"This is not so much the first over, as a gentle limbering up," or, Embarking on the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters

While waiting to get back to my local bookstore to pick up a copy of Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies--I'm nothing if not loyal!--I've been reading the first volume of the collected correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, a book that made its way to my shelves a few years back on the recommendation of Michael Dirda. In the course of a piece on the pleasures of James Lees-Milne's diaries at the Barnes and Noble Review, Dirda included the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis correspondence in a list of his ten favorite books, alongside such IBRL favorites as Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Casanova's memoirs, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, and In Search of Lost Time. About the list Dirda wrote,

If literature is news that stays news, as Ezra Pound famously said, then such books as those on my list represent what one might call the higher gossip. Their pages are packed with amusing anecdotes, erotic adventures, moral observations, lyrical evocations of the past, bits of biography, encounters with unusual people, and glorious descriptions of nature, art, places, and society. These are, in short, works that recreate a time and a place, while also plunging us deep into a tattered human heart.

I'm only 150 pages into the six volumes of Lyttelton/Hart-Davis letters, and I've already encountered all these elements. These are truly wonderful letters.

The correspondence began in charming fashion: Hart-Davis, a publisher, had been a pupil of Lyttelton at Eton, and when they met again at a dinner party in 1955 Lyttelton complained of being lonely in rural Suffolk:

"Nobody even writes to me," he said. Flushed with wine, I accepted the challenge.

"Ill write to you, George."

"When will you start?"

"Next week-end."

"Right. Ill answer in the middle of the week."

For seven years, until Lyttelton's death, that's what they did.

The first couple of letters are, as you might expect, a bit awkward: tentative and self-consciously literary. But amazingly quickly the pair settle into a true exchange that feels as comfortable as any rambling conversation with an old friend. They're both highly educated and steeped in English literary culture in that oh-so-English public school way that can positively boggle even the relatively literate mind at times. References--most caught, some requiring resort to research--abound, as do quotations, all feeling organic, markers of the mind at work. Hart-Davis, dismissing Lyttelton's apology for the "tediously otiose" act of quoting Dr. Johnson, sums up the pleasure of quotation:

[I]t's such a pleasure to write down splendid words--almost as though one were inventing them.

The most fun part of these early letters is the simple joy these two men are discovering in each other's company--finding that this lark on which they've embarked is, after all, a genuine meeting of the minds, a friendship that seems almost from the start to be infinitely capacious. Most collections of letters are best suited for dipping into rather than reading straight through; this one, at least thus far, seems the rare exception where following the trajectory and growth of the correspondence would more than make up for any of the inevitable tedium brought on by letter after letter after letter.

I'm sure I'll be sharing more in the coming weeks--this post, actually, was a sidetrack from what was to be a simple post about a tossed-off remark by Lyttelton about M. R. James's handwriting, which I promise I'll get to soon. For now, I'll leave you with a line that Hart-Davis quotes from the notebooks of another IBRL favorite, Thomas Hardy*:

Nine-tenths of the letters in which people speak unreservedly of their feelings are written after ten at night.

Being as we're long past that hour, I'll attempt to retain my reticence by retiring.

The return of the New York Moon!

After a multi-year hiatus, the New York Moon has peeped out once more from behind the clouds, this time with an issue organized around the loose theme of nostalgia. There's lots worth your attention, beyond the lovely graphic design and illustrations, including a look at Egypt through the eyes of a 1914 Baedeker Guide, a remarkable set of photos of abandoned spaces in Cairo, an analysis of the recordings sent spinning into space with the Voyager probe, and--by me--a look at one of my favorite things in all of London, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs (and, unknown to me before I started researching the article, their never-completed Central Park counterparts!).

Once you've read that issue, you might trawl the archives. The last piece I contributed to the Moon is one I'm still proud of, a commonplace bookµstyle collection of writings from travel writers, novelists, and explorers on deserts and water, for the Desert issue. The original, commissioned illustrations are themselves worth the trouble of clicking through.

Enjoy!

