposed analysis
of the urban chronotope, therefore, examines the topical movement of the city inhabitant from the
house as a container of intimate spaces (Bachelard, Poetics of Space). Its essence as topical time-
space can be revealed through topoanalysis as the common beginnings of inhabiting the
metropolis for residents born in London, significantly affecting the trajectories inscribed in the
city by the city dwellers in forming the chronotope of “the beginnings”. Thus, key points in the
analysis will be the beginnings in the city and the oscillations from them and they will be seen as
indicative of experiencing time-space in the novel through inhabitant rhetoric. This analysis can
be considered an attempt to rationalize what Augoyard calls “scattered pluralities of lived
experience” (5) in the imagined city.
The city dweller enters the examined urban representation through the London house, the
topical recurrence of which results in sequencing city spaces, formative for the city residents in
their becoming true Londoners and rendered through inhabitant rhetoric. The spatial dimensions
of this type of rhetoric are defined by Augoyard as two basic types: retentional and protentional
(130) or here called for short: tropes of retention and protention. The first can be summarized by
the inhabitant’s tendency to let himself/herself be led by space rather than transgress it. The
second type is marked by telescoping topological succession of sites and failure to retain
memories of dwelling, thus leaping from one site to another. A third type is also possible and it
combines the two given so far: eurythmic composition (130). Other types may also exist, for
example – vicissitude – alternating spaces and sites, and consequently lived experience in a
mobile reciprocity.
A good case study in Our Mutual Friend is the opposition of two types of houses as
indicative of city inhabitants moving in house space. They are Gaffer Hexam’s house, where
Lizzie was born, and Reginald Wilfer’s house, where Bella was born, examined against the house
of the Veneerings. Even though the former are very different from what Bachelard calls an
“oneiric house” – a dream house of three floors (25), they are easily contrasted to a more modern
house – the one of the Veneerings in having one crucial differentiating element – the functioning
hearth.
I begin my analysis with the house of the Veneerings against which the two examined
houses are reflected and measured in architectural pragmatism and spirituality. Its ostentatious
glamour is synecdochically represented by the monstrous looking glass above the sideboard (12)
where partial truths reflect the identities of vanity of the respective wholes:

MR AND MRS VENEERING were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new

quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their
furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was
new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures
were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully
compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather,
he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him,
French polished to the crown of his head. For, in the Veneering establishment, from the
hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and
upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish.
And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings—the surface
smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky. (8)

In this representation of the nouveaux-riches in London, we see that they have everything a
newcomer to the metropolis can dream of – everything in, around and about them is new.
Dickens makes use of heavy iteration to emphasize the novelty of their situation in the city and of
themselves. They are so much like their highly polished furniture, suggested in their family name
as well, that they would produce even a “bran-new great-grandfather” upon demand. As a result,
reflecting the cold sensibility of the new times, they have everything needed for the incipient
epoch, but are completely closed to the extant world of pre-modernist humanity, also expressed
in organic architecture, which is capable of protective and spiritual functionality, a recurrent
motif in Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1922). The movements in the house time-space of
Our Mutual Friend examined in two female city inhabitants are seen as both topical and tropical
in relation to this house and the house of their beginnings.
I continue my analysis with the house where Lizzie was born. It is on the riverside and is
clearly an amphibious place: “afloat— among bow-splits staring into windows, and windows
staring into ships” (23). It is indiscernible on the refuse of the river and the riverboats moored
near it. Despite its grim rickety appearance, however, it is not a repulsive place once Eugene and
Charlie, Lizzie’s brother have entered it. The room that they enter has an air of self-sufficiency
imparted by its shape and interior. If subjected to the proposed topoanalysis (Bachelard, Poetics
of Space) as a means of conceiving of and perceiving houses, it will appear to be much different
from its off-putting outside appearance confirmed by this critic’s discussion of the dialectics of
the outside and inside (211-231). Slipping on the refuse strewn on the stones next to the house,
they are ushered into a different universe dominated by light:

‘Here’s my father’s, sir; where the light is.’ The low building had the look of having once
been a mill. There was a rotten wart of wood upon its forehead that seemed to indicate
where the sails had been, but the whole was very indistinctly seen in the obscurity of the
night. The boy lifted the latch of the door, and they passed at once into a low circular
room, where a man stood before a red fire, looking down into it, and a girl sat engaged in
needlework. The fire was in a rusty brazier, not fitted to the hearth; and a common lamp,
shaped like a hyacinth-root, smoked and flared in the neck of a stone bottle on the table.
