Book Review: Charles Dickens 17 - "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"

Charles Dickens in 1869

There was a four-year gap between the conclusion of Our Mutual Friend (August 1865) – Charles Dickens’s final completed novel – and the time when he began contemplating a new novel in the summer of 1869. He no longer relied on his novels as a primary source of income: he was still editing his weekly magazine All the Year Round; he was collecting royalties from editions of his previous books; and he was earning substantial revenues doing public readings from his vast repertoire of fiction – novels and short stories. These performances had begun as one-off events, or limited runs, done to raise funds for Dickens’s favourite charities. But eventually he realised that they had the potential to become his main source of income. From here on in, Dickens devoted most of his professional time and effort to public readings. The effects were wonderful for his bank account, but disastrous to his health.

In January, 1866, Dickens decided to undertake a public reading tour of England and Scotland. His friends advised him against it. He wasn’t in good physical condition: he had suffered a mild stroke back in September; and he had a chronic problem with vascular degeneration which led to gout in his left foot. He had always been a keen walker – hiking, on average, about twelve miles a day when he was fit. He still continued to take long walks when he could manage it, but as his physical condition deteriorated, these excursions became impossible. He took to using a walking stick. And in the last couple of years of his life, he was often stuck indoors because of the pain of his swollen left-foot, and he needed physical support getting around. But he pushed himself to do this tour: he needed to work; he wanted the money; and he basked in the adulation of his audiences.

The tour began in late March, 1866 and ran into late June. His contract with Chappell and Company – whom he hired to handle all of the arrangements – specified a run of 30 public readings, for which he would be paid £1,500, plus extra to cover his personal and travelling expenses. This was Dickens’s first extended tour for four years. He was a meticulous man – so he prepared himself thoroughly. He had decided to add a new reading to his repertoire – the Christmas story about Cheap Jack that he had written the previous year. Once he’d prepared a reading script of the story, he rehearsed it to himself about 200 times! And then he did a private performance in front of friends – timing it to the second.

Dickens doing a public reading in the U.S. in 1868 - an engraving from a sketch by Charles Barry 

Every aspect of the performances was planned with care. In his biography, Peter Ackroyd describes a typical stop on the tour. When Dickens first arrived in the city or town, he would immediately visit the venue, in order to do a ‘sound check’ and “take his bearings”: to check out the acoustics, and to monitor the seating arrangements. Occasionally – if he was not satisfied – he would insist on moving to another hall. They would set up a large, maroon screen on the stage behind him – seven feet high and fifteen feet wide. It served not only as a dramatic backdrop, but also as a device to project his voice more effectively out into the audience. His reading desk was set stage centre on a maroon carpet. At the front of the stage, on either side of Dickens, they set up gas-fired lamps that were fed by pipes. The lamps illuminated the prompt-copies for that day’s readings, and helped to set him up in a more dramatic fashion.

Dickens always wore evening clothes for his public readings. He would place a flower – usually a rose, or a geranium – in his buttonhole. And he would have his gold watch-chain hanging across the front of his waistcoat. The performances usually ran for two hours. The first reading – invariably a dramatic one – would go for ninety minutes. After a brief interval, Dickens would be back to do a second reading for about half an hour – usually a comic piece.

Charles Dickens photographed in 1869

Dickens’s reading style, Peter Ackroyd points out, was affected by his acting technique. On stage, when he had been involved in amateur theatricals, he had always approached his roles seriously – he was never a ‘ham’. Despite his familiarity with the melodramatic style of his period, Dickens adopted a restrained manner – avoiding grand gestures, and building a character on the accumulation of small, incisive details. When he did his readings, he would use a sober approach – controlling carefully every rehearsed look and accent, in order to build up to the effect he was after. For these performances, Dickens was a reader, not an actor – he eschewed melodramatic mannerisms, and aimed for a realistic style that avoided cheap affectations.

This tour had a noticeable effect on Dickens’s health, but he persisted; and – even before the run was over – he opened negotiations with Chappell and Company to do another tour the following winter. They were happy to oblige. The gross receipts for the tour just completed was some £5,000 – they had paid Dickens £1,500, plus expenses. The winter tour was even more ambitious – a total of 42 nights. Dickens would get £60 per night (an increase of 20%), plus the usual extra for his personal expenses. It ran from January to May, 1867.

1866 editions

In the summer of 1866, Dickens was busy again with literary matters. He was involved with the publication of a brand-new set of his novels – the Charles Dickens Edition. Once a month, one of his novels would be released in a single volume, priced at 3/6. The novels would be freshly set. Dickens would write a Preface for each. And – surely there were assistants for this task? – there would be a descriptive headline at the top of each right-hand page, itemising what was happening on those two pages of the novel. [This device is featured in the Everyman Editions of the novels which I have used throughout this series of blog posts.] This Charles Dickens Edition of 1866 was the most popular release of his books during his lifetime – actually it’s the first complete edition of his novels (except for the incomplete Edwin Drood, still yet to be written).

Despite the increasing damage to his health from the reading tour running from January to May of 1867, Dickens decided – again before the current one was complete – to undertake a gruelling tour of public readings in the United States. It was now 25 years since his first visit, and he had been receiving constant invitations to go over there for a tour. He did it for the money – he believed he could make a “fortune”. He was now supporting three main establishments: the family home at Gad’s Hill in Kent; the London home of his wife, Catherine, from whom he was separated; and the home he had recently set up on Linden Grove in Peckham for his lover, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. On top of that was the office space on Wellington Street in London he rented for his magazine and the temporary lodgings he often rented in the capital, in order to receive family and friends. And then there was the extended financial support or one-time gifts he provided to various family members and friends who were having money problems.

