Dickens, Darwin, and Marx
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865), and Karl Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 (1867) were written within ten years and twenty miles of one another. Each is a big, system-mapping book that seeks to understand some of the largest and most complex forces that shape our world: capitalism, empire, the world-city, and Earth itself. Each has also shaped our world in profound ways. All three authors have become adjectives, their names appended to ideas and political movements that have long outlived anything Charles, Charles, or Karl might have recognized. In this course, we will read these monumental works in conjunction with one another, exploring the connections (and tensions) between them, while contextualizing them in relation to the world in which they appeared: most notably London, the first global metropolis, capital of an Earth-spanning empire, and a thoroughly manufactured landscape in which even the weather bore the effects of human action. We will also think about what it means to read them in our own time, connecting their insights to the manifold emergencies that define our own time: climate change, rampant inequality, the Covid-19 pandemic, ecosystem collapse. In so doing, we will seek to treat them both as historical antecedents and as contemporaries, using their enduring influence to think about the origins and afterlives of ideas and the forms that enable them to travel.