Charles Dickens (20 page)

Once he started, the writing was slower than usual—he was working hard but felt he was no longer as quick and inventive as he had been. One number came up two and a half pages short—a flaw that had to be corrected and seems to have indicated to Dickens that he was losing his professional edge. All in all, the composition of
Our Mutual Friend
did not give him the pleasure that others had (though much of the information about Dickens's views on
Our Mutual Friend
is not available, because the final volumes of his letters have not yet been published).

Yet the novel is a delight. The opening two chapters set the theme—in the first chapter, Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam are out upon the Thames, engaged in Gaffer's line of work, which is salvaging from the river. They find a corpse. In chapter 2, gossip about a strange will comes up at the high society dinner table of Mr. and Mrs. Veneering; at the end of the meal, a young lawyer, Mortimer Lightwood, is handed a message. The beneficiary of the will has been found drowned. Gossip neatly defines the circle of the novel—the highest are linked with the lowest, not by an institution (the court of Chancery) or a system (capitalism), but by the much more casual and yet permanent human inclinations to tell a good story and to investigate a secret. As the characters come into relationships with one another, they do so voluntarily, because they
conceive an interest in one another. Their relationships proliferate; desired connections lead to undesired connections as well as other desired ones, until everyone is connected, much of London is explored, and the plot works itself out clearly, logically, and with pleasure for the reader. Throughout, the novel is driven by character and style rather than by theme.

If we compare
Our Mutual Friend
with
Bleak House
and
Little Dorrit,
for example, we see that the imputation, in the earlier books, that characters' views and actions are determined by their circumstances is no longer present. All the characters in
Our Mutual Friend
act in accordance with their sense of who they are morally, or who they would like to be; even Rogue Riderhood has a motto—he “makes his living by the sweat of his brow.” The good characters, of whom Mr. Boffin is an example, are able to retain a sense of right and wrong in spite of circumstances. Much of the novel turns upon the moral education of Bella Wilfer, in whom those who love her see an inherent sense of compassion and integrity, but who acts in a mercenary and spoiled fashion. Mr. Boffin intends his ruse of miserliness to uncover the real Bella, not to change her from one sort of girl to another. Dickens is careful, in the beginning, to show Bella's true affection for her father—the question is how she will reveal her naturally good nature, not whether she will. Eugene Wrayburn undergoes a similar testing—when he finds Lizzie in her hiding place and has a last interview with her, his motives are still dishonorable—although he is strongly drawn to her, he cannot bring himself to cross the social gulf between them and ask her to marry him. Even after she rescues him and cares for him, he is hesitant and wonders if his moral
weakness is, or should be, fatal. But the experience of marriage (as with Bella) and friendship and connection bolsters his resolve, and the novel closes with Eugene at last attaining a moral vision. Instead of the last note of
Little Dorrit,
which has Clennam and Amy subsumed into the “usual uproar,” at the end of
Our Mutual Friend,
the principal characters have made themselves a small society of friendship (and prosperity) that is a refuge from the shallowness represented by Lady Tippins, the snobbishness represented by Lord Snigsworth, the blind pomposity represented by Podsnap, and the passion, greed, and criminality represented by Headstone, Wegg, and Riderhood. In short, Dickens has returned to a comic vision of the world, in which choice and agency determine fate, connection is possible, and individuals are able (and indeed required) to understand their true situations and act on them.

Also in contrast with every novel after
David Copperfield,
Dickens explores the postmarital relationships of his characters, developing images of domestic connection. The weddings are not the end. Bella continues to be tested after hers. Her husband tempts her greed, her trust, her dedication to household management, her relations with her mother and sister. These chapters not only allow Bella to win wealth and integrity together, they allow Dickens to expatiate upon his ideas of a good marriage, which he has hardly ever done before. The foundation of this ideal marital relationship is romantic love combined with gratitude; its goal is some sort of substantial “improving object”; it is lived out among a community of like-minded friends rather than familial kin. Eugene and Lizzie's marriage reflects the same ideals, except that enlightenment and strength flow not from the man to the
woman, as with John and Bella, but from the woman to the man. What is important here is that in contrast with, say, Pip and Sydney Carton, the reformed characters of
Our Mutual Friend
are allowed to reap the rewards of salvation; their feelings of guilt and shame do not prohibit them from intimate connection. In addition, that salvation takes place in the world rather than in the afterlife.