His closest friend and confidant, John Forster, had always advised Dickens against doing these public reading tours. He thought they were bad for his art – because they distracted him from his fiction and focused his effort primarily on pleasing his public – and damaging to his health. Dickens always ignored his friend’s protestations.

Photo by J. Gurney in New York (1867)

Dickens left for the U.S. on November 9, 1867. His first reading was in Boston on 2 December. He toured primarily around the north-east. In addition to his chronic health conditions, Dickens suffered through the entire trip with various colds. Regardless of how run down he was physically, he always rallied once he hit the stage. And the adrenalin seemed to revive him after each performance. But this was getting harder to do. He was constantly exhausted and depressed. Before going over to North America, Dickens had attempted to arrange things discreetly so that Ellen Ternan could accompany him. All his efforts came to nothing, however; he was terribly lonely without her. Things were so bad, Dickens decided to cut short his tour by a month; he cancelled visits to Chicago, the west coast, and Canada. Unbelievably, in the midst of all this physical and mental strain in the United States, Dickens negotiated with Chappell and Company to do yet another series of public readings in Britain – a “farewell tour”. Chappell suggested an incredible run of 75 performances. Dickens’s response? Let’s do 100. They agreed to pay him £8,000.

For this final series of public readings Dickens wanted to do something special. He decided to revive the excerpt from Oliver Twist that he had prepared some five years previously – the brutal murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes. He had abandoned the piece back then – thinking it was just too intense, too horrific, for a general audience. But now he was looking for something really dramatic – something sensational. The tour began on 6 October, 1868, but Dickens didn’t debut the “Sikes and Nancy” reading until 5 January, 1869 at St. James Hall. He put everything he had into the performance, and at its conclusion he was “utterly prostrate”. Almost as soon as this tour had begun, Dickens began to suffer a litany of problems – mental and physical. He continued to experience his chronic health problems. On top of that were mental distress, depression, and sleeplessness. And yet he continued to put himself through the emotional and physical exhaustion he suffered after each and every performance of “Sikes and Nancy”. His son, Charley, thought that it was the endlessly repeated murder from Oliver Twist that finally killed him. Others might not have accepted that it was that particular reading, but they agreed that the physical debilitation he experienced from this long series of tours must have accelerated his demise. Eventually, his doctors ordered him to cut short this tour.

Rosa Bud sings; John Jasper plays - illustration from the original issue by Samuel Luke Fildes

Dickens made a retreat back to Gad’s Hill Place and took it easy – at least for a while! The revival of his health and spirit prompted him to plan a new novel in the summer of 1869. He just could not stop working for long. The first idea he had come up with was that of a betrothed couple who do not marry until the very end of the book. Then he had something much better. He mentioned to his friend John Forster this “very curious and new” idea – the murder of a young man by his uncle, which is not revealed until the murderer reflects on his crime in his prison cell. He also planned to use opium as an exotic and intriguing element in the story – its consciousness-altering effects would be used as the agent of revelation. Dickens had recently visited an opium den in London – Bluegate Fields in the Limehouse area – with his visiting American publisher James Fields.

Once Dickens had a basic plot in mind, he approached his publishers, Chapman and Hall, in order to negotiate a contract. He proposed writing twelve monthly parts, instead of the traditional twenty. He knew now that much of his energy was gone, and that a sustained year-and-a-half campaign of writing was probably beyond him. He also advised Chapman and Hall to include a clause in the contract outlining how the publishers would recoup some of their outlay, if the author was unable to finish the novel because of death or incapacity. In return for the copyright, Dickens was to receive £7,500 and a half-share of the book’s profits. Dickens began work on the novel in the early autumn of 1869. He worked in two main locations: the Swiss chalet set up in his garden at Gad’s Hill Place; or the villa he had set up for the Ternans at Peckham in south-east London.

Cover wrapper

The first monthly issue of The Mystery of Edwin Drood was published by Chapman and Hall at the beginning of April, 1870. It sold about 50,000 copies. Each instalment would cost one shilling. The original plan would have seen the twelfth and final issue released in March 1871. As it turned out, only half the book was completed – the final section (Chapters 21-23) was issued posthumously in September, 1870 – three months after the author’s death. Dickens had originally planned to have his son-in-law Charles Collins – married to his daughter Kate – do the illustrations. It was probably an act of kindness that prompted this decision. Collins was certainly an excellent artist, but he was seriously ill (dying of cancer, it turned out). Dickens was happy to see him given a serious project to occupy his time and a source of income. But, after the cover of the new novel was complete, it became evident that Collins was unable to continue. The young artist Samuel Luke Fildes was hired – much to his delight, because this commission established his reputation.

Charles Dickens set his final novel in London and Cloisterham. Cloisterham was based on Rochester – the town in Kent that he grew up in. So in his swan song, Dickens’s story is set in the two places that influenced him the most, the two places that fuelled his creativity. To the landscape of his childhood he brings themes of secrecy and self-division. The last few novels of his career were dominated by the themes of the secret life, of twin identities, of self-division.