Case notes, or, Some disconnected bits on the law and justice

1 When I'm between books, I often turn to John Mortimer's Rumpole stories, through which I've slowly been making my way for the past several years. Usually Rumpole's relationship with and characterization of his wife is a subject of humor verging on whining--he regularly refers to her, in a nod to Rider Haggard, as She Who Must Be Obeyed--but in "Rumpole at Sea," the story I read this morning, he quietly reveals that he has a lot more respect for Hilda than he usually lets on. In telling the story, Rumpole is forced to relate a number of events at which he was not present, but he explains, "I have reconstructed the following pages from [Mrs Rumpole's] evidence which was, as always, completely reliable." Later, he notes:

She Who Must Be Obeyed has a dead eye for detail and would have risen to great heights in the Criminal Investigation Department.

A reliable witness with a dead eye for detail? What higher praise could Rumpole offer?

2 One of the best moments early in Sergio De La Pava's A Naked Singularity--a moment when you begin to realize that you're in the hands of a genius--is on the fifth page, when Casi, the protagonist, informs the reader that there is about to be a digression:

And this is as good a time as any for you, gentle reader, to learn that I can wander a bit while storytelling so that the very imminent digressive passage on the judicial creation of Miranda warnings can be entirely skipped by the uncurious without the slightest loss of narrative steam.

Said digression ensues, explaining in intense and often hilarious language the case and judicial and legal activity that led up to "the kind of decision that makes maybe five people happy" and led to the warning about self-incrimination that TV has made so famous.

With A Naked Singularity on the brain last week, I was surprised to see the following exchange late in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend:

"Don't!" said Mr Inspector. "Why, why argue? It's my duty to inform you that whatever you say, will be used against you."

"I don't think it will."

"But I tell you it will," said Mr Inspector. "Now, having received the caution, do you still say that you foresaw my visit this afternoon?"

So as far back as that, in England, an officer--of a police force that had been in existence for less than forty years--already felt it was his duty to warn a suspect, and it was already known as "the caution"? I had no idea, and neither, it seems, does Wikipedia: the section on similar rights in England and Wales in the entry for Miranda, while noting that the right may have originated there, only traces it as far back as 1912. Any legal scholars want to weigh in?

3 In anticipation of Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (which is one the best books I've read in recent years), I read Ford Madox Ford's treatment of a slightly later period in the career of Thomas Cromwell, The Fifth Queen. Ford, a Catholic, lays his sympathy with Katherine Howard, Henry VIII's fifth queen, and in the process he paints a much darker portrait of Cromwell than Mantel does. Ford's Cromwell isn't the ruthless villain he is forced to play as the foil of the perfectly noble Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, but he is driven much more by self-interest than in Mantel's account, and his mutability is seen less as an emblem of his essential--and laudable--modernity than of an essential ethical slipperiness.

Mantel's Cromwell is so well drawn, so memorable, that he's hard to shake even as you're reading Ford, so when we see him meet the downfall we've known since the first page is inevitable, it's hard not to feel a real pang. The moment in The Fifth Queen when his last-ditch machinations fail and he's confronted by the lords who are his bitterest enemies, stripped of his chancellorship, and named a traitor unites the two characterizations and is vividly arresting:

Then such rage and despair had come into Thomas Cromwell's terrible face that Cranmer's senses had reeled. He had seen Norfolk and the Admiral fall back before this passion; he had seen Thomas Cromwell tear off his cap and cast it on the floor; he had heard him bark and snarl out certain words into the face of the yellow dog of Norfolk.

"Upon your life you dare not call me traitor!" and Norfolk had fallen back abashed.

Then the chamber had seemed to fill with an awful gloom and darkness; men showed only like shadows against the window lights; the constable of the Tower had come in with the warrants, and in that gloom the earth had appeared to tremble and quake beneath the Archbishop's feet.

And now on to Bring Up the Bodies!

4 As seems only right on questions of the law and justice, I'll let Kafka have the last word. This comes from Gustav Janouch's Conversations with Kafka (1968):

How often is injustice committed in the name of justice? How often does damnation fly the flag of enlightenment? How often does a fall disguise itself as a rise? We can see it all now quite properly. The war didn't only burn and tear the world, but also lit it up. We can see that it is a labyrinth built by men themselves, an icy machine world, whose comforts and apparent purposefulness increasingly emasculate and dishonour us.

Dickens as a reader

One of the reasons that there were three years between Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, and then another five before The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was that Dickens was devoting much of his time to his highly lucrative (and draining) reading tours. Most biographers put at least some of the blame for Dickens's early death on the grueling pace and physical demands of his reading tours. By all accounts, however, they were brilliant performances--sentimental and overblown by today's taste, perhaps, but gripping and effective, carrying away audience after audience.

