But all that aside, it was the personal revelation in Our Mutual Friend that I found most revealing and relevant to the current situation we all found ourselves in.
To my trained writer’s eye and experienced reader’s ear, signs and echoes of Dickens’s disastrous culmination of his long relationship with his wife and the commencement of his dangerous liaison with Ellen Ternan were to be found everywhere in this book.
Most novelists create the occasional character—often a villain—who leads a double life, but Dickens’s fiction now seemed saturated with such dualities. In Our Mutual Friend the hero, young John Harmon (heir to the Harmon dust heap fortunes), who appears to be drowned under suspicious circumstances while returning to London after many years at sea, immediately visits the decomposing body (dressed in his clothes and thus presumed to be him) at the police station. Harmon then changes his identity to Julius Handford and then later to John Rokesmith so that he can act as secretary to the Boffins, lowly servants who have, by default, inherited the fortune and dust heaps that should have been John Harmon’s.
The villains in Our Mutual Friend—Gaffer Hexam, Rogue Riderhood, Mr and Mrs Alfred Lammle (grifters who have deceived each other into a loveless and moneyless marriage and who join hands now only in deceiving and using others), peg-legged Silas Wegg, and especially the murderous headmaster Bradley Headstone—may pretend to be someone or something else, but are allowed to remain their sincere selves at heart. Only the positive protagonists in the novel suffer from dual or multiple identities amounting to an actual confusion of self.
And that tragic confusion is inevitably brought about by one form of energy—love. Misplaced, displaced, lost, or concealed romantic love is the engine that drives all the secrecy, machinations, and violence in Dickens’s single most energetic (and terrible) comedy. Our Mutual Friend, I realised to my own pain and horror, was a title and tale worthy of Shakespeare.
John Rokesmith/Harmon hides his identity from his beloved, Bella, until long after they are married and even after they have a child, all the better to manipulate and test and educate her—away from love of money towards love for love’s sake. Mr Boffin becomes an ill-tempered miser to all appearances, driving the Boffins’ ward, Bella, out of the house and back to her impoverished roots, but it is all a charade—another means of testing the true mettle of Bella Wilfer. Even the wastrel lawyer Eugene Wrayburn—one of the strongest (if most confused) personalities in all of Dickens’s fiction—reaches, because of his illogical love for low-born Lizzie Hexam, a point where he taps his head and breast in confusion, speaks his own name, and cries out—“… perhaps you can’t tell me what this may be? — No, upon my life I can’t. I give it up!”
John Harmon, lost amidst all his disguises and manipulative strategies, reaches a similar loss of identity and cries, “But it was not I. There was no such thing as I, within my knowledge.”
The weak and jealous headmaster Bradley Headstone seems to confess to all of Charles Dickens’s own hidden passions and jealousies when he tells the much-in-demand Lizzie Hexam—
“You draw me to you. If I were shut up in a strong prison, you would draw me out. I should break through the wall to come to you. If I were lying on a sick bed, you would draw me up—to stagger to your feet and fall there.” And later—“You are the ruin of me… Yes! You are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me. I have no resources in myself, I have no confidence in myself, I have no government of myself when you are near me or in my thoughts. And you are always in my thoughts now. I have never been quit of you since I first saw you.”
Compare this to what Charles Dickens had written in a private letter not so long after he had met Ellen Ternan for the first time—“I have never known a moment’s peace or content, since the last night of The Frozen Deep. I do suppose that there never was a man so seized and rended by one Spirit.” And—“Oh, that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!”
Charles Dickens’s passion for Ellen Ternan, much less the destruction to his sense of self, family, and sanity that this passion was causing, cried out to me from behind the mask of every character and violent event in Our Mutual Friend.
In the terrifying scene where Bradley Headstone confronts the cowering Lizzie Hexam with his passion—set, I thought, quite appropriately in a foggy burial ground, since the schoolmaster’s love is doomed and one-sided and short-lived even before it dies from jealousy and resurrects itself as murder—the deranged schoolmaster seems to cry out in a voice echoing Charles Dickens’s silent screams of agony that year—
No man knows until the time comes, what depths are within him. To some men it never comes; let them rest and be thankful! To me, you brought it; on me, you forced it; and the bottom of this raging sea has been heaved up ever since.… I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me. You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This, and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.
And all the time Bradley Headstone is shouting these things, he is wrenching at the stone of the graveyard wall until powdered mortar spills and dribbles onto pavement and until, finally, “bringing his clenched hand down upon the stone with a force that laid the knuckles raw and bleeding.”
Charles Dickens had never before written so clearly and painfully and forcefully about the terrible twinned power of love and jealousy. He was never to do so again.
As with Bradley Headstone, could the confusion of identities and loss of control over his own life, casualties of erotic and romantic obsession, lead Charles Dickens to madness in daylight and murder in the night? It sounded absurd, but it sounded possible.
I set aside the magazine as the train rolled into the station and shifted in my seat to look out into the cold, grey, shadowless Christmas Day. This promised to be an interesting visit.
A YEAR EARLIER—before Staplehurst—Dickens’s comparatively desultory Christmas gathering for 1864 had been composed of my brother, Charley, and his wife, Katey, the artist Fechter and his wife (and Fechter’s amazing gift of the Swiss chalet), Marcus Stone, and Henry Chorley. This year I was mildly surprised to find another bachelor, Percy Fitzgerald, a guest for several days, not surprised at all to see Charley and Katey back at the Dickens hearth, pleased to find the other Gad’s Hill residents Mamie and Georgina in relatively good spirits, and totally surprised—despite the fact that the young Staplehurst survivor had mentioned Dickens’s invitation to me the previous summer—to find young Edmond Dickenson installed at Gad’s Hill for the week. That made three bachelors at the table, if one did not count Dickens himself as such.
And that morning, Dickens promised me another gratifying surprise by dinnertime. “My dear Wilkie, you shall love our surprise guests tonight. I promise you that. They shall be a delight to us, as always.”
If it had not been for the plural, I might have mockingly asked the Inimitable if Mr Drood were making an appearance at our Christmas table. Or perhaps I might not have; despite his enthusiasm about the mystery guests, Charles Dickens seemed very tired and haggard this Christmas Day. I enquired about his health and he admitted to having been plagued with pains and mysterious weaknesses during the late autumn and early winter. Evidently our mutual friend and physician, Frank Beard, had been consulted frequently, although Dickens rarely followed Beard’s advice. It seems that Beard had diagnosed “a want of muscular powers in the heart,” but Dickens seemed certain that the injured heart in question lay more in the realm of emotions than in his chest cavity.