The manic John Jasper collapses  - illustration from the original issue by Samuel Luke Fildes

The Mystery of Edwin Drood has been called one of the first detective stories, despite the fact that by the point in the plot where the book ends unfinished, a detective has still not shown up – although the strange character of Mr. Dick Datchery seems to be developing into an investigative figure. He arrives in town out of the blue and shows a particular interest in the characters of our story. The real mystery here is not plot-based, focused on crime and detection; it is the mystery of the secret life of John Jasper, the choirmaster at Cloisterham Cathedral and Edwin Drood’s uncle. As Dickens’s daughter Kate put it, “it is the wonderful observation of character, and his strange insight into the tragic secrets of the human heart.” The gripping portrayal of Jasper – a murderer, perhaps, an opium addict, a thwarted lover – can be seen as a self-revelation of Dickens’s own secret heart: “troubled, with some strong sort of ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction … “

And yet the mystery of Edwin Drood’s fate – clearly telegraphed through several important clues in the book, and revealed directly by Dickens to his close friend John Forster, his illustrator, Luke Fildes, and his son Charley – continued to fascinate readers long after the author’s death. There have been a number of attempts to finish Dickens’s story in print. The first three tries were by Americans: Robert Newell (1870), Henry Morford (1871-1872), and Thomas James (1873). A more recent example has been the book by Leon Garfield (1980). In January 1914, John Jasper – the apparent murderer in Dickens’s book – “stood trial” for the murder of Edwin Drood in London. The “trial” was organised by the Dickens Fellowship. G. K. Chesterton, famed English writer and Dickens enthusiast, served as the judge. George Bernard Shaw was the foreman of the jury, which was made up of other well-known authors. The event was a light-hearted proceeding – Shaw was particularly entertaining, making lots of witty wisecracks. The jury returned a verdict of manslaughter. And Chesterton, “the judge”, ruled that the mystery was insoluble, and then fined everyone present for contempt of court!

'Princess Puffer' and John Jasper in the opium den - illustration from the original  by S. Luke Fildes

The style of narration in The Mystery of Edwin Drood is more direct and restrained than some of Dickens’s more complex and poetic final novels. It is an easier and simpler read. The chapters focused on the brooding and troubled John Jasper are gripping. But I found the sections dealing with the relationship between Edwin Drood and Rosa Bud quite uninteresting. Likewise the parts dealing with the conflict between Drood and Neville Landless. Reviewers of the book in Dickens’s time seemed to ignore the aspects of the book that were interesting and unique – the exotic theme of opium addiction, for example – and focused on familiar things, like the humour seen in the characters of Durdles, Sapsea, and the Deputy.

While he was writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens suddenly decided to bring some closure to his previous “farewell” tour of public readings – which had been interrupted by his ill-health – by doing a final run of twelve performances. He spread them out so that he would do about two per week. This was new for him – he had never done a series of public readings at the same time as he was working on a novel. He managed to finish this run, but at significant cost to his physical strength. The very last performance in this final series took place on 15 March, 1869 at St. James’s Hall. He did – what else – “A Christmas Carol” and “The Trial from Pickwick”. At the conclusion of the readings he gave a brief farewell speech: “From these garish lights,” he said, “I vanish now for ever more, with a heartfelt, grateful, respectful, and affectionate farewell.” There was a storm of applause and cheering. Dickens’s head was bowed, and there were tears streaming down his cheeks as he left the stage. The thunderous applause would not end. Dickens came back to greet his audience. He raised his hands to his lips in a kiss and then, for the very last time, he was gone.

And then he made what turned out to be his final public speech at the annual dinner of the Royal Academy. “I already begin to feel like the Spanish monk,” he said, “of whom Wilkie [Collins] tells, who had grown to believe that the only realities around him were the pictures which he loved [cheers], and that all the moving life he saw, or ever had seen, was a shadow and a dream [more cheers]."



Manuscript - the last page of the last novel

During the last few days of May, Dickens was working on the sixth instalment of The Mystery of Edwin Drood back at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent. He was in such pain now, with his swollen foot, that he had to take large amounts of laudanum in order to get to sleep. But he still persevered, as ever, with his book. On the morning of 8 June, 1870, he hobbled out from the house, took the tunnel under the main road, and got to work in the study of his Swiss chalet. He was working towards the conclusion of Chapter 23, called “The Dawn Again”. Unusually for him, he came back to work there again in the afternoon. He wrote the final words – “and then falls to with an appetite” – and then broke off for the day, and made his way back to the house an hour before dinner. He spoke briefly to his sister-in-law Georgina, went suddenly pale, and then experienced a fit, and fell to the floor. He never regained consciousness – dying twenty-four hours later on 9 June 1870.


 

"The Empty Chair" - a tribute to Dickens [showing his desk and chair at Gad's Hill Place]
 by Samuel Luke Fildes, the illustrator of Edwin Drood [oil on canvas]

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester).

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Dickens was to start again, read through all of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. So this is the seventeenth, and last, of a series.]

[Resources used: "Introduction" to The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Peter Ackroyd (2004); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990)

Book Review: Charles Dickens 16 - "A Christmas Carol"

I didn’t plan to include A Christmas Carol in this series of blog posts about the novels of Charles Dickens. But, then again, I did include Sketches by Boz at the beginning of this series – and that, too, is not one of his novels, it’s a collection of sketches and tales originally written for newspapers and magazines. So, as a special way to mark this Christmas Day of 2012, here’s a review of one of Dickens’s most popular works. Merry Christmas!



 

Charles Dickens first conceived of the story that became A Christmas Carol on a short trip to Manchester in 1843. He was there to give a benefit speech at the Manchester Athenaeum – an educational enterprise. His speech helped raise funds used for the education and recreation of labourers in that city.

