Charles Dickens is to Victorian England what Shakespeare is to Renaissance

England: he typifies the period his writings disclose and expose. The greatest

comic genius of his age, Dickens relentlessly calls for reform at every level,

implores us to embrace the disadvantaged for our own good, and offers the values

of a loving heart and the image of a warm hearth as the emblem of the solution

to the cruel and mindless indifference of a society given over to the pursuit of

"money, money, money, and what money can make of life," as Bella Wilfer says in

Our Mutual Friend.

Born in Portsmouth, England, on February 7, 1812, the second of John and

Elizabeth Dickens's eight children, Charles was raised with the assumption that

he would receive an education and, if he worked hard, might some day come to

live at Gad's Hill Place, the finest house on the main road between Rochester

and Gravesend. But John Dickens, on whom Mr. Micawber is based, moved the family

to London in 1823, fell into financial disaster, was arrested for debt and

imprisoned in the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison. Charles was forced to go to work

at Warren's Blacking Factory at Hungerford Stairs labeling bottles. In his Life

of Charles Dickens, John Forster shares the fragment of Dickens's autobiography

upon which David Copperfield's Murdstone and Grinby experiences are based:

It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age.

It is wonderful to me, that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I

had been since we came to London, no one had compassion on me -- a child of

singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally --

to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have

been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out.

No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could

hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a

grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.

Dickens himself did not know how long this ordeal lasted, "whether for a year,

or much more, or less"; surely it must have seemed as if it would last forever

to this sensitive twelve-year-old boy and it so seared his psyche that Dickens

the man never "until I impart it to this paper [a full quarter century later],

in any burst of confidence to anyone, my own wife not excepted, raised the

curtain I then dropped, thank God."

Dickens was able to continue his education after his father received a legacy

from a relative and was released from the Marshalsea. Charles attended

Wellington House Academy from 1824 to 1826 before taking work as a clerk in

Gray's Inn for two years. In order to qualify himself to become a newspaper

parliamentary reporter, Dickens spent eighteen months studying shorthand, a

perfect command of which was "equal in difficulty to the mastery of six

languages," he was cautioned, and studying in the reading room of the British

Museum. He won a reputation for his quickness and accuracy during his two years

(1828-1830) as a reporter in the court of Doctors' Commons before reporting for

the True Sun and the Mirror Parliament and finally becoming a reporter for the

Morning Chronicle in 1834.

Dickens's first published piece appeared in the December, 1833, number of the

Monthly Magazine , followed by nine others, the last two appearing over the

signature "Boz," a pseudonym Dickens adopted from a pet name for his younger

brother. These sketches were collected into two volumes and published on

Dickens's twenty-fourth birthday, February 7, 1836, as Sketches by Boz.

Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People. Dickens's skills as an

observant reporter intimately familiar with middle and lower class London are

demonstrated in these descriptive vignettes of everyday life, which also reveal

his high humor and his deep concern for social justice, qualities that will

dominate his novels.

On April 2, 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of George Hogarth,

with whom Dickens worked on the Morning Chronicle . Catherine and Charles had

ten children before they separated in 1858. Mary Hogarth, Catherine's beautiful

younger sister, joined the Dickens household shortly after the honeymoon. Mary's

death, at seventeen years of age, in Dickens's arms established in his mind an

image of ideal womanhood that never left him. The ring he took from Mary's dead

finger remained on his hand until his own death.

The introduction of Sam Weller into the fourth number of Pickwick Papers

(1836-37) launched the most popular literary career in the history of the

language. Pickwick Papers became a publishing phenomenon, selling forty thousand

copies of every issue. Published in twenty monthly installments, Pickwick took

England by storm: Judges read it on the bench, doctors in the carriages between

visiting patients, boys on the street. Carlyle tells Forster the story of a

clergyman who, after consoling a sick person, was alarmed to hear the patient

exclaim, upon the clergyman's leaving the sickroom, "Well, Thank God, Pickwick

will be out in ten days anyway!" People named their pet animals after characters

in the novel; there were Pickwick hats, cigars, and coats, and innumerable plays

and sequels based on the original.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club chronicle the amusing misadventures

