Environment and Destiny in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend
'What's let loose upon us? Who loosed it?'
The Relationship Between Environment and Destiny in Our Mutual Friend (1865)
When Humphry House suggested that
he could describe the entire world of Charles Dickens’ novels without once
mentioning nature,[1] he
summarised the opinion of generations of critics; that nature, if it exists at
all in his novels, ‘is never unconnected from man.’[2]
Dickens was interested in the inextricability between humans and their
environments, once writing ‘people like the houses they inhabit’ in his working
notes for Little Dorrit,[3]
and this relationship is brought to the forefront in his final novel, with a
river that dominates the narrative, shadows that consume and fire that knows
the future. The natural elements in Our Mutual Friend continually extrude
beyond their bounds, exerting an influence over characters’ destinies.
The
world of Our Mutual Friend is obsessed with fate, with characters that
practice fire-gazing and repeatedly reference tarot cards in conversation.[4]
Critics have often remarked on the sense of predestination in narrative itself,
due to its frequent reliance on coincidence;[5]
to take one example, the dying Betty Higden is found by chance by another
central character, Lizzie Hexam, forty miles outside London (p. 572). However speaking
on coincidences such as these, Dorothy Van Ghent writes that ‘there is no discontinuity
in the Dickens’ world,’ even between characters and their environments, meaning
there can be no real coincidences.[6]
‘The atoms of the physical world have been
impregnated with moral aptitude, so that it is not inconsistent that
at the crisis of a plot, a giant beam should loosen itself and fall on the head
of the villain.’[7] Read
in this way, every particle of Dickens’ world has the potential for narrative
importance, and may be mobilized to further his plot. When considered alongside
an environment that ‘constantly
exceeds its material limitations,’[8] Ghent’s concept of ‘moral atoms’ provides a useful
framework in which to consider the natural elements in the novel as guiding
forces of the narrative.
Though first defined
40 years after the novel’s publication, John Ruskin’s notion of pathetic
fallacy is clearly anticipated in Our Mutual Friend, where ‘all violent
feelings’ certainly do ‘produce in [the characters] a falseness in all [their]
impressions of external things.’[9]
When falling in love, for example, characters see the Thames as a ‘great serene mirror’ selectively reflecting
only ‘peaceful, pastoral and blooming’ images (p. 583). By
understanding Dickens’ environment as a reflection of his characters, critics
such as Arom Fleishman have categorised the central figure of the river Thames as
a ‘represent[ation] of the natural shape of human destiny,’ moving from
innocence to pollution, as it flows from source to city.[10]
As this essay will demonstrate however, the river does not only passively
reflect the characters on its banks, but actively contributes to the shaping of
their narrative arcs.
The Thames is perhaps
the clearest example of a natural force which ‘exceeds its material limitations,’
a figure so central to the plot that in 2009 Jeremy Tambling named it the
titular ‘mutual friend.’[11]
Four characters are drowned in its waters (George Radfoot, Gaffer Hexam, Rogue Riderhood
and Bradley Headstone), with three others resisting the call to join them (John
Harmon, Betty Higden and Eugene Wrayburn). These drownings chart the moral
pollution of the river, as with every ‘unclean’ death, the eyes of the drowned
glare out from the river with greater and greater ferocity. When George
Radfoot’s body is first hauled into Gaffer’s boat, Lizzie remarks that the
‘ripples passing over [the Thames] were dreadfully like faint changes of
expression on a sightless face,’ suggesting a residual presence of death in the
water even after the removal of the corpse (p. 6), and when Bradley Headstone
rows upstream intending to murder Eugene Wrayburn, the setting sun causes him
to see figures of death in the barge posts with the river ‘red like guilty
blood’ (p. 707). After Headstone’s attempt on Eugene’s life, death becomes
inextricable from nature as a whole, with Dickens remarking that ‘the earth […]
might have been likened to the stare of the dead’ (p. 783). Each drowning
further imbues the natural world with the threatening presence of death, forging
the Thames as ‘a modern Styx, coursing through a city of the dead,’ in Michelle
Allen’s words.[12] This
moral defilement of the waters is perhaps a reflection of the urban pollution
Dickens observed, as Andrew
Sanders writes: ‘the London that the young Charles Dickens first got to know in
the 1820s was overcrowded, unhygienic and generally ill governed. […] Its
buildings were blackened and its atmosphere was dank and polluted with the
smoke of hundreds of thousands of domestic coal fires.’[13]
This provides a stark contrast to the rural Thames upstream which yields a
balanced ‘growth of weeds and flowers,’ and so harbours the good in harmony
with the bad (p. 838). London’s pollution has corrupted the river, and so she
exacts her revenge, resulting in an environment which, in Robert Patten’s view
‘carries within her not seeds of regeneration but of destruction.’[14]
This notion of regeneration corrupted clarifies the murderous actions of the
Thames in Our Mutual Friend: London has polluted the ‘moral atoms’ of
the river to create a malignant force.