There was a wooden bunk or berth in a corner, and in another corner a wooden stair
leading above—so clumsy and steep that it was little better than a ladder. Two or three
old sculls and oars stood against the wall […].The roof of the room was not plastered, but
was formed of the flooring of the room above. This, being very old, knotted, seamed, and
beamed, gave a lowering aspect to the chamber; and roof, and walls, and floor, alike
abounding in old smears of flour, red-lead (or some such stain which it had probably
acquired in warehousing), and damp, alike had a look of decomposition. (23-24)

Even though the interior of the house is a natural continuation of the exterior, being made of the
same materials, the room that they enter exudes cosiness. It is in a perfect harmony with the
world without, shutting out its hostility in a similar way in which Eskimos’ igloos reflect and
contrast the forbidding environment around them. Bachelard speaks of a “little threshold god”
who is “incarnated in the door” (224). Moreover, Spengler perceives the house to be intrinsically
ambivalent in its functionality as a material and spiritual shelter: “in the house, Janus is the door
as god, Vesta the hearth as goddess, the two functions of the house are objectivized and deified at
once” (403). It is a vehicle of producing dynamic time-space and indeed, it is the threshold and
the opening door that recreate the self-sufficiency of the room and of the house by extension. In
spite of its very harsh conditions, the house is not lacking in anything important. The sudden
change from the hostile ambiance of the river refuse reveals a circular room embodying the
“phenomenology of roundness” (Bachelard 232-241). In his discussion of the house as
embodying intimate spaces, he speaks of “the roundness of being” (233), which in the room is
achieved by its shape, resulting in a sense of completeness imparted to its inhabitants. Lizzie’s
father, positioned by the fire, is not unlike a primitive god able to transform the world around him
by using the transformative force of the fire. The picture is completed by Lizzie herself, who, like
any other respectable daughter of the house, is engaged in needlework when seen by guests.
While the hearth and the brazier detached from it have a central position in the universe of
Gaffer’s house, the corners emanate a sensation of haunted places with their being positioned
farther from the centre and where the details of the objects that fill them remain unclear. Thus,
one corner reveals a bunk or berth suggestive of previous usage of other inhabitants, whereas
another one discloses the vertical dimension of the house – a wooden stair leading upward. In his
discussion of house corners, Bachelard rationalizes inhabiting in its relationship to the most
mysterious parts of the house, “a living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all
corners are haunted, if not inhabited” (140). Simplicity and pragmatism reign supreme in Gaffer’s
house where the ceiling is made of the same material as the flooring of the room above, while the
roof is camouflaged in the same material as the waste materials surrounding the house.
Christian aspects of the house such as its upward dimension, seeking contact with the celestial
and divine, are at variance with disquieting images of the unstable road to it – the wooden stair as
well as the patched roof. Moreover, the rusty brazier and the fact that it is detached from the
hearth create a sensation of unsettling disengagement and a sense of imbalance. This patchwork
of a house is finally the ultimate expression of Gaffer’s assurance for Lizzie that the river gave all
necessary materials for her cradle, bed and food (5), but which, no doubt, renders the house a
product of city recycling.
In spite of Dickens’s scathing criticism in the novel of “the pitiful conditions of riverside
areas in these years” (Smith 168) following the flushing of the sewers into the Thames in 1849,
with a decision of the Board of Health, Gaffer’s house is not only functional, it transcends its
insufficient materiality by being imbued with a sense of completion. Moreover, the burning light,
its utter poverty as well as the solitary lives of Gaffer and his daughter, Lizzie, lead to a
semblance with the hermit hut, “symbolic of the man who keeps vigil” (Bachelard 33). As
Bachelard also claims, “through its light alone, the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is
an eye open to night” (35). Even though the religious connotations of his own house may have
escaped Gaffer, it objectively offers the possibility of communion with God unhampered by
human crowds. If the father appears to be unaffected by his own creation, persisting in his
materialist exploitation of the river as a dredgerman, the aura of the secluded house has certainly
influenced Lizzie. Thus, she conforms to Bachelard’s denying a connection between materialism
and the hermit hut: “The hut can receive none of the riches ‘of this world’” (32). The intensity of
its essence of lack of materiality is to be inhabited with spiritual meaning in response to Mr.