Dickens has stepped back from his wholesale critique of English society and, in so doing, allows his characters to assert their freedom within what he continues to portray as a corrupt structure. Corruption, he is saying, is a fact of life, but not the determiner of the individual's moral direction. The average man or woman (not just the exceptional Amy Dorrit type) can understand right and wrong. Twemlow, Lightwood, Jenny Wren, Riah, Mrs. Lammle, and Georgiana Podsnap are all required to assume a moral stance against one sort of pressure or another, and all do, and thus a right-minded community is formed within the larger community of fools and knaves.

In
Our Mutual Friend,
Dickens doesn't seem to be pressing grand themes and motifs, as he had in
Bleak House
and
Little Dorrit,
or even
Great Expectations,
and as a result, critics have not always taken this last completed novel as seriously as earlier ones. But in fact, Dickens's style and character portrayal in
Our Mutual Friend
show that his political and social opinions have been successfully and gracefully dissolved into his use of language. At 820 pages,
Our Mutual Friend
is certainly one of the greatest examples of sustained perfection of style in the English language. Examples of felicitous phrasings abound on every page, from the satiric (“A certain
institution in Mr. Podsnap's mind which he called ‘the young person' may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his daughter”) to the comic (“ ‘Who is it?' said Mrs. Wilfer, in her Act-of-Parliament manner. ‘Enter!' ”) to the violent (“In an instant, with a dreadful crash, the reflected night turned crooked, flames shot jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars came bursting from the sky”) to the lyrical (“Up came the sun, streaming all over London, and in its glorious impartiality even condescending to make prismatic sparkles in the whiskers of Mr. Alfred Lammle as he sat at breakfast”). But grace of style meshes with delicacy and complexity of character drawing. Dickens's typical florid repetitiveness, which sometimes works in earlier novels (Mrs. Gamp, Flora Finching, Miss Tox, Josiah Bounderby, Carker the manager) and sometimes does not (Esther Summerson, Miss Wade, the Frenchman Rigaud), has given way to something much more subtle in
Our Mutual Friend
. In allowing for the possibility of transformation in almost all the characters of the novel, Dickens has changed his mind about human nature—he revisits old character types and sees them anew: the Reverend Frank Milvey, clergyman, is a forgiven Chadband. Eugene is a forgiven James Harthouse. Lightwood the lawyer is a forgiven Tulkinghorn. Boffin the miser is a forgiven Scrooge. Fledgeby is Ralph Nickleby brought low, given a drubbing, and peppered into the bargain. Lammle has certain Murdstone characteristics, but when he canes Fledgeby, the reader has to acknowledge that he has his uses. Bella is not unlike Dora. Lizzie is Agnes with strength and initiative. While I don't want to make too much of these similarities, I do want to stress that Dickens's comic vision in
Our Mutual
Friend
is partially retrospective—the greatness of the novel comes from a new vision of the world that more successfully integrates the conscious mind with the subconscious and the individual with the group, and at the same time more successfully integrates all the various parts of a novel—plot, character, style, setting, and theme.

As I have pointed out before, the form of the novel carries several inherent philosophical ideas—that the individual is worthy of investigation; that his or her relationship to the group is always more or less vexed, but that he or she exists only as part of a group; that reality is always subjectively experienced; that the world is so abundant and disorderly that it can be described only in prose; and that stories can be narrated sequentially and understood. A great novel may work against these inherent philosophical ideas, but a perfect novel must work with them—a perfect novel realizes the implications of the form and communicates the author's idiosyncratic vision simultaneously, in an outpouring of language that seems brand-new and just right at the same time. For me,
Our Mutual Friend
is Dickens's perfect novel, seamless and true and delightful in every line.