In his account of Dickens's reading career, Charles Dickens as a Reader (1872), Dickens's friend Charles Kent, who wrote his book at the suggestion of Dickens and had access to the author's marked-up performance manuscripts, reminds us at the opening that not every writer is even a competent reader. He illustrates that with a story of Dr. Johnson and Virgil Thomson:

According to the grimly humorous old Doctor, "He [Thomson] was once reading to Doddington, who, being himself a reader eminently elegant, was so much provoked by his odd utterance, that he snatcehd the paper from his hand, and told him that he did not understand his own verses!"

Kent's book is admiring to a fault, but it's still of interest to any dedicated Dickensian. What's perhaps most interesting is the realization Kent comes to when he looks at the marked-up manuscript for Dickens's reading of the scene from David Copperfield where Emily runs off:

The wonder still is to us, now that we are recalling to mind the salient peculiarities of this Reading, as we do so, turning over leaf by leaf the marked copy of it, from which the Novelist read; the very wonder, we repeat, still is to us how, in that exquisite scene, the very words that have always moved us most in the novel were struck out in the delivery, are rigidly scored through here with blue inkmarks in the reading copy, by the hand of the Reader-Novelist. Those words, we mean which occur, where Ham, having on his arrival, made a movement as if Em'ly were outside, asked Mas'r Davy to "come out a minute," only for him, on his doing so, to find that Em'ly was not there, and that Ham was deadly pale. "Ham! what's the matter?" was gasped out in the Reading. But--not what follows, immediately on that, in the original narrative: "'Mas'r Davy!' Oh, for his broken heart, how dreadfully he wept!"

Kent goes on to give a number of specific examples of lines Dickens cut but whose emotional sense he managed to convey by tone or expression. Frustratingly, he doesn't give any further details of how Dickens achieved his effects in this case, which perhaps would have been difficult to determine outside the actual moment. But the complicated choices of what to omit are a reminder of what Kent notes elsewhere in the book: that Dickens, ever the craftsman, devoted copious attention to assembling his reading manuscripts.

It was not by any means that, having written a story years previously, he had, in his new capacity as a reciter, merley to select two or three chapters from it, and read them off with an air of animation. Virtually, the fragmentary portions thus taken from his later works were re-written by him, with countless elisions and eliminations after having been selected. Reprinted in their new shape, each as "A Reading," they were then touched and retouched by their author, pen in hand, until, at the end of a long succession of revisions, the pages came to be cobwebbed over with a wonderfully intricate network of blots and lines in the way of correction or of obliteration.

Oh, to have seen him in action!

Reviewing and plots

In my re-reading of Our Mutual Friends over the past several days, I've been making extensive use of Philip Collins's collection of contemporaneous reviews of Dickens, Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage. Among the twenty-five pages of reviews of Our Mutual Friend--most of them mixed at best--is one from the Eclectical and Congregational Review of November 1865 that, in passing, addresses one of the great problems of fiction reviewing:

Needless work, we presume, it would be to attempt to tell the outline of Mr Dickens's story. Most of our readers have either read, or will read it; those who have not read will, perhaps, not thank us for attempting to tell it.

Now, a fiction reviewer these days certainly can't presume that all his readers will be familiar with the work in question, but even given that, I prefer that attention to plot be kept to a minimum--fiction reviewing is difficult precisely because it should be primarily evaluative or analytical, yet it seems that often the reverse holds true: we get a recap of the plot and, almost as if they're thrown in as a bonus, perhaps a few lines at the end rendering some quick judgment.

That said, I'm not sure I trust the judgment of the Eclectic and Congregational Review's critic, however, based on what comes next in this review:

Yet, perhaps, as a story, it is quite equal to any Mr Dickens has told; it is sustained throughout; there is nothing in the plot too strained or unnatural. Mr Dickens has not always been thought happy in this, for a writer with so much of nature; he has sometimes and often devised most unnatural positions and situations. . . . Yet there is less that offends in this way than in many other works of the writer, as even in Great Expectations, where the reader is startled by the half grotesque and half horrible episocidal thread of Miss Haversham [sic].

The "episodical" thread of Miss Havisham? Imagine pulling her thread from that book . . . what on earth would you be left with?

