by Fred Kaplan
By late summer, spent mostly in France with Ellen, he was “full of notions” for “the new twenty numbers.” Returning to the form of publication with which he had begun his career as a novelist was a formidable challenge. His initial hesitation, his inability to draw immediately on his usual concentration and discipline, may have had as much to do, though, with feelings associated with his youthful beginnings and his sense of the changes that had occurred as with any possible decline in creativity. His last novel in monthly numbers, Little Dorrit, had been written almost ten years before. In August, he felt that as soon as he could “clear the Christmas stone out of the road,” he could “dash into it on the grander journey.” In early September, he got down to business with Chapman and Hall “in reference to a new monthly work in 20 monthly No.s as of old.” Having reviewed the balance sheets of his previous monthly serials, he proposed that they pay him “£6000 for the half copyright throughout and outright,” assuring them that “I do not press you to give the sum … and that you will not in the least inconvenience or offend me by preferring to leave me to make other arrangements. If you should have any misgivings on this head, let my assurance that you need have none set it at rest.”14 They did not prefer. They had no misgivings.
In September, he wrote “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings,” clearing that “stone out of the road.” He wanted both to “get into the field before next spring is out” and to be “well on before the first No. is published.” Shirking his usual day at the office, he arranged five consecutive days at his writing desk at Gad’s Hill in early October, “exceedingly anxious to begin.… I am bent upon getting to work on it… but I am determined not to begin to publish with less than five numbers done. I see my opening perfectly, with the one main line on which the story is to turn; and if I don’t strike while the iron (meaning myself) is hot, I shall drift off again, and have to go through all this uneasiness once more.” By late October, his writing discipline had reasserted itself. He allowed no one to disturb him, “shutting [himself] up from breakfast to lunch.” Sorting out his ideas, making number plans, he had his beginning under way sometime in November 1863. Despite a full house for the Christmas holidays, he knew by mid-December that he would keep his May 1864 engagement with his reading public. By the end of January, he had completed the first two numbers and was well into the third. “It is a combination of drollery with romance which requires a great deal of pains and a perfect throwing away of points that might be amplified; but I hope it is very good.”15
Soon “various distractions” slowed him down, one the painful news of his son Walter’s death. He grimly joked to Macready that the delay “was quite superfluous, for I was bad enough before,” though he kept working “in a rather dull slow way for the moment.” In mid-February 1864, he moved to 57 Gloucester Place, Hyde Park Gardens, which he had rented until June “to be in town when my book is preparing and begins to come out.”16 He had the printer set the first two numbers in type, and then met with his new illustrator to “take counsel together” about “what little indication of the story” to have in the illustration on the cover of the first number. He had decided to end his collaboration with Browne, which had begun in 1837. It had become less personal as the years went by, partly because of Browne’s move away from central London, partly because Browne became increasingly unsocial, partly because there were few grounds of attraction between them other than their common enterprise. Busy with the time-consuming work of making his living as an illustrator, Browne took on as many commissions as he could manage. During the six years since Little Dorrit, working only on serial novels for weekly publication, Dickens had had no need for an illustrator of monthly parts. Browne’s professional virtues now no longer seemed sufficient. With changes in the aesthetics and technology of book illustration, he was out of fashion. He was also out of Dickens’ mind. With his usual loyalty to friends, Dickens turned to Frank Stone’s son, the deeply admiring, modestly talented Marcus, who was at the beginning of a career that could benefit from a Dickensian boost.