Boffin’s mock cynical comments on the incompatibility of poverty and pride to the point of the
combination rendered nonsensical: “Why it stands to reason. A man, being poor, has nothing to
be proud of” (492). They, however, corroborate the fact that pride, being of this world is also
denied the inhabitants of the hut.
Furthermore, Bachelard continues, “it possesses the felicity of intense poverty … it gives
us access to absolute refuge” (492). Naturally, one could argue that this forced spirituality of
being is unintended, and indeed Dickens, makes it clear that although it has taken place in
Gaffer’s house through Lizzie, even divine communion may be obstructed by the materialist
perspective of the house crumbling to the pieces it is made of. However, this house has another
redeeming element, which sustains its spiritual character on the brink – it is its hearth. The image
of the hearth opposes the consistent image of the “black and shrill” night (74), a synecdochic
representation of the classical image of the “black shrill city” in Our Mutual Friend (153).
The importance of the hearth becomes so much more obvious if we compare it to the
house of the Veneerings – cold, lifeless, and inanimate like its inhabitants, all polished over
resembling its furniture. If the city of London is a city of death, the hearth with its light, warmth
and identification with home, is its antithesis, nothing less than life itself (Welsh 142-3). Gaffer’s
house, indeed, despite not complying completely with Bachelard’s definition of the multi-floor
house as the house of dreams, offers enough spaces to be one according to Sansot. So he states,
“car la maison onirique admet l'homme et la présence des disparus et celle des enfants” (171) [as
the dream house admits the man, the presence of the children and of the ones already gone,
translation mine].
Having grown up in the spiritual geometry of Gaffer’s house, a habitat of dreams, Lizzie,
does not need to move to spirituality, standing in a tropical relation of completion to it. She,
therefore, seeks to extend its influence to the regenerative river that has provided the material for
the house, perfects her skills of fishing for dead bodies in it and is rewarded with the regeneration
of Eugene. By extension, she becomes the embodiment of the house as a spiritual refuge that
Eugene may oscillate from, but where he wants to belong: “[to Lizzie] when you see me
wandering away from this refuge that I have so ill deserved, speak to me by my name, and I think
I shall come back” (797).
Lizzie’s inhabitant rhetoric is marked by retention as she retains the image of the
complete house – Hexams’ house, an antipode to the “Enough House” in Great Expectations,
which is self-sufficient only in recreating the eternal winter of Miss Havisham’s discontent.
The next house to be examined is the house of the Wilfer family, where Bella was born. It does
not have the austere lines of reduced materialism and increased spirituality of the house of the
Hexam family. Neither does it have the pretentious opulence of the house of the Veneerings. As a
result, it is perceived as wanting in both aspects, which has affected its youngest inhabitants the
strongest – Lavinia and Bella Wilfer.
The introduction to the house is given through its breadwinner, Reginald Wilfer in his
perceived failure of being successful in London working as a clerk expressed in his inability to
“wear a complete new suit of clothes, hat and boots included, at one time” (35). This deeply felt
sense of deficiency of societal appropriateness in London is imparted to the house itself, which
renders it insufficient. His house is just outside the city, north of London in the Holloway region.
Between Battle Bridge and his house lies the inspiration for T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland – “a tract of
suburban Sahara” with its kilns tainting the ever-present fog with “lurid smears” (37).
Even though the Wilfers consider their house poor (Mrs Wilfer: “it is the abode of
conscious though independent Poverty,” 114), it is not so stripped of decency as Hexams’ house.