Dickens was motivated partly by a need to earn more money. His expenses were growing, and he owed money to his publishers Chapman and Hall. He came up with the notion of writing a small book for the festive season – a book that would have a Christmas theme.

When he began work planning the book he was about half-way through his current novel, Martin Chuzzlewit – another of his large novels published in twenty monthly instalments. This new book would share the same themes as Martin Chuzzlewit: selfishness, the greed for money, and the commercialisation of social relations. It’s ironic that a book that promoted the Christmas values of giving and sharing, and explored themes of greed and poverty, was conceived of as a plan to make money by cashing in on the Christmas market!



Ignorance and Want



Near the conclusion of “Stave Three” of A Christmas Carol, the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals to Scrooge – from the voluminous folds of his long robe – two wretched children. “They were a boy and girl,” Dickens writes, “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility.” Scrooge wonders whose they are.

“They are Man’s!” said the spirit. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both … but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom …”

Dickens had always been concerned with the twin phantoms of Ignorance and Want. In an article for the Examiner he had once written, “Side by side with Crime, Disease and Misery in England, Ignorance is always brooding, and is always certain to be found.”



Scrooge meets the Ghost of Christmas Present



One of the charitable institutions active in Victorian Britain was the ragged schools movement. They provided free education for destitute children, and were active mostly in industrial cities. Dickens first became interested in the movement in 1843. He was a friend of the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. Starting in the early 1840s, he advised her on several charitable projects. Their association continued for almost twenty years. On her behalf, Dickens visited a school on Saffron Hill, which had been advertising for charity. It was one of the first so-called ragged schools. The school had been set up by Evangelicals. Dickens was appalled by what he called the “dire neglect of soul and body exhibited in these children.” The people living in the immediate neighbourhood of the school were immersed in “profound ignorance and perfect barbarism.” Dickens was determined to help alleviate these wretched conditions; it was the beginning of a long interest in the ragged school movement.

The plot of A Christmas Carol was derived primarily from the memory of the story of Gabriel Grub that Dickens had interpolated into The Pickwick Papers. Grub was a solitary and cold-hearted sexton, who experienced a change of attitude at Christmastime after being visited by several goblins, who showed him the past and future. Dickens was also influenced by Washington Irving’s Sketch Book (1820), which described the traditional old English Christmas. And Dickens found yet again ways to include elements of his own childhood into the story.



Frontispiece and Title-Page from the First Edition of 1843



Dickens began writing A Christmas Carol in September, 1843. It took him about six weeks to complete. It was unusual in that he completed it in one piece – it wasn’t created in many parts spread over a long period of time. It was an extended short story – a novella – divided into five sections. The full title of the piece is A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. The five sections are called Staves – stanzas, or verses – in line with the work’s title. Dickens was intensely satisfied with the work he had produced. He decided to make sure that the published book looked really good. It was bound in red cloth, had a fancy gilt design on the cover, and the edges of the paper were treated with gilt. John Leech did four full-colour etchings and four black-and-white woodcuts for the book. The price was set at five shillings. A Christmas Carol turned out to be the most successful Christmas book of the season. The book was released on 19 December, 1843 - published by Chapman and Hall. By Christmas Eve it had sold 6,000 copies.

A Christmas Carol didn’t make as much money that first year as Dickens had hoped. He was anticipating a profit of £1,000, but the production costs cut into the profits. The sale of the 6,000 copies only netted for its author £230. Two months after the book’s publication, Parley’s Illuminated Library printed a pirated version of the story. Dickens sued them and went on to win his case in court. But the pirates simply declared bankruptcy. Not only was Dickens cheated out of his financial settlement, he was also obliged to cover the £700 in legal costs. Eventually, though, Dickens would recoup his losses. The book would be a perennial favourite. It was also used to raise money for charity. In 1853 Dickens gave his first public reading as a benefit. He read A Christmas Carol in front of 2,000 working people at Birminghan Town Hall. He would perform the piece over and over – first as a means of supporting a variety of charities, and then as part of tours around the country designed to make money for its author.  

Once Dickens had begun writing A Christmas Carol it flowed from his pen with ease. He laughed and wept throughout its composition. And when it was done, he was elated. His closest friend, John Forster, recalled with what “a strange mastery it seized him.” It was because he imbued the story with memories of his own childhood experiences. The rescue of the adolescent Ebenezer Scrooge from school by ‘Little Fan’ recalled Dickens’s youthful yearning to be rescued from Warren’s Blacking Factory by his own sister Fanny. And the Cratchit family’s set up – living in a humble terraced house – recalled Dickens’s own family life on Bayham Street, shortly after they first arrived in London from Portsmouth. And Tiny Tim was a reference to Tiny Fred, the name of his younger brother, who was two years old when they moved to London.

As Peter Ackroyd points out in his biography, Dickens created the character of Ebenezer Scrooge – the cold-hearted, money-obsessed skinflint – just at the time when he was desperate for money. Dickens was not a profligate, like his father. He was careful with his money. He had a long-standing fear of poverty – of falling back into the sort of financial ruin that his father had faced several times. So there was an ambivalence in his attitude to money. He yearned for it as a means of security and a mark of success, but he saw how it could corrupt the heart and the soul. Lots of money could lead to miserliness – a vice, or it could lead to generosity – a virtue. And the depiction of Scrooge as both a mean man (at the beginning of the story) and a generous man (once the three spirits have prompted his redemption) is a revealing depiction of Dickens himself – a professional man always looking for further success and money, but also a very generous man, who was always ready to help others.