The reviewer is right that there is less here of the grotesque or fantastic than in other of Dickens's novels--no spontaneous combustion, for example--but there is strain, as the plot turns on some unlikely events and a number of the novel's least convincing characters.

More perceptive is the opening of the unsigned review, by E S. Dallas, that appeared in the Times on November 26, 1865:

Novels published in parts have the advantage and disadvantage that their fortunes are often made or marred by the first few numbers; and this last novel of Mr Charles Dickens, really one of his finest works, and one in which on occasion he even surpasses himself, labours under the disadvantage of a beginning that drags. Any one reading the earlier numbers of the new tale might see that the author meant to put forth all his strength and do his very best; and those who have an eye for literary workmanship could discover that never before had Mr Dickens's workmanship been so elaborate. On the whole, however, at that early stage the reader was more perplexed than pleased. There was an appearance of great effort without corresponding result. We were introduced to a set of people in whom it is impossible to tak e an interest, and were made familar with transactions that suggested horror. The great master of fiction exhibited all his skill, performed the most wonderful feats of language, loaded his page with wit and many a fine touch peculiar to himself .The agility of his pen was amazing, but still at first we were not much amused. We were more impressed with the exceeding cleverness of the author's manner that with the charm of his story; and when one thinks more of an artists' manner than of his matter woe to the artist.

The reviewer is responding in part, it seems, to a characteristic that I noted in my first post on the book several days ago: that the opening chapters feel remarkably de-centered, jumping from location to location and character to character with barely a hint of the thread that will ultimately connect them all. It's a daring decision--all the more so because Dickens isn't explicit about it, neither calling out the fact that he is doing anything unusual nor hinting at who among these characters may end up as his hero.

Dallas ends up approving of the book, and his review closes with fulsome praise for Dickens's characterization of one of his heroines, Bella Wilfer, "without exception the prettiest picture of the kind he has drawn--one of the prettiest pictures in prose fiction." Bella is more interesting, and more complicated, than the usual bland, flawless Dickens heroine, but she's far from the best thing in the book. Still, I suspect it's that passage that led Dickens, as Philip Collins tells us, to take the unprecedented step of sending the reviewer a copy of the manuscript of the book in thanks. Dickens's heroines, it always seems, are the closest to his heart--the more you read about his life, the more you become convinced that this is simply how he saw women, how he needed them to be, and that blindness deformed a number of relationships throughout his life. To have an outsider recognize his portrait as perfect would surely have pleased him beyond most other praise.

Dingy London

As a counterbalance to the recent string of long posts, a short one today, quoting Dickens on London, which, in Our Mutual Friend is presented with more dinginess and dirt than in any other of his novels:

It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy an dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-creatures that had no business abroad under the sun; while the sun itself, when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was great, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City--which call Saint Mary Axe, it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome of Saint Paul's seemed to die hard; but this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.

This one is, if anything, even more depressing:

A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sun dial on a church wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment for ever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porters sweep melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell. The set of humanity outward from the City is a set of prisoners departing from gaol and dismal Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as his own state dwelling On such evening when the city grit gets into the hair

We can only hope that London presents such a welcoming face when the Olympics crawls in to strangle it this summer!

Finds among the faults

For all the praise I've given Our Mutual Friend in the past week, there's no denying that some aspects of it are weak. While John Lucas in Charles Dickens: The Major Novels argues convincingly that the flatness of Dickens's caricature of social climbers in the novel is intentional--that "they are his marvellously intelligent and imaginative way of exploring the cost of class consciousness in a society which can conceive of itself no other way"--that's a second-order response, generated by multiple readings and long engagement with the book. Our first acquaintance with the interpolated set-pieces that introduce the mannered, empty voice of society is much more likely to fall in line with this anonymous writer from the Saturday Review of November 11, 1865:

In Our Mutual Friend . . . we find only caricatures, but they are caricatures without either of Mr DIckens's characteristic excellences. They are not very witty or humourous, and we are unable to recognise their truth and purpose. Nothing, for instance, can be more dismal in the way of parody or satire than the episode of the Veneerings and their friends. Where is either the humour or the truth of caricature? The execution is coarse and clumsy, and the whole picture is redolent of ill-temper and fractiousness. This spoils it. A good caricaturist enjoys his work, however angry he may be against the object of it. Mr Dickens, in this case, seems to screech with ill-will and bitterness.