If, as Fleishman states, the river’s ‘social
functions [are] production and excretion,’[15]
then we may still observe some regenerative effect of the Thames in the novel,
even within the polluted environment. Dickens’ ‘waterside characters’ are
sustained by the materials it produces, though in a way that drastically
differs to that of Henley, where the river sustainably powers the village’s
paper mill.[16]
The Hexam family survives by trawling the river’s surface for bodies and lost
possessions, relying on it entirely: ‘the fire that warmed you [Lizzie] when
you were a baby […] the very basket that you slept in’ were all made from wood
found in the river (p.4). Gaffer engages in a kind of trade with the Thames, as
the water appears to take its cut in the business when he blames ‘the wash of
the tide’ for bodies found with their ‘pockets empty and turned inside out’ (p.
24). This suggests that his agreement with the water is transactional, a
reflection of the business-minded city on its banks. Just as the river becomes
imbued with death through these dark dealings, it begins to demand greater
reparations from those who pollute it, reaching out to claim those who survive
on its waters. Gaffer is first described wearing ‘dress [which] seemed to be
made out of the mud that begrimed his boat’, suggesting that the water is
already a part of him (p. 2), and is later fully claimed by the river when he
is drowned by accident during a storm (p. 194). Before his search party find
him, the narrator remarks that the city’s buildings look like people ‘cowering’
and like ‘graves’; the man-made environment appears to be mourning a death
caused by wild, natural elements (p. 190). Therefore, by reflecting the morally
questionable human practises on its banks, Dickens constructs the polluted
Thames as an active agent in Gaffer’s death.
If the urban Thames is a malignant force due
to the city’s pollution, it's reasonable to expect the opposite occurring in
rural areas upstream. Henley’s Thames is also shown to draw characters into its
depths, however unlike in London, it does so at a natural point. Betty
Higden, for example, walks along the banks of the unpolluted Thames at the end
of her life, and ‘hear[s] the tender river whispering to many like herself,
‘come to me, come to me!’’ but resists this call (p. 564). In Henley, the Thames
is ‘dimpled like a young child, playfully gliding away among the trees,
unpolluted by the defilements that lie in wait on its course.’ Dickens frames
the river as morally innocent as well as physically pure when untouched by the
city’s pollutions. As such, its sustaining relationship with the community is
balanced; it is the force which turns the paper mill, supporting their economy.
When Bradley Headstone approaches intending to kill Eugene, the water appears
to warn him, as ‘the rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir
in his uneasy reflections’ (p. 778). Afterward, Lizzie reenacts the start of
the novel as she drags Eugene’s body into her boat from the Thames, inspired by
‘her old bold life and habit,’ transforming the previous immoral act into moral
one (p. 779). The intended murder does not occur in these pure waters, as it is
Eugene’s destiny to marry Lizzie, and so he is not drowned. Returning to
Dickens’ metaphor of the positively selective mirror, not only does the river
reflect the natural order of the rural community on its banks, but it translates
this into moral actions. As Allen writes, moving to Henley, ‘Dickens purifies
his heroine [Lizzie] of any potential or suspected taint.’[17]
The environment here intervenes to put the characters on a moral course,
purifying their actions the further they move upstream.
Whilst we have observed
the physical agency of the novel’s environment through the varied examples of
drowning and saving, it is equally important to note its potential to further
Dickens’ narrative mentally, through characters’ thoughts. His environmental
forces appear not only to have been ‘impregnated with a moral aptitude,’ in
Ghent’s words, but also a foreknowledge of the plot, as demonstrated through
the female characters’ relationships to the elements. For Sean O’Toole,
Dickens’ environment is ‘a psychic as much as a physical space,’ and this is particularly
pertinent when examined against Bella Wilfer’s story.[18]
Her section of the Thames is less polluted by poverty than that of Dickens’
‘waterside characters’ as she visits wealthy areas such as Greenwich, where
‘looking at the ships and steamboats’ she is drawn into daydreams. In one
vision of the future, ‘John Harmon’s disastrous fate’ has been proven untrue,
and he ‘had come home and found [Bella] just the article for him’ (p. 355).
