Mobilities: Physical and Social

This chapter focuses on the influence of prosthesis use on social mobility, challenging predominant utopian views regarding nineteenth-century prosthetics. It exposes the social restrictions underpinning prosthesis use, while showing how several writers challenged the status quo. Centring on a case study of Charles Dickens’s portrayal of the villainous wooden-leg user Silas Wegg in Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), the chapter identifies how Dickens drew from anxieties surrounding the social position of amputees by presenting a wooden-leg user as a transgressive social climber. The chapter places Dickens’s representation of Wegg in context with his other depictions of prosthesis users and those found in his journals Household Words and All the Year Round. This chapter argues that stories such as Dickens’s ultimately problematize the logic of prosthesis use.

Proto-Reading and the Positing of Character in Our Mutual Friend

The openings of Dickens’s novels schematically isolate the elements that will form the texts: beginning with the “two figures” of the novel’s opening, this chapter examines the positing of character in Our Mutual Friend. It traces the novel’s fascination with proto-, incomplete, or newly emerging persons: the partial assembly of skeletons, the emergence of the nouveau riche or of “made” men, the awakening to consciousness after a near-drowning, the looming of forms that might be (but that are not yet) human out of the darkness or at the borders of perception. The novel repeatedly produces scenarios where recursive structures of gazing (fond spouses attending to their spouses’ looks, a daughter watching to see what her father sees) as if produce faces that loom out of the void. It also repeatedly dramatizes forms of reading that aren’t literally reading: Silas Wegg teaching Boffin to “decline and fall”; Lizzie Hexham seeing stories in the fire; Charlie Hexham looking at the spines of books; Gaffer “reading” posters illegible to him, and so on. The novel’s concern with incipient forms and, as it were, proto-reading, indexes the way its major and minor plots and subplots are structured by an overarching concern with inception.

The Developmental Process of Peer Support Networks: The Role of Friendship

This study investigated the characteristics and development of peer support networks in an effort to unravel the role of friendship in this developmental process. The relationships between friendship networks and peer support networks were explored, and the influence of dyadic and triadic friendships on the development of peer support relationships was examined. Two waves of data were collected among a sample of adolescents in six Chinese junior high schools (n = 913 students from 28 classrooms; mean age = 14.13 years; 50.49% boys), and classroom friendship networks and peer support networks were analyzed. The results showed that peer support networks were sparse, hierarchical, and sex-segregated. Furthermore, peer support networks and friendship networks partially overlapped. Friends tended to have similar support-seeking and support-providing ties. Longitudinal multiplex social network analysis revealed that peer support networks changed moderately over time, and friendships played various roles in the development of peer support networks. Dyadic friendships improved the formation of peer support ties. A mutual friend improved the formation of support relationships between two students when the mutual friend chose the two students as friends, but a mutual friend also hindered or had no effects on the formation of support relationships in other cases. The implications for educators to improve peer support networks are presented, and directions for future research are discussed.