Though it's hard to banish suspicions of political disagreements underlying that review, even as Dickens's analysis of the fundamental emptiness of much society rings true a century and a half later, so does the reviewer's analysis--there is none of the glee of invention here that animates Dickens's best grotesques and villains.

Even so, there are moments of genius, like the introduction of the ready man, Mr. Twemlow:

There was an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy castors and was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint James's, when not in use, to whom the Veneerings were a source of blind confusion. The name of this article was Twemlow. Being first cousin to Lord Snigsworth, he was in frequent requisition, and at many houses might be said to represent the dining-table in its normal state. Mr and Mrs Veneering, for example, arranging a dinner, habitually started with Twemlow, and then put leaves on him, or added guests to him. Sometimes, the table consisted of Twemlow and half a dozen leaves; sometimes, of Twemlow and a dozen leaves; sometimes, Twemlow was pulled out to his utmost extent of twenty leaves.

Another of my favorite parts comes amidst one of the novel's greatest failures, the conversion of Mr. Boffin, who has unexpectedly come into wealth, from a kindly man to a miser. Rather than having us gradually notice the change, Dickens simply has a character announce it--as if he himself has just thought of the possibility. But one of the ways that Boffin expresses his newfound miserliness is so amusing that it redeems the whole character arc: he starts obsessively buying and reading books about historical misers.

Morning after morning they roamed about the town together, pursuing their singular research. Miserly literature not being abundant, the proportion of failures to successes may have been as a hundred to one; still Mr Boffin, never wearied, remained as avaricious for misers as he had been at the first onset.

He hands a bundle of these volumes to one of his assistants, saying,

Don't drop that one under your arm. It's Dancer. Him and his sister made pies of a dead sheep they found when they were about a walking.

He even finds a whole book--a real one, which Dickens himself owned, called Lives and Anecdotes of Misers; or, the Passion of Avarice Displayed. His assistant, Silas, reads from the table of contents:

I should say they must be pretty well all here, sir; here's a large assortment, sir; my eye catches John Overs, sir, John Little, sir, Dick Jarrel, John Elwes, the Reverend Mr Jones of Blewbury, Vulture Hopkins, Daniel Dancer--"

"Give us Dancer, Wegg," said Mr Boffin.

With another stare at his comrade, Silas sought and found the place.

"Page a hundred and nine, Mr Boffin. Chapter eight. Contents of chapter, 'His birth and estate. his garments and outward appearance. Miss Dancer and her feminine graces. The miser's Mansion. The finding of a treasure. The story of thee mutton Pies. A miser's Idea of Death. Bob, the Miser's cur. Griffiths and his Master. How to turn a penny. A substitute for a Fire. The advantages of keeping a Snuff-box. The Miser dies without a Shirt. The treasure of a Dunghill.'"

Dancer, we learn, did without a fire by sitting on his dinner to warm it, only one of many manifestations of his madness.

This is one of the reasons Dickens has lasted: even when he's at his worst, even when there are large problems within a scene or a novel, there are guaranteed to be enough jewels--to take a metaphorical cue from the misers--hidden in there to make the reading worthwhile.

Who's the hero here?

The most arresting scene in Our Mutual Friend comes just after the 1/3 mark, when schoolmaster Bradley Headstone and his pupil, Charley Hexam, confront the idle, casually ironic young lawyer Eugene Wrayburn about the attention he's been paying Charley's sister, Lizzie.

I wrote on Friday about Wrayburn's detachment, which at times verges on accidie; it is, from what I remember, something new in Dickens--a dissatisfaction with the world that results neither in action to change society nor in amoral abuse of it. In this scene, however, we see more clearly both the class basis of Wrayburn's cool and the real risks it represents to his character and the lives of those around him. With his friend Mortimer Lightwood at his side, he faces his two angry visitors:

"In some respect, Mr Eugene Wrayburn," said Bradley, answering him with pale and quivering lips, "the natural feelings of my pupils are stronger than my teaching."

"In most respects, I dare say," replied Eugeene, enjoying his cigar, "thought whether high or low is of no importance. You have my name very correctly. Pray what is yours?"

"It cannot concern you much to know, but--"

"True," interposed Eugene, striking sharply and cutting him short at his mistake, "it does not concern me at all to know. I can say Schoolmaster, which is a most respectable title. You are right, Schoholmaster."