of Mr. Pickwick, a lovable innocent who seeks to discover the world with his

youthful companions, parodies of the lover, the sportsman, and the poet. While

the Papers begin as a hilarious romp parodying the eighteenth-century novels

Dickens had pored over as a child, they eventually assume a shape rising to the

mythic level of great literature. Pickwick's education, under the guidance of

Sam Weller, his streetwise, Cockney manservant, leads him to the discovery of

the world of shyster lawyers, guile, corruption, vice, and imprisonment. The

comic exuberance of Pickwick dominates this dark underside, though, and the

sheer energy and wonderful good humor of the Papers carries the sunny day. There

are, however, the Interpolated Tales of madness, betrayal, and murder, and Mr.

Pickwick is forced to become a prisoner in his own room in the Fleet, for three

months. The horrors young Charles Dickens had witnessed as a boy working in the

blacking warehouse while his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea

are not eliminated from Pickwick's world; indeed, his awareness of their

existence is what allows Mr. Pickwick to become a fully loving, if finally not

fully effective human being, who, with Sam's help, can see reality and relieve

evil--to the best of his limited abilities.

Even as Pickwick Papers was enjoying its huge success, Dickens started Oliver

Twist; or The Parish Boy's Progress in January, 1837; it continued in monthly

numbers through 1838. In Oliver , Dickens explores the social evils attendant

upon a political economy that made pauperism the rule rather than the exception.

Oliver flees the cruel Sowerbys where he is apprenticed as an undertaker, having

been sold to them by the workhouse for daring to ask for more -- food, love,

nutrition, warmth -- and seeks his fortune in the criminal slum world of London

proper. Befriended by the irrepressible Artful Dodger, he discovers warmth and

good humor in Fagin's den, among thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes, and

burglars. Dickens presents an unrelenting portrait of the filth and squalor that

surround poverty and, refusing to romanticize the criminal world, at the same

time makes it clear that this sector has been abandoned by society just as

surely as Oliver and the other Parish Boys have been abandoned by an

unresponsive system. This is the world the young Dickens saw at the blacking

warehouse.

The contrasting world of the Brownlows and the Maylies may serve to rescue

Oliver from the corruption of Fagin and the brutality of Sikes, but the other

boys in Fagin's gang--who have been nurtured better by Fagin than Oliver's

fellows had been in the workhouse--will remain abandoned. Rose Maylie, Dickens's

first resurrection of Mary Hogarth, is discovered to be Oliver's aunt and Oliver

is returned to her through Nancy's intervention, When Bill Sikes learns of

Nancy's betrayal of him and the gang, Dickens has Sikes brutally murder her.

Dickens's almost compulsive public reading of the death of Nancy some thirty

years later--readings that shortened his own life--seems an insistent reminder

to his public that this problem has not been successfully addressed. The social

system has victimized Nancy and Sikes just as surely as the Poor Law has failed

Oliver. There may be Brownlows and Maylies who can intervene individually and

occasionally--and miraculously--in the lives of some Olivers, but the masses of

screaming mobs hot in pursuit of Sikes for the murder of Nancy need to know how

those destructive forces can be reversed. Sikes has been as brutalized by that

society as Nancy has been by him. Dickens's novels seek to help us understand

this and to do something about it, as a society.

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby , appearing in twenty numbers from

April, 1838, to October, 1839, returns to the comic exuberance and vitality of

Pickwick Papers. Dickens is exposing the cruelty and exploitation of children in

the Cheap Schools in Yorkshire, immortalized in the portrayal of Wackford

Squeers at Dotheboys Hall. In Nickleby Dickens brings together the serious

issues of social reform he addresses in Oliver Twist with the rollicking humor

and vast landscape of humanity he presents in Pickwick Papers . The public

responded enthusiastically with sales reaching fifty thousand.