It has often been said that Dickens transformed the Christmas season by giving it a secular ethic. He promoted it as a time primarily of family get-togethers full of festive joy and material well-being. There had long been a rather sombre, puritan attitude to the season. But the Christmas holiday had been undergoing change – Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, had only recently introduced the German tradition of the Christmas tree. Christmas greeting cards were introduced that same year (1843). And the importance of Christmas carol singing was making a major comeback. A Christmas Carol became something of a national institution. And it exerted a long-lasting influence on the way the meaning of the season was perceived.

A Christmas Carol received almost immediate and universal acclaim. The Athenaeum magazine, echoing Dickens’s own response to his story, called it “a tale to make the reader laugh and cry – to open his hands, and open his heart to charity even toward the uncharitable.” William Thackeray, not often a big fan of Dickens, wrote in Fraser’s Magazine (February, 1844) that the story was “a national benefit and to every man or woman who reads it, a personal kindness.” Thomas Carlyle, after finishing the book, went out right away and bought a turkey. And the acerbic critic Theodore Martin, who was usually extremely hostile to Dickens, described A Christmas Carol as “finely felt, and calculated to work much social good.”



"Bah, humbug!" Alastair Sim as Scrooge (1951 film)

I first became aware of Charles Dickens through A Christmas Carol – not the book version, however, but the 1951 British film starring Alastair Sim (released as Scrooge in the UK, but known as A Christmas Carol in North America). In the days long before videocassettes and DVDs, you had to wait for TV stations to broadcast your favourite films. No worries about A Christmas Carol, though – they showed it at Christmas every year. And what a wonderful film it is. Alastair Sim is still the definitive portrait of this Dickensian character. You watch the film over and over, and you still delight in his work.

My father used to read the story every year in the lead up to Christmas. It was a Christmas ritual for him. He also loved the filmed version with Alastair Sim. He particularly loved the final scenes, where the “new” Ebenezer Scrooge dances around the room in sheer joy that he has not missed Christmas day, and then leans out of the window and banters with a young boy – “An intelligent boy! A remarkable boy!" – about his arranging with the local butcher to send over the prize turkey that sits in his shop window.



"... he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge."



A Christmas Carol is the concentrated essence of Charles Dickens. It has the humour, sentiment, and pathos of his humane characterisations. It has the vivid descriptions, the sharp dialogue, and the brilliant turns of phrase. It is also perhaps one of his most successful works of fiction, in the way that the characterisations and dialogue match perfectly with incident and plotline. It’s worth reading as an introduction to the author. And it’s worth reading every Christmas season as an annual re-acquaintance with Dickens - the Great Spirit of Christmases Past, Present and Future.

Resource: Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990)

Book Review: Charles Dickens 15 - "Our Mutual Friend"



Charles Dickens in 1862



After Charles Dickens completed Great Expectations in June, 1861, he moved down to Gad’s Hill Place – his house near Rochester in Kent – for the summer. He spent a lot of time preparing a new series of public readings that had been set for the coming autumn. He wanted to expand his repertoire of material, so he worked up readings from Nicholas Nickelby (“Nicholas Nickleby at Yorkshire Schools”), a short story from his former magazine Household Words (“Mr. Chops, the Dwarf”), Pickwick Papers (“Mr. Bob Sawyer’s Party”), and David Copperfield (“Storm at Yarmouth”).

Dickens used old copies of his magazine instalments of the novels, in order to cut and paste prompt-copies for each reading. He completely revised the book sections that he used. He would choose scenes that were powerfully dramatic, or very funny – removing any references to sub-plots or incidental characters. He would also excise any political or social references; he didn’t think they were appropriate for an event that was strictly “entertainment”. Dickens added stage directions in the margins – reminding himself about the physical gestures and vocal effects he wanted to use, in order to make his presentations more dramatic, more effective.

The autumn tour – his second major public-reading tour of England – ran from late-October to the end of January. It didn’t start well at all. There was less magnetic energy between himself and the audience than Dickens was used to. More importantly, his extremely competent manager, Arthur Smith – who had previously handled every aspect of these events with punctilious care – had suddenly died. His replacement, Arthur Headland, was incompetent – constantly making serious mistakes, which made Dickens mad, because he expected precision about these matters.



Hanover Square Rooms - an engraving from 1843



The following spring, Dickens did another series of readings. He was keen to earn more money, in order to defray the growing expenses he was incurring supporting his family and friends. He also thrived on the applause and adulation he received from his loyal fans. This new season of readings was done in London’s Hanover Square Rooms, instead of being spread around the provinces. Dickens eventually began organising and rehearsing the dramatic and gruesome scene from Oliver Twist which described the murder of Nancy by Bill Sykes. The horror of the scene, and the intensity with which he delivered it, made Dickens think twice about doing it in public. He avoided it for five years; but when he eventually began performing it, he did it constantly, and it proved to be both physically and emotionally exhausting for him.

In June, 1862, Dickens began making regular visits to Condette – a village ten kilometres south of the town of Boulogne, in northern France. The reason for these regular visits – known to only a few of his most intimate friends – was to visit Ellen Ternan. He had set up Ellen and her mother in a small house there. They were close enough – only thirty kilometres south of Calais – to be readily accessible to Dickens, but far enough away to be safe from the prying eyes and ears of London society.