It is also spacious enough to offer accommodation to Mr. John Rokesmith (John Harmon) having
in mind that it already accommodates four members of the family – Bella, her sister, Lavinia, Mrs
Wilfer and Mr. Wilfer. Upon John Harmon’s taking a lodging there, the house is seen as replete
with tumultuous quarrels between Bella and her sister, her father and her mother, Mrs Wilfer,
who seemingly acquiesces to everything Mr. Wilfer says, but effectively cuts off communication
with him. Money is the incessant topic of discussions, especially between the two sisters. The
house is initially not described in detail as pecuniary matters accompanied by Bella’s peevish
remarks to her sister and mother, fill up house space. Still, details of the house mentioned at
random reveal its being perceived as rather claustrophobic, made up of connected compressed
spaces: “little hall,” “little front court,” while the doorplate is not renewed when worn down, but
“burnished up” (37). Bella is the one who complains about poverty the most and who finds it
humiliating to keep up appearances as regards her stature of a lady with the meagre conveniences
the house offers, which avail her of a “flat candle and a few inches of looking-glass” (46).
The reason for Bella’s frustration at the house is the fact that continuous penury alternates
with brief spells of opulence – the delicious and expensive dinner served at the table thanks to the
money for the rented space. It evokes her father’s concluding remarks on the house and its
location: “what might have been is not what is” (37). Her desire to consume is thus heavily
impeded by the house. The narrow piece of mirror, compared to the giant one in Veneerings’
house reflects nothing but her greed. The upward dimension is not given at all, so all its
inhabitants stay firmly down to earth and to the consumption demands of the city. Likewise, she
is also deprived of experiencing spirituality in the spaces of this house. Even the hearth is
stripped of its poetical and transcendental connotations and is reduced to a fireside, the function
of which is unintentionally utilitarian as it helps disperse the perfume the girls use (45).
The Wilfers’ house as a city “beginning” is a house of conscious want both material and
spiritual and is even more important than the Hexams’ house as its elements are seen against a
number of other houses and rooms tracing Bella’s movements in city spaces. Hence, the Boffins’
invitation for Bella to share their house and Boffin’s Bower is a means of compensation, or as
John Harmon puts it, “makes amends” for their fortune (218), but offers only a partial solution to
the problem as the spiritual deficiency remains unfilled. However, it is instrumental in Bella’s
realizing that she needs to have a spiritual life, too, which serves to unlock a number of other
houses and rooms for her attention by means of which she can discover spirituality. In the
environment of the big city, it is to be found in inhabiting rooms and houses, whose interior is to
reflect a sense of warmth and divinity.
The proposal to Bella is a challenge for her to reap the material benefits of her thwarted
marriage to John Harmon, which has resulted in ridiculous widowhood requiring her to wear
black. It is also a compensation for her inability to inhabit the same house as John’s wife as she
cannot be married to him. The fact that she is going to inhabit Boffin’s house satisfies Bella’s
material pretences, but does not quench her thirst for urban consumption expressed in potential
commodities that money can buy. Once, she is found by John Harmon reading a book, just like
the other angelic daughters of Dickens’s representations of London do. Unlike them, she is
reading a book about economy and finances: “A love story, Miss Wilfer?’ ‘Oh dear no, or I
shouldn’t be reading it. It’s more about money than anything else” (216).
Bella’s overt preference of the new house where she becomes “an inmate, for an
indefinite period” (221) conspicuously discarding her beginnings embodied in her father’s house,
enters into polemics with Bachelard’s insistence on the significance of our first house (home). He
claims that all mechanical gestures resulting from our interaction with other houses are nothing
but repetitions of gestures, which will always be charged with intimacy only found in the first
house (15). Not responding to this innate sensation of belonging to her beginnings turns the house
into an accurate “tool for analysis of the human soul” (Stilgoe xxxvii). Furthermore, this critic
claims, the human soul being an abode, “by remembering ‘houses’ and ‘rooms,’ we learn to
abide within ourselves” (xxxvii). Applied to the purposes of this analysis, these statements reveal
Bella as shallow. Her interest in consumption is also clearly modernist in the perceived trend in
city dwellers to move to consumerist practices in the London of 1865, evolving into full-blown
consumerism on both sides of the Atlantic before and after the First World War.
