“Fraudulent Unearthing”: Working-class Antiquaries in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend

This article recenters attention on the interplay between error—false facts, false theories—and nineteenth-century fiction, specifically Charles Dickens’s inventive misuse of antiquarian practice in Bleak House (1852–53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–65). Informed by a pattern of offhand remarks in an archive of antiquarian papers, this article remodels Dickens’s Jo, Boffin, and other waterside characters as “working-class antiquaries,” a contemporaneous pejorative for laborers, farmers, and uneducated members of the public who stumbled across artifacts in day-to-day life. From the perspective of established scientists of the past, these working-class antiquaries had the potential to destroy the clarity of historical narrative. Dickens, I argue, views the threat of the working-class antiquary to official knowledge as liberating and treats historical error as both productive and essential for the construction of plot. Dickens grants real narrative authority to these working-class antiquaries; as they muddle in and redirect the past, they trade historical accuracy for intimate, reparative understandings. Simultaneously, he sheds light on the casual, imaginative ways in which lay people apprehended the past.