It was not the dullest part of this goad in its galling of Bradley Headstone, that he had made it himeslf in a moment of incautious anger. He tried to set his lips so as to prevent their quivering, but they quivered fast.

"Mr Eugene Wrayburn," said the boy, "I want a word with you. I have wanted it so much, that we have looked out your address in the book, and we have been to your office, and we have come from your office here."

"You have given yourself much trouble, Schoolmaster," observed Eugene, blowing the feathery ash from his cigar. "I hope it may prove remunerative."

"And I am glad to speak," pursued the boy, "in presence of Mr Lightwood, because it was through Mr Lightwood that you ever saw my sister."

For a mere moment, Wrayburn turned his eyes aside from the schoolmaster to note the effect of the last word on Mortimer, who, standing on the opposite side of the fire, as soon as the word was spoken, turned his face towards the fire and looked down into it.

"Simlarly, it was through Mr Lightwood that you ever saw her again, for you were with him on the night when my father was found, and so I found you with her on the next day. Since then, you have seen my sister often. You have seen my sister oftener and oftener. And I want to know why?"

"Was this worth while, Schoolmaster," murmured Eugene, with the air of a disinterested adviser. "So much trouble for nothing? You should know best, but I think not."

"I don't know, Mr Wrayburn," answered Bradley, with his passion rising, "why you address me--"

"Don't you?" said Eugene. "Then I won't."

He said it so tauntingly in his perfect placidity, that the respectable right-hand clutching the respectable hair-guard of the respectable watch could have wound it round his throat and strangled him with it. Not another word did Eugene deem it worth while to utter, but stood leaning his head upon his hand, smoking, and looking imperturbably at the chafing Bradley Headstone with his clutching right-hand, until Braldey was wellnigh mad.

When Charley has said his piece, throughout which Wrayburn affects complete boredom, Headstone sends him out and addresses Wrayburn himself:

"You think me of no more value than the dirt under your feet," said Bradley to Eugene, speaking in a carefully weighed and measured tone, or he could not have spoken at all.

"I assure you, Schoolmaster," replied Eugene, "I don't think about you."

"That's not true," returned the other; "you know better."

"That's coarse," Eugene retorted; "but you don't know better."

Leaving aside the equivocal position of Headstone, who is in love with the girl he's claiming to try to protect, and Charley Hexam, whose sole interest in his sister is that she not impede his class-climbing, the cruelty displayed by Wrayburn is breathtaking. I can't think of another scene in all of Dickens--except, perhaps, a few between Pip and Estella--that carries this kind of power. In Dickens: The Major Novels, John Lucas writes that

The sheer malignity of the gentleman's assumption of inherent superiority is never more convincingly demonstrated than in Dickens's handling of Eugene.

Moreover, Lucas finds in this scene a key to the low critical opinion of this novel:

Most of the critics, whether working within the academy or as men of letters, who claimed to find Dickens vulgar were from class circumstances close to Eugene's. Many of them, I can report from my own experience, behaved and sounded like Eugene. No wonder they didn't--and don't--like what Dickens shows them.

That's twisting the knife a bit.

What's more interesting about the scene is the difficulty we have, reading it, in finding a place for our sympathies. Wrayburn up to this point has been silly rather than cruel, disaffected rather than superior, but in this scene, confronted with hot emotion, he steps instantly in the shelter offered by his class privilege, and he uses the weapons he finds there without a hint of compunction. He is bloodless and cruel to an excruciating degree. Yet at the same time, his antagonists offer us little to like. Charley Hexam, it is clear, will sacrifice anything to his desire to escape his roots; though he tells his sister earlier, "I don't want, as I raise myself, to shake you off, Liz. I want to carry you up with me," neither we nor his sister believe him. Headstone, meanwhile, ought to have our sympathy: he is a self-made man up against a thoughtless child of privilege. There are hints of Dickens the poor boy shuddering at the memory of the blacking factory in the curses he spits at Wrayburn at the close of the scene:

I scorn your shifty evasions, and I scorn you. . . . In the meanness of your nature you revile me with the meanness of my birth. I hold you in contempt for it.

A reasonable reader, knowing nothing of the arc of the story to come, would likely come out of this scene feeling that Headstone, though defeated, had been in the right--and just might be beginning to emerge as the hero of this strangely uncentered novel. But even they, I think, would maintain some reservations, for there is that in Headstone's barely repressed passion that hints of unhealthiness.