Ellen Ternan

The exact nature of the relationship between Dickens and Ellen Ternan is the subject of much conjecture. Clearly, Dickens was obsessed with this young woman. He pursued her; he financially supported her; and made all sorts of clandestine arrangements so that he could spend time with her – without arousing public suspicion. Claire Tomalin, author of a recent biography of Dickens – Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) – also wrote a book about their relationship, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nellie Ternan and Charles Dickens (1991). She is virtually certain that they had a sexual relationship, which resulted in a child (who died in early childhood). Other biographers, including Peter Ackroyd, are more cautious. Ackroyd concedes that it is generally assumed that their love was consummated, but he suggests that it is possible that they had a sexless union. He argues that purity and innocence was important to Dickens; and their liaison may have been similar to the love Arthur Clennam felt for Little Dorrit. Dickens would have considered his sexual passion for Ellen as illicit and, therefore, creating a strong sense of guilt. He was, after all, still married to Catherine, although they had been legally separated for about four years (since 1858). He was twenty-seven years older than Ellen, and would have viewed her like one of the young, idealised virgins in his novels. The rumours of an illegitimate child come primarily from Kate, Dickens’s favourite child. She and her brother Henry both claimed, long after their father’s death, that Dickens and Ellen had a son, who died in infancy.

Throughout 1861 and 1862, Dickens had plans to begin work on a new novel – a long novel, like Little Dorrit, that would be published in the familiar format of twenty monthly instalments. He had some ideas, but no clear plot. Things constantly upset any hope for the kind of sustained, settled period he needed to focus on a long campaign of serious writing: there was the constant travelling, the reading tours, several bouts of illness, and family and business obligations – not to mention the weekly chore of editing his magazine, All The Year Round. And, as he grew older, there were more and more deaths of friends and family to throw him off balance. In the second half of 1863, for example, both his mother-in-law, Mrs. Hogarth, and his own mother, Elizabeth Dickens, died. His mother’s death was somewhat of a relief to the family; she had been in a state of mental and physical decline for a long time.



Wood engraving by E.G. Dalziel (1911)



In the late autumn of each year, Dickens exerted a special effort on his magazine’s Christmas edition. This was an important annual source of income for him; the Christmas editions usually sold about 200,000 copies. In the 1863 version, he wrote a Christmas story for the Magazine called “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings”. The portrait he gave of its title character was a fictional tribute to his mother. It was similar to his early work – poignant and very funny. It was one of the most popular things he ever wrote, and that Christmas edition sold over 200,000 copies.

Dickens began thinking about his novel again. He entered into negotiations with the publishers Chapman and Hall about the terms for this new work – his first long novel for seven years. He wanted £6,000 for half of the copyright. And he was given it. He began writing Our Mutual Friend in November, 1863. There were some characters and themes that had been in his mind for several years. He had written notes on a character called Podsnap way back in 1855. He had used the phrase “our mutual friend” three times in Little Dorrit. But, as his first biographer and confidant, John Forster, would recall later, there were three main sources for the foundation of this new novel.



Opening Scene: Jesse Hexam & Lizzie Hexam retrieve a body from the Thames



The first source, Forster wrote, came from wanderings that Dickens had made during the writing of his previous book, Great Expectations. He had been strolling down by the bank of the Thames, when he saw handbills posted, which provided “dreary descriptions” of people who had drowned in the river. This suggested to Dickens the characters of Hexam and Riderhood, the waterside men who made a “ghastly calling” by fishing corpses out of the river at night. “I think,” Dickens had written, “a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead … and for years retaining the singular view of life and character so imparted, would be a good leading incident for a story.” That young man would be John Rokesmith, aka John Harmon.

The second source Forster mentioned were ideas Dickens had for other major characters. He planned to make greed and social position central themes of the book. He had the notion of a man and woman who both married each other primarily for their money, only to discover soon after the wedding that neither of them, in fact, had any money. After finding out their mistake, Dickens recalled, they would “enter into a league and covenant against folks in general.” These would become the Lammles. Dickens also planned to create a couple he thought of as Perfectly New people – what we call today nouveau riche. “Everything new about them,” he wrote, “… new like the furniture and carriages – shining with varnish, and just home from the manufacturers." And these would be the Veneerings; like veneer – all surface, no depth.

Mr. Riah and Jenny Wren

The final thing Forster talks about is Dickens intention to put a benevolent old Jew in his new story – called Mr. Riah, a generous and noble character who works for a villain named Mr. Fledgeby (“Fascination Fledgeby”). Dickens’s motivation was to make amends – long after the fact – for his portrait of Fagin (“the Jew”) in Oliver Twist. In the midst of the monthly run of Oliver Twist – back in 1838 - he had received a letter from a Mrs. Eliza Davis complaining about his characterisation of Fagin. She argued that he “encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew”, and that he had done a great wrong to the Jewish people. In a letter back to Mrs. Davis, Dickens replied in some detail that she had misinterpreted his real attitude – that he bore no ill-will or prejudice toward Jews. His immediate response had been rather defensive, but he must have thought long and hard about her opinion, though, because in the final sections of Oliver Twist he drops the constant use of the term “the Jew” – favouring simply the name Fagin. And in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens not only includes the upright and kind Mr. Riah, who works for a nasty ‘Christian’ money lender, he also has Lizzie Hexam working for Jewish employers. When a clergyman expresses concern about her remaining with them, Lizzie says: “I think there cannot be kinder people in the world.”