An important correlation between the “first house” and the subsequent movements into
represented urban space becomes evident. Enjoying a fuller set of rooms at the Boffins, Bella
visits her home to be reminded that each of its current inhabitants (John Harmon included) has
only one room. As her family wish to recreate a simulation of her luxury at the Boffins, they use
the sitting room for her reception, which is John’s room and here serves the purpose of a drawing
room (479). As Bella’s road to spirituality and suppressed materialism goes through interaction
with room and house space, she is curious to explore John’s room and finds it to be a
combination of pragmatism and spirituality in being “economically furnished” with “shelves of
books in English French and Italian” (480). John’s room within Wilfers’ house is a subliminal
indicator for Bella that spirituality and comfort are possible in humble abodes, his room offering
a possible reconciliation of these two opposing principles of human habitation.
Bella continues her exploration of rooms comparing them to her own room in her father’s
house so she benefits from seeing Lizzie’s room, the effects of which are amplified on her by
Lizzie’s presence and the blazing fire in the hearth:

‘I am afraid it is a poor room for you,’ said Lizzie, with a smile of welcome, as she
offered the post of honour by the fireside. ‘Not so poor as you think, my dear,’ returned
Bella, ‘if you knew all.’ Indeed, though attained by some wonderful winding narrow
stairs, which seemed to have been erected in a pure white chimney, and though very low
in the ceiling, and very rugged in the floor, and rather blinking as to the proportions of its
 lattice window, it was a pleasanter room than that despised chamber once at home […].
The day was closing as the two girls looked at one another by the fireside. The dusky
room was lighted by the fire. The grate might have been the old brazier, and the glow
might have been the old hollow down by the flare. (556)

Lizzie’s room, so described, clearly reflects the sense of spirituality that Lizzie emanates. It is
made manifest in the location of the room itself – reached through the wonderful winding narrow
stairs suggesting the precarious, but also lofty road leading to the divine, which on the horizontal
level of a city dweller’s life is invariably tortuous, very different from a straightforward
protentional movement. If the room that Lizzie inhabits is the reflection of her soul, the winding
staircase leading to Lizzie’s room is a projection of her inner struggles, otherwise never
disclosed, of prevailing spirituality at the expense of reduced materialism. It is the staircase itself
that stands out as beautiful in a very rugged room by comparison with the regular room in a
Victorian house, a modern example of which can be the house of the Veneerings. If compared to
a described tower room in The Poetics of Space, “the abode of a gentle young girl” (Bachelard
24), a number of similarities and differences can be established. What the two rooms share is a
steep narrow stairway, a narrow window and the “brief light” from the window, which in the
depiction of Lizzie’s room is “blinking”. The differences are nearly as many as the similarities:
Bachelard’s depiction presents a “perfectly round room” with a “vaulted ceiling”, rendering the
dreamer’s perfect abode.
By contrast, Dickens’s depiction stays close to the urban realities of London – this room
is not described as round as is the one on the first floor in Gaffer’s house; instead of the vaulted
ceiling in the poem, the ceiling here is described as “very low” (556). These meaningful
distinctions point out the differences between a poetical vision and a realistic urban vision of
spiritual habitation. In the case of Lizzie, in spite of its self-sufficiency embodied by her, spiritual
architecture is always challenged by urbanity in the necessity for pragmatism realized in
recycling materials as well as installing a low ceiling, which economizes space and building
materials.
What Dickens suggests through Lizzie’s portrayal as the embodiment of the spiritual
house is that it is possible and achievable in the metropolis. Experiencing the pleasant effects of
cosiness and apparent spirituality enables Bella to recall the elements of warmth – the brazier and
the fire in her father’s home and see them as prominent in her earlier pre-Boffin life. It is realized
through the ritual of being placed by the fireside where she experiences a sense of silent
communion with Lizzie as well as deep primordial forces antedating Christianity (Welsh 148).
Furthermore, Spengler sees an organic presence in the city if it has the inherently rural elements
of “hearth and door, floor and chamber” which are deified in pagan kindly spirits – “Vesta, Janus,
Lares and Penates” (90) all prominently tangible in Lizzie’s room. These elements, as Spengler
admits, are fashioned by “the spirit of commercial enterprise,” but it suffices for the hearth to
retain its “pious meaning” (100) as the actual centre of a family for a city to preserve an organic
connection to the land. By piety here, we are to understand a combination of household gods,
who are “of flesh and blood” (Welsh 160) and, therefore, are divorced from the excesses of
materialism.