Though he gave Stone specific guidance for the cover of the first number and had his say occasionally thereafter, Dickens was less insistent than he had ever been in controlling the choice of subjects for illustrations. Often he allowed Stone to choose what he liked. One afternoon, in search of “some eccentric calling” for a character, Stone introduced him to “an articulator of skeletons, a stuffer of birds, and dealer in bottled monsters … ‘It is the very thing I want.… It couldn’t be better.” Having “grown hard to satisfy,” he wrote very slowly. “I have so much not fiction—that will be thought of when I don’t want to think of it—, that I am forced to take more care than I once took.” While working on the “golden dustman,” he took long walks in the dusty street, in the “utterly abominable and unwholesome” March weather when London seemed at its worst. “Such a black shrill city, combining the qualities of a smoky house and a scolding wife; such a gritty city; such a hopeless city, with no rent in the leaden canopy of its sky.” By early April 1864, he had the satisfaction of having in hand the five numbers that allowed him to breathe more easily on May 1, the date of publication, and soon to take pleasure and profit in the success of “Our Friend, now in his thirtieth thousand, and orders flowing in fast.”17
The advantage of being in town while his novel was being prepared for publication had been partly offset by social demands, “the most severe dinner-eating I have ever known in London. Every week” he swore “to go out no more, and every week I have perjured myself several times.” Vowing to “stick to [his] book and dine no more until next year,” he repossessed Gad’s Hill. To desert it for anyplace but France would make him vulnerable again to the temptation of self-perjury. Before Dickens departed for Condette in late June, Stone had chosen the scenes to illustrate for number six, and number seven was in proof. Though he worked hard at the manuscript in July, he felt his imagination flagging. The new Christmas story, which had to be written in the next three months, began to seem a burden. For the first time since 1856, he was working on both that and a novel. Desperate not to lose any of his five-number head start, he felt his advantage slipping away. By the end of July he had fallen behind almost one full number. In poor health, Wills had become sufficiently ill to force him “to do all the office needful.” Dickens himself felt quite unwell with some unspecified ailment. At Gad’s Hill, in “this beautiful but painfully hot” rainless summer, he struggled on with the novel, soon losing part of another number of his head start.18 The cleaned-up proofs of eight were ready for Stone in September 1864. In early October, though, he had to break off before completing number nine to take up his part in the Christmas number. Soon back in form, he was happy with eight and “pleasing [him]self very much with Mrs. Lirriper” again. Working hard, “though No. 10 is unborn,” he had the benefit of a holiday with Wilkie Collins and Georgina. In Dover, which was very quiet, even Collins had restful nights like those he remembered having when he was a boy.
Soon, though, Dickens was staggered by Leech’s death, put “out woefully.” He could not write in the first week of November. In the next he was “only by slow degrees getting back into the track.” He did finish number ten in time to leave a little after the middle of November for two weeks in France. Probably he had the beginning of number eleven in hand. In December, January, and February he was in writing form again, with “the proofs of No. XIII back to the printer” at the middle of February 1865. But he was invalided by a painfully “wounded foot,” whose lameness he attributed to frostbite from “walking continually in the snow, and getting wet in the feet daily.” Forcing his boot onto his swollen foot and going out as usual, he “fell lame on the walk, and had to limp home dead lame, through the snow, for the last three miles.” He was mostly confined to a sofa at Gad’s Hill and at his office apartment, and then at 16 Somers Place, Hyde Park West, which he had rented for the spring. By late March 1865, he still suffered tortures, the “confounded foot as bad as ever again.” In April, though
he could again walk his ten miles a day without inconvenience, he worked “like a dragon.” At the end of the month he went to France. At the end of June he went again, and he and the manuscript of number sixteen barely survived the return journey. Late in July, the number, delayed by the frightening accident and his shakiness afterward, went to the printer. When he received the proofs, he was distressed to learn that he had “under-written … by two and a half pages—a thing” that had not happened since Pickwick. The miscalibration of nerves, invention, and judgment indirectly brought to mind the trauma of Mary Hogarth’s death. With the end in sight, he had proofs of number seventeen by the end of the third week in August.19 On the second of September, he was finished, and wrote the postscript “with devout thankfulness” that he had lived to complete it and address his readers once more.
