Reanimation, regeneration, re-evaluation: rereading Our Mutual Friend

In adopting the utilitarian analogy of physiological circulation, Ruskin was arguing that Political Economy encouraged unequal distribution of wealth at the expense of the poor, whereas the health of the nation depended on an equal flow throughout the body: "There is one quickness of the current which comes of cheerful emotion or wholesome exercise; and another which comes of shame or of fever. Metz does not think the dust mounds wiU ever get carted away and sees no end to the entropy in which the characters are trapped, yet the novel does not end on a note of depression or resignation, but with vindication of Eugene's moral conversion and love over society gossips and parvenus, and it points to moral salvation in the salvage of the city's refuse (incidentally, Victorian readers would not have been too prudish to explore the sewers in London Labour and London Poor and would have got Dickens's crude joke at Mr. Podsnap's expense about the marks of the British constitution found in the horse dung on London's streets). [...]John Harmon is triumphant, comes into money, and retreats into bourgeois success. Like the chaotic upheaval of the uprooting of Stagg's Gardens resulting from the building of the railway in Dombey and Son, the stop-go "checks and balances" of Victorian progress is reflected in the unplanned flux of new suburban expansion described in Our Mutual Friend: a toy neighbourhood taken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly incoherent mind, and set up anyhow; here, one side of a new street; there, a large soUtary pubUc-house facing nowhere; here, another unfinished street already in ruins; there, a church; here, an immense new warehouse; there, a dilapidated old country viUa; then, a medley of black ditch, sparkUng cucumber-frame, rank field, richly cultivated kitchen-garden, brick viaduct, arch-spanned canal, and disorder of frowsiness and fog.