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The novelist John Irving is holding Our Mutual Friend back for his deathbed read. So too is Desmond, in the cult TV series, Lost. It's a wise decision not to rush at Dickens's last completed novel. It was written late and, ideally, should be confronted late. Late, that is, in one's reading of the author's works and late in one's own life — at that point where the grim reaper's rap on the door will be no great surprise.
If, 60 years ago, you'd asked me what my favourite Dickens work was, I would have replied (having been glued, eye-poppingly, to my seat by the David Lean movie), Oliver Twist. In my middle years, it would have been a toss-up between Dombey and Son and Bleak House. Now (is that a knock on the door I hear?) it's — you've guessed it.
"Strike the keynote!" Dickens liked to tell himself in the terse working notes for his novels in progress. The opening sentence of Our Mutual Friend strikes that keynote dark and hard: "In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in." Dickens instructed his artist, Marcus Stone, to accompany the scene with a keynote illustration, titled Bird of Prey: The man, one observes, has caught something — but what is it precisely? A corpse, it transpires. "I will make you fishers of men," our saviour said. He did not mean it in the sense that Gaffer Hexam fishes for his fellow kind (suicides, in the main) out of that filthy river, whose "big stinks" in summer would bring the whole city to a standstill.
Our Mutual Friend is haunted by death and God's grim curse: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Dickens himself, during its composition, was lucky to escape being killed (as scores of his fellow passengers were) in the terrible Staplehurst train accident, on June 9. 1865. He, like Hexam in his boat, had a young girl in attendance on that fateful trip — his mistress, Ellen ("Nellie") Ternan. It is plausibly surmised the couple had recently buried their love child (bear the fact in mind reading the death of orphan Johnny in Our Mutual Friend). Plausible too that the angelic Lizzie Hexam may be an idealized portrait of Nellie.
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The Victorians loved Dickens, but they did not entirely love Our Mutual Friend. A main reason is the extraordinary complexity — verging on impenetrability — of the plot. An estranged son (who has three names during the narrative) is called back from abroad by his dead father's will to marry a woman he has never met. If he does, he will be rich. If he doesn't — so be it: Poverty is virtuous. The son is murdered, or is he? The wealth (in the form of huge mountains of "dust" — euphemism for saleable human waste) will be the property of a lowly servant. Or will it? New wills appear all over the place. Decadent young lawyers, self-improving (and homicidal) schoolteachers and the criminal riff-raff of the river-bank tangle the novel's plotlines to more than cat's cradle intricacy. A handful of angelic women lighten the oppressively dark mix.
Few readers will get through Our Mutual Friend without the occasionally furrowed brow and a lot of going back to work out exactly what happened earlier in the story. And what is the novel, finally, about? Probably the best answer is given in an ejaculation by Bella Wilfer (not initially one of the forementioned good women): "money, money and what money can make of life." A horrible mess is what it can make.
Henry James spoke for many when he called this novel "the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works." Why didn't his contemporaries like it? Because, as does much great literature, Our Mutual Friend disturbs us to the root of our being. Who, hand on heart, "likes" King Lear? But who would deny that it is the greatest play in the Shakespearian canon?
Henry James was 25 when he penned that derogatory judgment on Our Mutual Friend. One would like to think that, 40 years on, he came to see it for what it is. Terrible, yes. But terribly great. Read Our Mutual Friend. But not unless you are entirely confident you are ready for it.
Postscript: I love puzzles in Victorian Fiction. Here are a couple: The corpse that Hexam hauls out of the water bears four names in the course of the story. What (for silver) are they? And (for the gold medal) who has murdered that many-named dead man?
John Sutherland is the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at University College London, and author of The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction.
Excerpt
The wind was blowing so hard when the visitor came out at the shop-door into the darkness and dirt of Limehouse Hole, that it almost blew him in again. Doors were slamming violently, lamps were flickering or blown out, signs were rocking in their frames, the water of the kennels, wind-dispersed, flew about in drops like rain. Indifferent to the weather, and even preferring it to better weather for its clearance of the streets, the man looked about him with a scrutinizing glance. …
"I have no clue to the scene of my death," said he. "Not that it matters now. But having risked discovery by venturing here at all, I should have been glad to track some part of the way." With which singular words he abandoned his search, came up out of Limehouse Hole, and took the way past Limehouse Church. At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell.
From Book 2, Chapter 13, A Solo and a Duett