Indirectly speaking to his Jewish readers, Dickens attempted to provide redress for what he saw as their misunderstanding of his motives in depicting Fagin in Oliver Twist. Critical of overt anti-Semitism, he was less sensitive to his own more covert prejudices. His liberal imagination detested illiberality; yet the common idiom of anti-Semitism occasionally surfaced, even while writing Our Mutual Friend. He was sufficiently unselfconscious about it to feel defensive when it was brought to his attention by Jews as ostensibly English and acceptable as Eliza Davis, the wife of the businessman to whom he had sold the lease of Tavistock House. In July 1863, he had had a letter from her, raising the “great wrong” he had done to the “Jewish people” in the depiction of Fagin, which he answered at length. Typically, his defense was an attack. For “if there be any general feeling on the part of the intelligent Jewish people that I have done them what you describe as ‘a great wrong,’ they are a far less sensible, a far less just, and a far less good-tempered people than I have always supposed them to be.” Fagin, he claimed, was historically accurate, a representative of a race not a religion, a Jew “because he is one of the Jewish people, and because it conveys that kind of idea of him which I should give my readers of a Chinaman by calling him Chinese.… I have no feelings towards the Jewish people but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public or in private.”
He was enough affected by the accusation, though, to transform his defensiveness into the powerful Jewish-Christian motif of redemption in Our Mutual Friend. Reversing the historical stereotype, he depicts Christianity as responsible for the fiction of the materialistic perversion of the Jew in Christian culture. Under economic pressure, oppressed by racial and cultural stereotypes, Riah, the good Jew, is forced to become the front man for the Christian moneylender and slum landlord Fascination Fledgeby. Without a sense of otherness, Dickens conceives of the Jew in stereotypical Christian terms and the Christian in stereotypical Jewish terms. As fiction, it is brilliant. As racial apologetics, it is limited. Later, accepting the gift of a Hebrew-English Bible from Mrs. Davis, he stressed that he would not “willfully” have done such an injustice to the Jewish people “for any worldly consideration.”20 But he could not get beyond the cultural evasion inherent in the word “willfully” nor escape subtly associating material terms with those to whom he was supposedly apologizing.
His new novel replicates powerfully the themes that he had developed throughout his career. Set partly in London, partly in the countryside, it follows the flow of the waters of the Thames from the city to the country, from ignorance to education, from separateness to union, from death to life, refracting across a wide range of interlinked characters and plots the novelist’s fascination with rebirth and with human nature. In this world, society shapes the individual into unnatural contortions. This society that unnatural people create embodies their preoccupation with money, power, exclusion, exploitation, and cannibalism. Symbolized by the dust heaps of Harmon’s Bower, the obsession with wealth provides the tension between innate feelings, such as love, generosity, and communal responsibility, and the socially produced deformation of human nature into material ambition.
In Lizzie Hexam’s relationship with her father and her brother, he sharply delineates the potential and the limitations of the working-class family. In Bella Wilfer’s dissatisfaction with her shrewish, pretentious mother and her lovable but inadequate father, he depicts the misplaced values of a family whose internal dynamic dramatizes the stultification of the lower-middle-class household. In his depiction of the Veneering-Podsnapian world of high bourgeois pretension, he dramatizes the failure of the familial hearth to be anything but a surface fire. Having internalized the values of a rigid social system, the family is captive to the limitations of its own class identification. Since survival depends on the minimal protection that such identification provides, social exploitation is a given. Efforts to alter the family structure have only the limited potential to effect change in personal relationships, mainly through the efforts of those rare people from whatever social level who have some capacity to change themselves. Attempts to alter the larger social world directly are fated to be dissipated or smashed. The structure is a triumph of inertia and self-interest.
Lizzie Hexam and Noddy Boffin, “the golden dustman,” have an innate goodness so concentrated that familial and social pressures cannot damage their ability to love generously and compassionately. Pretending to have drowned in order to explore his possibilities for life undamaged by other people’s material considerations, John Harmon shows himself a man of inner and outer moral resolution. Why and how these characters can escape normative social conditioning the novel does not make clear, though Dickens implies that they are special people whose innate moral sentiments are so strong that they are invulnerable to deformation. But others can escape the structural vise only at the cost of painfully reconstructing themselves to become emotionally and morally independent of the external structures that they cannot change. Bella Wilfer and Eugene Wrayburn are the dynamic characters of the novel for whom deprivation and deformation have taken the form of a frenetic verbal materialism and emotional paralysis. Under the elaborate tutelage of Boffin, who pretends to be a miser, Bella’s essential moral sanity asserts itself. She prefers love to money, compassion to exploitation. Despite the resistance of his upper-class values, Eugene’s love for Lizzie motivates him to change. His deathly passivity gives way to emotional vibrancy. The threat of physical and emotional death makes his resurrection an act of self-assertion so powerful that it transforms him into a compassionate, energetic human being.