Even so,
Our Mutual Friend
was not a tremendous success. The first number sold very well—a new Dickens after two and a half years—but sales dwindled thereafter, and the last number sold only nineteen thousand copies. Dickens made about £7,000 overall (roughly equivalent to some $250,000), but Chapman and Hall lost money. Reviewers seemed to love it or hate it—one of the haters was Henry James, aged twenty-two, who panned it in
The Nation
. Modern critics have been divided also, no doubt owing to its
differences from those novels—
Bleak House, Little Dorrit,
and
Great Expectations
—that they have most fervently admired. But the modern era has not, in general, been receptive to the comic novel, or the comic view of life, and has also tended to devalue Shakespeare's comedies relative to his tragedies. It takes exceptional grace of style and a steady comic vision to make a comic novel work without allowing it to slip into sentimentality, while at the same time preventing its satirical tone from darkening into cynicism. Some critics have recognized the accomplishment of
Our Mutual Friend,
but others have looked for something that was no longer there—Dickens's former global critique of English society.

 

On June 9, 1865, when Dickens was returning from France with Ellen and Frances Ternan, the train in which they were riding went off the tracks as it was crossing a bridge near Staplehurst, Kent. Men working on the tracks had failed to post a warning guard far enough away for the train to have time to halt, and seven first-class carriages went over the bridge into the river below. Dickens's carriage dangled over the bridge, held by its coupling to the baggage car behind it. Dickens and the Ternans were thrown into the downward corner of the carriage, but Dickens managed to climb out the window and then procure a key and get the two women out. At this point, he saw the chaos below. He took his brandy flask and his top hat and went down among the dead and injured; he filled his top hat with water from the river and went around, succoring where he could. Some people died as he was helping them; others he helped, only to return and discover that they had died. Dickens was not especially well at this time, but he
wrote to a friend, “I have a—I don't know what to call it—constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind, and was not in the least flustered at the time.” He persuaded one young man to get himself out from under the wreckage; he helped another confront the death of his bride. As usual, he did not stint himself or shrink from the horror. When it was time to be taken away by an evacuation train, he climbed into the dangling carriage and found his manuscript.

Although he acted in every way calmly and even heroically during the crash, he began within a day or two to suffer from what we would call post-traumatic stress—he wrote little about it in his letters, but to one friend, he said that thinking about it gave him “the shake,” and although he continued to travel by rail and of course hansom cab in order to visit Ellen and to do business and give readings, his children recalled later that any sort of unexpected jolt on the train panicked him, and he hated a cab or a carriage to go too fast. He did not advertise his presence on the train or his heroism. He used influence with the railway company to avoid appearing at the inquest, knowing the identity of his companions would be revealed. He did, however, maintain an interest in at least one of the people he rescued, with whom he corresponded for several years.

It is possible that Ellen was injured in the crash, since Dickens referred to her in his letters as “the patient” for some time afterward, and in later life she was said to have an old injury in her upper left arm. Dickens, as always, went on with business—writing his novel, editing and publishing
All the Year Round
. In September, when the novel was complete, he went to France to do some business, returning over the same
route as the accident, perhaps a conscious attempt to overcome anxieties that were growing rather than diminishing. His health was not improving, either. In France he had some sort of “sunstroke,” which was probably an actual stroke; his many long walks were taken in spite of the fact that one of his feet was painfully swollen.

In the fall, Dickens leased several houses. One, near Hyde Park, was for himself and his daughter Mamie. Two others, in the village of Slough, he took under the name of “Tringham,” one for himself and one for Ellen and Frances Ternan. Letters written by contemporaries to other contemporaries about the Dickenses' social lives that fall indicate that they were the subject of at least some disparaging gossip—Dickens's daughters, after all, were allied not only to him, about whom there were stories, but also to Wilkie Collins, Katey's brother-in-law, who lived openly with his mistress. Dickens's apparently successful secrecy about where Ellen Ternan was and what precisely their relations were did not inhibit society, his old enemy, from inferring and disapproving.