This unlikely fantasy is in fact the very future which awaits Bella, implying that
by gazing into the Thames she has been able to access some prophetic knowledge
of her destiny. She consistently describes her future in maritime metaphors,
announcing her pregnancy as ‘a ship upon the ocean bringing to you and me a
little baby,’ (p. 767), and associating water with divination when she tells
her father of an encounter with a fortune teller: ‘the Knave of Wilfers,’ (a
representation of him) ‘is to look forward to [her marriage] also, by saying to
himself ‘I see land at last!’’ (p. 687). For the Wilfers, water is a psychic
space from which ‘thoughts are stirred into consciousness,’[19]
much in the same way that Dickens himself gleaned inspiration from gazing into
rivers, once writing that ‘running water is favourable to day-dreams.’[20]
Water sustains the Wilfers’ narrative, not through any physical action, but by
providing a hopeful, prophetic understanding of their destinies.
An elemental force running parallel to water
in the novel is fire, a motif which wields similarly prophetic potential in the
narrative. Whilst Bella imagines hopeful futures through water, Lizzie Hexam
practises fire-gazing to divine her destiny. Unlike water which can be
physically polluted by its environment, fire remains pure in all of Dickens’
locations, and so represents uncorrupted destiny in the novel. When Riderhood
is saved from drowning in the river, his resuscitation is described as if the
doctor is lighting a fire: ‘the spark may smoulder and go out, or it may glow
and expand’ (p. 496). Fire, as the antithesis of water, intervenes to save life
when the polluted environment would take it away. The element’s ‘moral atoms’
know the shape of Dickens’ story, forming scenes of the future in the Hexam’s
hearth as Lizzie says ‘when I look at [the fire] of an evening, it comes like
pictures to me’ (p. 31). She predicts that Charley will ‘cut [his] way from
father’s life, and have made a new and good beginning,’ while she will be ‘left
alone with father’ (p. 33). These both are true. Later she also practises
pyromancy for Bella, saying that she ‘will go through fire and water for
[Harmon]’ which Bella later confirms, though she fondly remembers that Lizzie
‘pretended to read the live coals’ (p. 764). Regardless of whether Lizzie’s
pyromancy is authentic, the women of the story continually form accurate
insights into the future whilst engaging with the elements. Many of Dickens’
key plot points are resolved through female intuition, described with the
language of fire. When asked how she knew Mr Riah was a ‘mask’ for Mr Fledgeby,
Mrs Lammle says ‘I scarcely know how I know it. The whole train of
circumstances seemed to take fire at once, and show it to me’ (p. 693). Likewise,
Mrs Boffin recalls that when realising Rokesmith’s hidden identity, ‘every
grain of the gunpowder that had been lying sprinkled thick about him […] took
fire!’ (p. 858). While the men of the novel (such as Lightwood, Wrayburn and Mr
Inspector) attempt, often unsuccessfully, to logically unravel the dense plot,
Dickens’ women repeatedly demonstrate a subconscious connection to the element
of fire which offers them insight into the absolute truth of the narrative.
Ultimately, the power
of Our Mutual Friend’s environment over its characters’ destinies is clearest
in the case of Bradley Headstone, whose fate is sealed by a combination of, fire,
water and shadow. When devising the novel, Dickens paid careful attention to
characters’ names, with these constituting the main body of his working notes.[21]
His decision to name his schoolmaster ‘Headstone’ (initially the even
less-subtle ‘Bradley Deadstone’) clearly marks the character as fated, as the
end of his life is an essential part of his identity.[22]
Headstone foretells the conflict he will have with the elements, exclaiming to
Lizzie that she has cast him to ‘the bottom of this raging sea’ in rejecting
his advances: ‘you could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water […] you
could draw me to death’ (p. 443). When attempting to murder Eugene, a character
protected by nature, Headstone is described as already ‘like a ghost’ (p. 711),
and when Riderhood speaks of drowning, Headstone ‘look[s] down into the water’
with a ‘gloomy fascination’, as if he might ‘throw himself in.’ (p. 709).