Dust heap at King's Cross - watercolour from 1837

Another major source for the new book was an article that R. H. Horne had submitted 13 years earlier (13 July, 1850) to Dickens’s former magazine Household Words. The article was titled “Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed”. It was about so-called “dust heaps” – huge piles of residue from coal fires mixed with domestic garbage. Elements of Horne’s attitude towards these heaps – especially the notion of them as places of decay, death and resurrection (the phoenix rising out of the ashes) – would emerge in Dickens’s novel.

By late January of 1864, Dickens had written only the first two monthly issues. He planned to have at least five instalments completed before publication began. That would be a lot more than usual, but he realised that he was not writing as quickly and as easily as he had in the past. He also had anticipations of being regularly interrupted by social events. Posters, handbills and advertisements promoting the book were spread throughout London by the end of April. Its first issue appeared in May.

Front cover of Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend is Charles Dickens’s fourteenth novel. It was his last complete novel. It was published in nineteen monthly instalments from May 1864 to November 1865 by Chapman and Hall. Each issue, as usual, had 32 pages of text and two illustrations, and cost one shilling. The final instalment was of double-length and was priced at two shillings. The illustrations were not done this time by Hablot Knight Browne (‘Phiz’), but by Marcus Stone. Dickens had fallen out with Browne (who had been his artist-collaborator for about 27 years – since the very first novel, The Pickwick Papers). The problem went back to Dickens’s separation from his wife, Catherine. He had severed his relationship with the publishers Bradbury and Evans because Frederick Evans had had the temerity to criticise Dickens’s behaviour towards his wife. Dickens not only transferred the publication of his novels back to Chapman and Hall, but he also closed up the magazine Household Words – which had been a nine-year partnership with Bradbury and Evans – and started a new periodical called All The Year Round. Dickens had not been best pleased when ‘Phiz’ began doing illustrations for the magazine that Bradbury and Evans had set up as a rival to Dickens’s All The Year Round. So he switched to someone else to illustrate Our Mutual Friend. Hablot Knight Browne was terribly offended. Marcus Stone was not as good as Hablot Browne. He was younger and keener, and certainly more contemporary. But his style was so different: Browne had been vivid and often grotesque, working with steel etchings; Stone favoured wood prints, and his approach was naturalistic and rather sentimental. Dickens had always conferred closely with Browne about which scenes to illustrate, so it was rather odd that he showed a much more casual attitude with this younger, less-experienced artist. He simply invited Marcus Stone to choose his own “good moments” from each month’s instalment. Dickens was getting older. Other non-writing concerns were wearing him down – and there seemed to be a decline in his enthusiasm and concern for the many details of novel-preparation. The first issue of Our Mutual Friend sold about 35,000 copies. Interest in the book waned, however, during its run; by the end of its serialisation, it was only selling about 19,000 copies.

Dickens's working notes for the first section of  Our Mutual Friend



Our Mutual Friend is the final book of Dickens’s so-called London Trilogy – the three late-period books centred on a critique of society in the English capital. Bleak House had fog as its dominating symbol; in Little Dorrit it was the prison. For Our Mutual Friend, Dickens used the gigantic dust heaps – the mounds of coal-fire residue and domestic detritus collected from London’s residents – as the book’s defining image, suggesting rot, ashes, mud, decay, death and resurrection. But he also used water as an important symbol, with the ambivalent notions of life and death being tied up in it – life emerging from it, being dependent on it, and succumbing to it, through drowning. Dickens was focused on a change he sensed in civilisation – the growing attachment to financial speculation, foreign investment, and the idea that the worth of everything lay in its monetary value. The city was now a world primarily of barter and exchange.



Dickens photo from 1865



Dickens’s writing came much slower these days. He found it difficult switching back to monthly instalments, after producing his previous two novels in weekly issues. He said the effort left him “quite dazed”. Dickens’s notes show how he built each new monthly instalment carefully from the last. He planned a more unified structure. His narrative style was a lot more fanciful than usual – similar to what he did in Bleak House.

After the self-revelation of his previous book, Great Expectations, Dickens turned his attention back to a sharp attack on English life. The book is full of derision for English social behaviour. In fact, most of social life in Our Mutual Friend is seen as nothing more than a game, tainted by pretension and false values. Dinners are an empty ritual. Dickens, who had always been a life-of-the-party type, began to hate parties. As he put it, he would invariably “bolt” very early, or, when the time was right, he would “slip away”. This formerly gregarious host had now become primarily a self-contained man. He hated all of the dreadful gossip; and he must have feared inadvertent comments about his wife Catherine and rumours spreading behind his back about his relationship with Ellen Ternan. His general hatred for this social scene shows in the book – his sympathies generally are with the odd characters and the social outcasts. The radicalism of his youth seemed to have erupted in his last novel.



Staplehurst Train Crash of June, 1865



Charles Dickens looked much older than his 53 years. He had aged rapidly during the last few years. His face betrayed the conflicts and anxieties which beset him. And he began to suffer episodes of gout – one of his feet began to swell because of vascular degeneration. And then came a traumatic event that had a major impact on his physical and emotional health. He was coming home from France in June, 1865 with Ellen Ternan and her mother, Mrs. Ternan. They were on the Folkestone-to-London train; and, just before reaching the station at Staplehurst, a signalman mistakenly directed the train to proceed ahead, even though a section of rail had been removed for repairs. The train was going about 50 mph and derailed at a bridge. It jumped a forty-two feet gap in the rail. Seven of the eight first-class carriages plummeted down from the bridge into the riverbed below. Dickens’s carriage was half off the track, but it didn’t fall with the others. He helped get the Ternans out of their carriage, and then he climbed down to assist with the care of the wounded and dying. He spent a long time helping, and witnessed several individuals die of their wounds. And then he clambered back up to his precariously-balanced carriage in order to retrieve the manuscript of his latest monthly instalment of Our Mutual Friend, which he had left in his overcoat pocket. The later inquiry into the accident was a big worry for Dickens; he was anxious that it not be revealed publicly with whom he had been travelling. He managed to have this information kept secret. More important than this immediate anxiety, however, were the long-term physical and psychological effects. From now on, Dickens – who travelled a great deal for both business and private reasons – suffered intense anxieties about travel.

