Victorian Moral Philosophy and Our Mutual Friend (Essay‪)‬

A few decades ago it would have been widely thought that to associate Dickens with anything so rarefied and academic as professional moral philosophy would be doomed to failure. Recently we have become more inclined to see him as intellectually sophisticated. But is it just that Dickens had unconscious insight, knowing more than he knew that he knew, as Rosemarie Bodenheimer has recently argued, or is there also a level of what could meaningfully be called philosophy? And, if so, how does it relate to the explicit philosophies of the time? I take my inspiration for this essay in part from Jane Nardin's book, Trollope and Victorian Moral Philosophy (1996), in which she argues that Trollope engaged directly and in a knowledgeable and pertinent way with serious philosophical issues in the latter part of his career, even if he did not necessarily read books by philosophers. And of course there are other Victorian novelists who were intellectually curious to a degree that necessarily embraced some of the philosophical debates of their time, George Eliot being the most conspicuous example.