This is the sort of complexity that makes Our Mutual Friend stand out in Dickens's corpus, and that makes up for the relatively static, even forced quality of some of its other scenes. In Dickens, surprise usually comes from plotting, disguise, or simple misapprehension--not from actual ambiguities of character--but in this scene he draws two fully realized characters who have multiple, widely differing paths to choose among.

All the sad young Victorian men

One of the ways in which Our Mutual Friend represents growth or innovation for Dickens is that for the first time--if my memories of the other novels, some of them admittedly fifteen years old now, are accurate--that he allows any character to exist in ironic relation to the world. Dickens of course deployed irony in his narrative voice regularly (and often heavy-handedly): it's the basic mode of his social satire. But in general Dickens's characters, the heroes aside, are either blandly good (nearly all the heroines and love interests), bad (Sikes, Squeers), damaged and callous (Estella, Mr. Dombey), or monomoniacally certain of the world and their place in it (a host of secondary characters, such as Sairey Gamp). They're all fundamentally earnest.

In Our Mutual Friend, however, we are introduced to two dissatisfied young lawyers, Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, who sound a note of ennui and detachment that is wholly new to Dickens--and that feels remarkably modern for 1865. Here's Lightwood telling Wrayburn about his Most Respected Father and his plans for his children:

"You know M. R. F., but not as well as I do. If you knew him as well as I do, he would amuse you."

"Filially spoken, Eugene!"

"Perfectly so, believe me; and with every sentiment of affectionate deference towards M. R. F. But if he amuses me, I can't help it. When my eldest brother was born, of course the rest of us knew (I mean the rest of us would have known, if we had been in existence) that he was heir to the Family Embarrassments--we call it before the company the Family Estate. But when my second brother was going to be born by-and-by, 'this,' says M. R. F., 'is a little pillar of the church.' Was born, and became a pillar of the church; a very shaky one. My third brother appeared, considerably in advance of his engagement to my mother; but M. R. F., not at all put out by surprise, instantly declared him a Circumnavigator. Was pitch-forked into the Navy, but has not circumnavigated. I announced myself, and was disposed of with the highly satisfactory results embodied before you. When my younger brother was half an hour old, it was settled by M. R. F. that he should have a mechanical genius. And so on. Therefore I say that M. R. F. amuses me."

More telling is this exchange between the two on that same night:

"The wind sounds up here," quoth Eugene, stirring the fire, "as if we were keeping a lighthouse. I wish we were."

"Don't you think it would bore us?" Lightwood asked.

"Not more than any other place. And there would be no Circuit to go. But that's a selfish consideration, personal to me."

"If we were on an isolated rock in a stormy sea," said Eugene, smoking with his eyes on the fire, "Lady Tippins couldn't put off to visit us, or, better still, might put off and get swamped. People couldn't ask one to wedding breakfasts. There would be no Precedents to hammer at, except the plain-sailing Precedent of keeping the light up. It would be exciting to look out for wrecks."

"But otherwise," suggested Lightwood, "there might be a degree of sameness in the life."

"I have thought of that also," said Eugene, as if he really had been considering the subject in its various bearings with an eye to the business, "but it would be a defined and limited monotony. It would not extend beyond two people. Now, it's a question with me, Mortimer, whether a monotony defined with that precision and limited to that extent, might not be more endurable than the unlimited monotony of one's fellow-creatures."

Where else in Dickens do we find thoughts and conversation let run in idle play like this? The novels are full of passing nonsense, but it tends to take the form of the verbal tics of secondary characters--and for those characters, those tics nearly always represent some deep-seated fixation or self-definition. Here, instead, we have two young men simply enjoying the play of words as a way to stave off larger questions about the world in which they must make their way. They are bored with the society in which they're expected to play a part, and feel detached from it--but it's a detachment born not from feeling superior to the world, like, for example, Steerforth's amorality, but from being disappointed in it. Lightwood and Wrayburn are the youthful embodiment of the bitter tone that runs through Our Mutual Friend, of Dickens's disappointment with the middle class's failure of promise, its grasping and grubbing and pretension. They're the coming generation having the good sense to look askance at what their parents have wrought.