John Rokesmith & Bella Wilfer

By August, Dickens was working on the novel’s final issue – the usual double-number. When he had it finished, he wrote – for the very first time – a Postscript for the novel, in which he justified the narrative method he had adopted in the book, and provided a brief description on the Staplehurst crash. He also mentioned the problems of serialising a novel in monthly sections. It sounded rather defensive – as though the author was anticipating a critical backlash. The response was mixed. One of the worst comments came from the young Henry James, who called the book “the poorest of Mr. Dickens’s work. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but a permanent exhaustion.”

Noddy Boffin looks for miser books

Of the three large, late-period novels dubbed the “London Trilogy”, Our Mutual Friend was my least favourite. The plot is an odd contrivance. The mystery of John Harmon’s fate is, strangely, revealed rather early to the reader. And then the change of character that Noddy Boffin goes through – tainted by the money he inherits and the social position it gives him – is later revealed as a sham, and a subterfuge planned with his secretary, Mr. Rokesmith. As G. K. Chesterton points out, in his 1907 introduction to the Everyman Edition, the original change of attitude seems to be Dickens’s original intention – another example of the corruption brought by money – but then altered later because of difficulties that Dickens had resolving the plot in the limited space he had available.

The portraits of the various social hypocrites that make up the circle of self-centred acquaintances that meet for dinners throughout the book – the Veneerings, the Lammles, the Podsnaps – are intitially of interest for the broad, satirical swipe Dickens aims at them. This is the social realism that Dickens aimed for in this book. But they don’t do much of interest, and they don’t advance the main plot. Mr. Podsnap – whom Peter Ackroyd identifies as a less-than-subtle portrait of Dickens most intimate friend and business advisor John Forster – serves as a representative of that disdainful society which condemns the relationship between Eugene Wrayburn – “one of their own” – and the low-born Lizzie Hexam - daughter of the apparently disreputable waterside man Jesse Hexam. Silas Wegg, who enters the story as a “balladmonger” and the keeper of a very small fruit-stall, is intended by Dickens to be one of his larger-than-life comic rogues. I found him actually to be quite tiresome, and the extended scenes between him and his taxidermist friend Mr. Venus seemed to drag on with little import or entertainment.



Bradley Headstone and Roger Riderhood



Of much more interest in this book are several of the female characters – and the love-interests they provoke. Bella Wilfer is the woman whom John Harmon was supposed to marry upon his return to England, in order that they both benefit from the will of the wealthy Mr. Harmon. She enters the story as a self-regarding and rather shallow person, but as the story progresses, she develops into an admirable character with whom, sure enough, John Harmon falls in love, regardless of any financial consideration. She has a close, rather flirty relationship with her father. Lizzie Hexam is one of those Dickens innocents who spend most of her time trying to protect her virtue. She is attracted to the high-born Eugene Wrayburn, but also runs from him, fearful that he is only interested in using her for his own satisfaction. She later heroically saves his life – using her skill as a boater to pull his battered body from the river Thames. She is also pursued by the schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, who is so obsessed with her that he attempts to kill her upper-class admirer. Headstone is an interesting character – one of those fevered criminal minds that Dickens puts us inside. And then there is Fanny Cleaver (“Jenny Wren”), a crippled young woman, who has successfully established a small business as a dolls’ dressmaker. She is linked to Mr. Riah, the noble and kind employee of the nasty Mt. Fledgeby. Jenny is another of those interesting characters who are physically weak, but actually very strong emotionally.

In Our Mutual Friend, London is an ugly and corrupt place. It’s a scene of moral and physical degradation – fog, rain, mud, decay, and death. It’s still the prison environment of Little Dorrit, a sad and depressing place. Is it any wonder that Dickens spent most of his time now either at Gad’s Hill Place in Kent, or near Boulogne in France. At the conclusion of Our Mutual Friend – which would turn out to be his last complete novel, Dickens was already thinking about his next book. And that one would be set again in the Rochester area – the milieu of Great Expectations – the scene that had inspired him to create a much more popular and successful novel.

[2012 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens. Lots of special events and activities are planned in England this year. Back in 2009, my good friend Tony Grant (in Wimbledon, UK) and I did a pilgrimage to three key Charles Dickens destinations - his birthplace in Portsmouth (the house is a Museum), the house he lived at on Doughty Street in London (now the chief Dickens' museum), and the town he lived in as a child on the north-coast of Kent (Rochester). 

These visits inspired me to begin reading through all Dickens's novels. By last summer I had done six, but stalled in the middle of Dombey and Son. I thought what I could do to mark this special year of Dickens was to start again, read through all of his novels inside the year, and blog about them. So this is the fifteenth of a series.]

Next: The Mystery of Edwin Drood

[Resources used: "Introduction" to Our Mutual Friend by Andrew Sanders (1994); Dickens by Peter Ackroyd (1990); Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin (2011); "Portraits of Charles Dickens (1812-1870)", an excellent web-page collection of Dickens pictures.  Dickens Portraits ]