These glimpses of otherness through the communication with Lizzie and the world that
she represents allow Bella to reevaluate her priorities in life while being exposed to the unlimited
luxury and flaunted cynicism of Boffins’ mansion.
We must admit then that the Boffins’ offer for Bella is a miraculous conceit, which is
nothing less than a challenge for her soul without the implications of the gross materialism of Mr.
Dombey’s offer to Edith (Dombey and Son), which exacts nothing but her selling herself to him,
body and soul. Indeed, Bella can afford to be materialist without having to suffer the
consequences the way Edith does. Another way of saying it would be that she has the advantage
of being conceived in Dickens’s mind in the year 1865, and not ten or fifteen years earlier, a year
when even Dickens felt he had to give women a more substantial access to conspicuous
consumption. Still, as admitted by some critics (Orwell 8; Schwarzbach 215), Our Mutual Friend
is a return to earlier urban narratives and character portrayals for that matter. This return,
however, is not a categorically “happy” one as it brings along tempo-spatial contradictions. For
example, Bella is an early modernist consumer of the city marked by excessive materialism, but
she has to give up some of her materialism and embrace spirituality. In other words, she must be
capable of Victorian self-reformation. Moreover, in a curious inversion of a previous approach to
the matter, still present in Lizzie, Bella is assisted along the way to spirituality through her
transformative friendship with Lizzie, initial animosity to John Harmon and last, but not least Mr.
Boffin’s deliberately cynical attitude meant to expose the corrupting power of money.
Exercising the influence of spirituality, Lizzie intimates with her the distinct pattern of
feminine sensibility – the essence of the woman’s heart, which should harbour the sentiment of
love, not gain (560). John, unlike male inhabitants from previous representations of London by
Dickens, does not need to be reformed by a Victorian woman as this job has been done by the
river as a woman with its power of effecting rebirth. As a result, under the cover of disguise, and
using his ingeniousness, he effectuates the gradual change in her in a similar way to Professor
Higgins’s transformation of Eliza Doolittle in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912). Finally, Mr.
Boffin’s coup de foudre in the “golden dustman” at his worst, labels Bella as a girl entitled to
marrying for money – “This young lady was lying in wait (as she was qualified to do) for money,
and you [John Harmon] had no money” (625) insinuating that to John, Bella represents “pounds,
shillings and pence” (629).
Even though this brutal attack aims to startle Bella into an awareness of her own nature,
histrionics has said more than enough and done more than it should as Mr. Boffin’s mock attack
at John, in reality, rings true. Having set the house as the place for Bella’s cathartic renouncement
on materialism, John can have it only through a marriage with her. He cannot reclaim it without
Bella, nor can he even restore his real name if he wants to profit from his father’s inheritance
without her accepting him as a husband.
These influences are telling in the end and lead to Bella’s transformation. Bella, in the
Boffins’ house, unknowingly falls into a trap set up by her own mercenary nature about which
she has previously been in the habit of joking with her cherubic doting father also known as
Rumty. The joke turns sour in the house as she is subjected to a modern reality show experiment
in which everyone but herself is playing psychological games with Mr. Boffin’s cynicism
ruthlessly exposing her own materialist nature. As a precaution, John has himself fired by Mr.
Boffin so that he can claim complete poverty. Luckily for John, the experiment succeeds and
Bella marries poverty believing it to be identical with spirituality. However, he will not take any
chances with her and puts her on probation by marrying her and living with her for some time
outside London, away from the temptations of city consumption.
If I return to the idea of abiding within ourselves through abiding in city spaces, Bella,
unlike Lizzie, who is spiritually complete, needs to experience more houses through dwelling in
them before her soul opens to spirituality, that is until her materialism is satiated. Dickens’s own
comment on Bella is that she is “spoilt first by poverty and then by wealth” (328), thus replacing
one extreme with another. Only when they cancel each other out as two opposite polarities of the
material, can she opt for the spiritual. After experiencing the wealth of Boffins’ house against
Lizzie’s, John’s and Mr. Boffin’s influences, Bella is finally repentant of her striving for wealth
and angry with the people who have tempted her with it and wheedled her into it (the Boffins),
but she wrongfully wants to replace it with poverty again, believing it is wealth that has undone
her (632).
