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In Charles dickens's fiction, doting on rubbish is an activity usually associated with his final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), a text that centers on the wealth-producing dust mounds of boffin's bower.1 but the scavenging impulse actually becomes evident much earlier, though perhaps in a less filthy form, in Bleak House (1852-53), a novel in which we often find characters manically sifting through discarded paper for scraps of potential informational value. Take, for instance, a particularly public scene of paper's reclamation that occurs while the Smallweed family clears out the rag-and-bottle shop of the lately combusted krook, an extended task that attracts the attention of "the court"-that is, a crowd of curious and capitalizing neighbors:
Twice when the dustman is called in to carry off a cart-load of old papers, ashes, and broken bottles, the whole court assembles and pries into the baskets as they come forth. many times the two gentlemen [reporters] who write with the ravenous little pens on the tissue paper are seen prowling in the neighborhood.2
for waste paper, these documents are remarkably generative, both in terms of the crowd's hopeful paper salvage as well as the scrib- bling reporters' proliferation of yet even more paper. And though this particular scene's scavenging never yields any morsel of value for the novel's reader, krook's remaining paper stash will eventually turn up both the incriminating love letters between lady deadlock and Captain Hawdon as well as the long-lost Jarndyce will, thereby effectively initiating the novel's slow lurch toward conclusion.
The scene reminds us, in fact, that documents in Bleak House are so very rarely thrown away for good: when their initial utilities do expire, documents are often recirculated via reclamation and exchange, or recycled completely into newly useful forms. krook's shop may be the most celebrated site of hoarding in Victorian fiction, but it would be a mistake to say that all of his prized rubbish remains there permanently, or to say that the novel's only vision of its paper world is one of endless accumulation. The interest of this essay is in theorizing the regenera- tive material systems that inform the novel, including not only acts of scavenging but also the nineteenth century's widespread (and widely reported) methods of producing new...