But within this horror of a landscape—and within great surges of distrust, vicious scheming, incipient dishonesty, ubiquitous greed, and murderous jealousy—the characters manage to find love and support not within families, as had been the example so used by Dickens and other writers of our era before this, but within small circles of friends and beloved, trusted individuals that make up ad hoc families which shield those characters we care about from the storm of poverty and social injustice. And it is these same circles of love which punish those whom we despise.
Dickens had created a masterpiece.
The public did not recognise this. The first number in All the Year Round had sold very well (it was, after all, the first new Dickens novel in two and a half years), but sales quickly fell off and the last number sold only 19,000 copies. I knew that this was a bitter disappointment to Dickens, and although he had personally profited (I learned from Katey’s comments to my brother, Charley) to the tune of about £7,000, the publishers Chapman and Hall actually lost money on the book.
The critics either loved or hated the book without reservation and laboured over either verdict with their usual cock-sure hyperbole, but the general critical trend was one of disappointment. Those in the intellectual sphere had expected another thematic novel with social criticism front and centre, again in the mould of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations, but all they received was a… mere comedy.
But, as I say, it took another professional author such as myself to see that Dickens had achieved the nearly impossible in sustaining such a gentle satirical tone at such length, and with such perfection, to see that the satire never slipped into cynicism, that the comic vision did not slide into mere caricature, nor the relentless critique of society devolve into mere rant.
It took me, in other words, to see that Our Mutual Friend was a masterpiece.
I hated him. As a competing writer, I wished at that moment—as the train left London for his home in Gad’s Hill—that Charles Dickens had died in the Staplehurst accident. Why had he not? So many others had. As he so insufferably wrote and bragged to me and to so many other of his friends, his was the only first-class carriage that had not been thrown to the riverbed below and smashed to flinders.
But all that aside, it was the personal revelation in Our Mutual Friend that I found most revealing and relevant to the current situation we all found ourselves in.
To my trained writer’s eye and experienced reader’s ear, signs and echoes of Dickens’s disastrous culmination of his long relationship with his wife and the commencement of his dangerous liaison with Ellen Ternan were to be found everywhere in this book.
Most novelists create the occasional character—often a villain—who leads a double life, but Dickens’s fiction now seemed saturated with such dualities. In Our Mutual Friend the hero, young John Harmon (heir to the Harmon dust heap fortunes), who appears to be drowned under suspicious circumstances while returning to London after many years at sea, immediately visits the decomposing body (dressed in his clothes and thus presumed to be him) at the police station. Harmon then changes his identity to Julius Handford and then later to John Rokesmith so that he can act as secretary to the Boffins, lowly servants who have, by default, inherited the fortune and dust heaps that should have been John Harmon’s.
The villains in Our Mutual Friend—Gaffer Hexam, Rogue Riderhood, Mr and Mrs Alfred Lammle (grifters who have deceived each other into a loveless and moneyless marriage and who join hands now only in deceiving and using others), peg-legged Silas Wegg, and especially the murderous headmaster Bradley Headstone—may pretend to be someone or something else, but are allowed to remain their sincere selves at heart. Only the positive protagonists in the novel suffer from dual or multiple identities amounting to an actual confusion of self.
And that tragic confusion is inevitably brought about by one form of energy—love. Misplaced, displaced, lost, or concealed romantic love is the engine that drives all the secrecy, machinations, and violence in Dickens’s single most energetic (and terrible) comedy. Our Mutual Friend, I realised to my own pain and horror, was a title and tale worthy of Shakespeare.
John Rokesmith/Harmon hides his identity from his beloved, Bella, until long after they are married and even after they have a child, all the better to manipulate and test and educate her—away from love of money towards love for love’s sake. Mr Boffin becomes an ill-tempered miser to all appearances, driving the Boffins’ ward, Bella, out of the house and back to her impoverished roots, but it is all a charade—another means of testing the true mettle of Bella Wilfer. Even the wastrel lawyer Eugene Wrayburn—one of the strongest (if most confused) personalities in all of Dickens’s fiction—reaches, because of his illogical love for low-born Lizzie Hexam, a point where he taps his head and breast in confusion, speaks his own name, and cries out—“… perhaps you can’t tell me what this may be? — No, upon my life I can’t. I give it up!”
John Harmon, lost amidst all his disguises and manipulative strategies, reaches a similar loss of identity and cries, “But it was not I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.”
The weak and jealous headmaster Bradley Headstone seems to confess to all of Charles Dickens’s own hidden passions and jealousies when he tells the much-in-demand Lizzie Hexam—
“You draw me to you. If I were shut up in a strong prison, you would draw me out. I should break through the wall to come to you. If I were lying on a sick bed, you would draw me up—to stagger to your feet and fall there.” And later—“You are the ruin of me… Yes! You are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me. I have no resources in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of myself when you are near me or in my thoughts. And you are always in my thoughts now. I have never been quit of you since I first saw you.”
Compare this to what Charles Dickens had written in a private letter not so long after he had met Ellen Ternan for the first time—“I have never known a moment’s peace or content, since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one Spirit.” And—“Oh, that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!”
Charles Dickens’s passion for Ellen Ternan, much less the destruction to his sense of self, family, and sanity that this passion was causing, cried out to me from behind the mask of every character and violent event in Our Mutual Friend.
In the terrifying scene where Bradley Headstone confronts the cowering Lizzie Hexam with his passion—set, I thought, quite appropriately in a foggy burial ground, since the schoolmaster’s love is doomed and one-sided and short-lived even before it dies from jealousy and resurrects itself as murder—the deranged schoolmaster seems to cry out in a voice echoing Charles Dickens’s silent screams of agony that year—
No man knows until the time comes, what depths are within him. To some men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea has been heaved up ever since.… I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This, and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.