Ironic detachment can curdle, or, through engagement, it can be cured. By introducing these characters, and giving them the freedom--a dangerous freedom for an author whose own narrative voice and point of view are so strong and so important to his books--to see the world and analyze their own relation to it, Dickens introduces the possibility of both choice and change, of characters who really might, by the end be something more than what they are when we first encounter them.

Our Mutual Friend

Since I first read it in 1996, Our Mutual Friend (1865) has been my favorite Dickens novel. Others, I'll acknowledge, are closer to perfection--on each re-reading, Great Expectations seems more impressive--but what I remember from my first encounter with Our Mutual Friend, which came at the end of a few months of intense reading of Dickens, is that it felt like a simultaneous broadening and deepening of Dickens's vision. The comedy was still there, and it still lay side-by-side with social critique, but a new note of seriousness of character and emotion also seemed to make itself heard. More impressive, the vast divide between primary and secondary characters that had characterized all of Dickens's work, which saw secondary characters reduced to caricature, change unavailable to them, was beginning to erode. At its best, Our Mutual Friend is a novel that makes you wish that Dickens had lived longer, had been healthier, had been able to follow it up with something more than that fragment of Drood. There was more to be found in Dickens's gift, it reveals, and the cruelty of that revelation is nigh infinite.

I'm now 200 pages into a re-read of Our Mutual Friend, the first time I've returned to it in any form other than recollection since that first encounter. And thus far I've been pleased to find my memories of its quality confirmed. If anything, I'm more impressed--I'm more attentive to the extravagant joys of Dickens's animistic vision of the world. Here, for example, is a description of a celebratory dinner that Dickens renders vital and absurd:

This was a neat and happy turn in the Wilfer household, where a monotonous appearance of Dutch-cheese at ten o'clock in the evening had been rather frequently commented on by the dimpled shoulders of Miss Bella. Indeed, the modest Dutchman himself seemed conscious of his want of variety, and generally came before the family in a state of apologetic perspiration. After some discussion on the relative merits of veal-cutlet, sweetbread, and lobster, a decision was pronounced in favour of veal-cutlet. Mrs Wilfer then solemnly divested herself of her handkerchief and gloves, as a preliminary sacrifice to preparing the frying-pan, and R. W. himself went out to purchase the viand. He soon returned breading the same in a fresh cabbage-leaf, where it coyly embraced a rasher of ham. Melodious sounds were not long in rising from the frying-pan on the fire, or in seeming, as the firelight danced in the mellow halls of a couple of full bottles on the table, to play appropriate dance-music.

Or take this account of a Thames-side pub:

The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned as a tavern of a dropsical appearance, had long settled down in to a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line, but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a batter-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped une upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed the whole house inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.

The joy of these descriptions comes from their complete dispensability: these are a throwaway passages, but Dickens invests them, and the inanimate objects they describe, with so much life that we can't help but smile. "Inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof"!

I'm not far enough into the novel this time to properly test my memory of the blurring of primary and secondary characters, but the opening, which with each new chapter introduces a new group of characters in a new location, with very little in the way of overtly explained connections among them, makes me think it's accurate. Franco Moretti, in Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900 (1998), a book I've consulted regularly for years now, draws fascinating maps of the locations of the first eight installments--approximately 200 pages--of Our Mutual Friend. Pointing to the maps, Moretti writes,

Look at the rhythm of this narrative pattern: with every new installment, always one or two new spaces; and then, unlike Lost Illusions, a plot that doesn't move in an orderly way from one space to the next, but jumps--and then jumps again: from the Thames to the West End, to Limehouse, to Holloway, to Wegg's lonely street corner . . . Fantastic idea: the city--the generalized spatial proximity unique to the city--as a genuine enigma: a "mosaic of worlds," yes, but whose tiles have been randomly scattered.

In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens brought to new heights his intuitive understanding of the city as a place of unexpected connections--and in doing so he changed the topography of his novelistic imagination as well, shaking up our (and his) casual separation of his characters into foreground and background, heroes and comic relief. It's an impressive growth in both sensibility and capability, and if memory serves, it's enough to make up for--and even to some extent to justify--the book's relatively creaky plot.

There's plenty more to write and think about Our Mutual Friend--such as the fact that it was poorly received by critics at the time, including Henry James, who, in an utterly fascinating review for the Nation called it "poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion"--and I expect that's where this blog will spend the next several days. I'm on page 225--catch up and join me!