Dickens’ reader knows instinctually that the character will die, given his name
and actions, and that the cause will likely be drowning. His destiny to become
a literal gravestone is enacted when Riderhood falls backward into the lock
with ‘Bradley Headstone upon him’ (p. 895). But the role of the environment in
this inescapable end is perhaps the most interesting part. Shadows, which
Fleishman describe as an aid to secrecy for the villainous characters in
Dickens’ Little Dorrit, are given greater agency in Our Mutual
Friend.[23]
Characters’ ‘shadows of avarice and distrust lengthen as [their] own shadows
lengthen’ (p. 654), and darkness takes a particularly active role in
Headstone’s demise. As his dealings get more sinister, Dickens gradually
dismembers Headstone with shadows, making him a ‘haggard head suspended in the
air’ when wearing black clothing (p. 610). As he approaches his death,
Riderhood watches him during a storm, lit occasionally by ‘forked lightning […]
sometimes he saw the man upon the bed […] sometimes he saw nothing of him’ (p.
713). Dickens slowly erases Headstone, emphasising the power of nature over him
in this storm where ‘palpitating white fire’ combines with ‘the river, rising’
and ‘wind, bursting upon the door.’ Nature here sends ‘invisible messengers […]
to carry him away.’ He dies twice in one chapter, once literally drowned and
once figuratively cremated when he sits ‘rigid before the fire, as if it were a
charmed flame that was turning him old,’ his face ‘turning whiter as if it were
being overspread with ashes, and the very colour and texture of his hair
degenerating’ (p. 893). The character arc of Bradley Headstone is determined by
the elements, Dickens’ own ‘invisible messengers’, sent to pull him towards his
destiny, demonstrating the unequivocal power of nature to intervene. Whether in
the river, fireplaces or shadowy streets, every atom of Our Mutual Friend’s
London is charged with a knowledge of the future, allowing Dickens’ environment
to consistently act as a tool for the author to enforce his characters’
destinies.
References
[1] Robert L. Patten, ‘A Surprising
Transformation: Dickens and the Heath’, in Nature and the Victorian
Imagination (California: University of California, 1977), pp. 153-170 (p.
153).
[2] Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to
Lawrence (London: Hogarth Press, 1987), p. 40.
[3] F.S. Schwarzbach, ‘Little Dorrit:
People like houses’, in Dickens and the City (London: Athlone Press,
1979), p. 155.
[4] Charles Dickens, Our Mutual
Friend (London: Thomas Nelson, 1908), p. 687. All further references are to
this edition.
[5] Neil Forsyth, ‘Wonderful Chains:
Dickens and Coincidence’, Modern Philology, 83.2 (1985), 151-165 (p.
151).
[6] Dorothy Van Ghent,
‘The Dickens World: A View from the Todgers’s’, in The Dickens Critics, ed.
by George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane (New York: Cornell University, 1961), pp.
213-32 (p. 221).
[7] Ghent, p. 223.
[8] Ghent, p. 218.
[9] John Ruskin, ‘Of
the Pathetic Fallacy’ in The Works of John Ruskin (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), pp. 201-220 (p. 205).
[10] Arom Fleishman, ‘The City and the
River: Dickens’ symbolic landscape’, in Studies in the Later Dickens,
ed. by Jean-Claude Amalric (Montpellier: Universite Paul Valery, 1973), pp.
111-26 (p. 122).
[11] Jeremy Tambling, Going Astray:
Dickens and London (Edinburgh: Pearson, 2009), p. 246.
[12] Michelle Allen, ‘A
More Expansive Reach: The Geography of the Thames in Our Mutual Friend’, in
Cleansing the City: Sanitary Geographies in Victorian London (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2008), pp. 86-114 (p. 98)
[13] Andrew Sanders, Charles
Dickens’s London (London: Robert Hale, 2010), pp. 51-2.
[14] Patten, pp. 167-8.
[15] Fleishman, p. 118.
[16] Allen, p. 105.
[17] Allen, p. 110.
[18] Sean O’Toole, Habit
in the English Novel, 1850-1900 (Hampshire: Macmillan, 2013), p. 56.
[19] Tambling, p. 249.
[20] Barbara Hardy, Dickens
and Creativity (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 29.
[21] Ernest Boll, ‘The
Plotting of Our Mutual Friend’, Modern Philology, 42.2 (1944), 96-122
(p. 102).
[22] Boll, p. 107.
[23] Fleishman, p.
116.
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