Ethics and aesthetics of dust in Charles Dickens' work between cultural history and corpus stylistics

Abstract

The paper adopts a mixed methodology, combining the analytical tools of literary and cultural criticism with corpus stylistics to explore the occurrences of dust and its derived forms in Charles Dickens’s work, with a focus on the novel Our Mutual Friend. After an initial reflection on the various forms assumed by dust, the occupations associated with it and the measures undertaken to sanitise society in Victorian Britain, the study goes on to explore the treatment of dust in Dickens’s fiction and nonfiction in an attempt to clarify its role as both material substance and symbol, plot device and religious metaphor.