ABSTRACT
The interest of this anecdote for the present study lies in its manner of relating the grotesque as an effect of taking opium with one of the main preoccupations of Dickens's later writing with the double, or split consciousness, of criminal psychology, as a writer conscious of following in the footsteps of Scott, and assuming the author mantles as the most popular English novelist, Dickens may have been aware of it in writing Edwin Drood, in such sentences as that concerning Miss Twinkleton and her Doppelganger. Our Mutual Friend explores the proposition, expressed in figurative terms that inevitably recall Marx's, that money is the opium of the Victorian middle classes, and that the consequences of addiction to it are grotesque visions that far outstrip those procured by any individual addict. The point - reaching back through the aesthetics of Dickens's novels is that in the end opium, like the grotesque, is merely real.