Redemption, though, in Our Mutual Friend is a Christian affair in a frighteningly un-Christian culture. Material and psychological disintegration are constant threats—death by exploitation, death by brutalization, death by dehumanization, death by spiritual atrophy, death by one’s body being inhabited by the materialism that the society promotes. In this world, the possibilities for individual and social rebirth have been diminished, in some instances to nonexistence. Without the paradigm of rebirth in life, after the final death-in-life there may come no life-in-death. The necessary intimations of immortality that life’s experiences and values should provide have almost disappeared. In Silas Wegg, Rogue Riderhood, and Mr. Veneering, Dickens portrays the spiritual vacuity of human beings damaged beyond the possibility of regeneration. In Bradley Headstone, perhaps his most powerful negative self-portrait, he depicts the psychologically tortured lower-middle-class aspirant toward self-fulfillment who has so completely internalized middle-class repression as a tool for ascendancy that his uncontrollable passion for Lizzie Hexam destroys him.
The most psychologically dynamic character in the novel, he is torn apart by a passion that his conventional qualities of prudence, outward deference, and total self-control cannot deal with, except at the cost of violence and death. Here Dickens perhaps dramatizes the dark side of his own passion, willfulness, and creativity, the self-destructiveness of which he had powerful glimpses in his anguish and hysteria during the late 1850s. The depiction of Bradley resonates with his one experience in applied madness. Having failed in his attempt to murder Eugene, his
rival for Lizzie, Bradley meets his soul mate of retribution in his vicious lower-class counterpart, Rogue Riderhood. When Riderhood attempts to blackmail him, Headstone succeeds in drowning his nemesis, his primitive alter ego. In a vicious struggle, they are both dragged down into the waters of the Thames. Locked in one another’s arms, they finally rise to the surface, an ironic representation of their inability both to rise in life and to rise to heaven.
Fragments of the author’s sense of identity rise to the surface of the novel. In John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn there is the Dickens who had transformed his separation from Catherine into a personal rebirth. Throughout, Harmon has the appropriate Dickensian characteristics of resolution, energy, and creativity. He too is a novelist of sorts, at least the creator of a plot and a story, the maker of a self and other-testing fiction by which he gains a world, including Bella Wilfer, that he thought he had lost or might not want. Initially aimless, lazy, and irresolute, Eugene Wrayburn embodies the Dickensian myth of regeneration through the redemptive power of love. The interaction between Lizzie and Eugene, older, more worldly, and socially superior, suggests some of the distance between Ellen and himself that Dickens needed to overcome.
In her purity of moral sentiment, in her absolute incorruptibility, Lizzie is the culmination of a series of idealized heroines who are both sister and lover and whose psychic origins are in his childhood relationship with his sister Fanny, in his feeling that his mother had deserted him, and in the reinforcement of his feeling of being deserted that the early death of Mary Hogarth provided. In the portrait of Bella, he combines some of Ellen’s traits, particularly her occasional teasing, with some of Katie’s. For where there is a sister and lover, usually there is also a father and daughter. The playful teasing between Bella and her father evokes the favorite daughter that he had partially lost. An idealized version of John Dickens, Mr. Wilfer is ineffectual but loving, just as the benevolent Mr. Boffin completes the resolution of Dickens’ lifelong effort to reconstruct out of the materials of John Dickens a satisfactory father figure. In Mrs. Wilfer, he creates a character whose similarities to the Elizabeth Dickens of the Mrs. Nickleby days are balanced by the depiction of Mrs. Boffin, so idealized a mother that she has only the children she chooses to adopt. Combined with Mrs. Wilfer, she provides an acceptable image of mothering of a sort that none of his previous novels has had in this sustained way. There are no witches in Our Mutual Friend, no representation of the child-adult’s nightmare of Elizabeth Dickens as the neglectful, unloving destroyer.