In rejecting wealth, Bella rejects the house space of opulence in a similar way as Edith
does in the house of Dombey and awakens to a different perception of her beginnings. The
difference is that to Edith it feels dead (Dombey and Son, 453) while to Bella, it has been a
pleasant, but still an eye-opening experience:

‘Now, I am complete,’ said Bella. ‘It’s a little trying, but I have steeped my eyes in cold
water, and I won’t cry any more. You have been a pleasant room to me, dear room.
Adieu! We shall never see each other again.’ (637)

The sensation of completion that Bella experiences, is cathartic as she is purged of aspirations
after wealth, which has opened room for spirituality. Although she feels anger for having had her
soul tried by the wealthy house, she is also grateful for the experience to the extent that she
ambiguously kisses the hall door (637), thus establishing an identification with this house and
turning it into a projection of her soul, which is guilty of money lust. On the other side of the
door as a divide between the inside and outside (Bachelard, 85-9), Bella feels, is the spiritual
world that is hers to discover. This intimacy applied to the inanimate matter that the door is made
of causes another trait to resurface – Bella’s consumerist nature, which cannot be effaced so
easily. In doing so, she tries to preserve the sense of comfort and material gain that she has
experienced there, which is proved when she, already married to John, admits that she feels safer
not having access to riches in the harm she may do to others or to herself (719). This is an
answer, which must have left Dickens satisfied, as he did not think that money was evil, he only
condemned excesses related to spending it.
Having married John Harmon, she goes through yet another house, a little cottage on
Blackheath outside London where she gladly accepts the role of the housewife, doing all the
numerous daily chores with the greatest pleasure and with the theoretical preparation from “The
Complete British Family Housewife”. In order for her to be of more use to John who commutes
to London every day, she resorts to mastering the art of reading and understanding newspapers
(722). She also gives birth to a baby girl, who is named after her.
Finally, having taken her schooling from numerous houses and rooms, rich and poor, and
already completely cleansed of her initial “mercenary spirit”, or so Dickens would have us
believe, she can reclaim the Boffins’ house as her own. Once John Harmon has entered into his
lawful inheritance, she thinks of it as gain being located in London. Future excessive
consumption, if it occurs, could be accounted for by providing the best for their child. Dickens,
again, would have us assured that this eventuality is very unlikely so we sneak into the nursery in
their new house (former Boffins’) with Mr. Boffin opening the door softly to see Bella posing by
the hearth with the baby. Thus, the hearth truly fulfils its function of the actual centre of the
modern conjugal family (Welsh 144), here represented in the intimacy of mother and baby:
“…there was nothing to see but Bella in a musing state of happiness, seated in a little low chair
upon the hearth, with her child in her fair young arms, and her soft eyelashes shading her eyes
from the fire.” (823-4)
Bella’s movement to spirituality, which was in insufficient amounts in her beginnings
(Wilfer’s house), is therefore marked by the tropes of antithesis and reconciliation. Her
movements in house space are marked by vicissitude, initially protentional towards filling the
material gaps in Wilfer’s house, but subsequently retroactive as she opposes spirituality at first
and embraces materialism. She then rejects it, re-activating a new protentional movement in
opening herself to spirituality, which she seeks in her father’s house. In the end, she will have to
accept both in a reconciliatory downplaying of the materialist side of her as a pre-modernist
consumer.
As this analysis has demonstrated, the topical chronotope of the house as one of the city
inhabitant’s possible beginnings in the modern city of London can be a useful tool in tracking
that inhabitant’s movements in city space. Topoanalysis has proved to be decisive in determining
the city inhabitant rhetoric in movements taken place in successive houses. The proposed
chronotope can be considered generic of the city in general and, therefore, relevant to
establishing habitation in the modern city in particular. Residents, who have decided to make the
city their permanent home in their centripetal movements to it, aim to inhabit increasingly larger
houses related to their numerous consumerist practices, thus rendering themselves susceptible to
this analysis.

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