Fearing the public might weary of long novels like Pickwick and Nickleby in

twenty monthly installments, Dickens decided to embark on a publication

resembling the Spectator , which would come out weekly and allow him--with the

help of others--"to write amusing essays on the various foibles as they arise"

and to introduce new characters, along with Pickwick and Sam Weller, to comment

on passing events. Thus was born Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-41), a weekly

magazine, the first number of which sold seventy thousand copies. However, as

sales dropped off due to the lack of a sustained story, Dickens introduced the

story of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity

Shop (1840), beginning with the fourth number of Master Humphrey's Clock and

resuming intermittently until the ninth chapter, at which point it continued

uninterrupted. The story of the innocent Nell surrounded by surrealistic figures

like Quilp and his gang and continuing onto a nightmarish journey through the

industrial inferno with her half-crazed, gambleholic grandfather calls forth all

of Dickens's original genius. The death of Nell, based on the death of Mary

Hogarth, caused a nation to weep and skyrocketed sales to 100,000 copies. The

publication of The Old Curiosity Shop secured Dickens's success not only in

England but in America, where he was now famous as well.

Dickens followed The Old Curiosity Shop with Barnaby Rudge

(1841), also published weekly in Master Humphrey's Clock . Set in the time of

the Gordon Riots of 1780, this represents Dickens's first attempt to write an

historical novel. While the riots themselves were inflamed by anti-Catholic

sentiment, Dickens suggests throughout the novel that they are actually an

outburst of social protest. Dickens is appalled by the mob violence he

brilliantly depicts in the brutal riots, but he expresses deep sympathy for the

oppressed who are driven to such lengths by an indifferent and unresponsive

system. Dickens himself was becoming increasingly impatient with England's

political economy, which he perceives as insensitive to the needs of the people,

and is indignant with the social conditions he sees around him. While he does

not advocate a violent outburst from those who are the victims of this

oppression, the explosive energy of the riot scenes in Barnaby offers a vision

of what is possible if the needs of the people are not addressed.

Upon completing Barnaby Rudge Dickens visited America where he was absolutely

lionized. However, after several attacks on him for his insistent speaking out

in favor of international copyright laws and after further acquaintance with

American ill breeding and overly familiar intrusion on his and Catherine's

privacy, Dickens became disenchanted with his own vision of America as a land of

freedom that was fulfilling a democratic ideal. In American Notes (1842) he

expresses his reservations about America, much to the chagrin of his American

audience.

With The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit , Dickens returned to monthly

numbers publishing in twenty installments from January, 1843, to July, 1844.

Martin Chuzzlewit is organized around the theme of selfishness, and marks an

advance in Dickens's development as a novelist. However, sales dropped off to

twenty thousand; in an effort to increase sales, Dickens sends Martin to America

where Martin discovers the boorish behavior Dickens had only gently portrayed in

American Notes . But if Dickens is scathing in his portrayal of America in

Chuzzlewit , he is even fiercer in exposing greed, selfishness, hypocrisy, and

corruption in his homeland. He is able to sustain this satiric exposure with his

comic genius, creating here characters who have achieved a reality beyond their

pages. Sairey Gamp is no less real for us than Mrs. Harris is for her, and

Pecksniff's name has entered the language as descriptive of hypocritical

benevolence.

In December, 1843, Dickens published the most popular and beloved of his works,

A Christmas Carol, a work that expresses succinctly his "Carol philosophy."

Scrooge has sacrificed joy, love, and beauty for the pursuit of money and is

representative of a society whose economic philosophy dooms the less fortunate

to lives of want and oppression. The ghosts help him to a Wordsworthian

recollection of youth and the promise of a better being, and as a result,

Scrooge's imagination is extended sympathetically beyond himself and he is

redeemed. Dickens's vision of a society redeemed through love and generosity

will haunt his works from now on. The alternative to this vision seems to be the

threat of revolutionary violence we see in Brandy Rudge .

Dickens traveled to Italy in 1844-45 and then to Switzerland and Paris in 1846.

His next Christmas book, The Chimes (1844), continued the assault on the

economic philosophy exposed in A Christmas Carol. Dickens ridicules Malthusian

philosophy and the economic theory that the poor have no right to anything

beyond meager subsistence. He is coming increasingly to believe that the social

problems in England are an inevitable byproduct of an economic philosophy that

is fundamentally wrong-minded. The Cricket and the Hearth (1845) and The Battle

of Life (1846) continue the Christmas books, and Pictures from Italy (1846)

recounts Dickens's impressions of his Italian travel.

Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son appeared in seventeen monthly numbers

from January, 1847, through April 1848, the last being a double number. In this

work Dickens is able to integrate his criticism of the social philosophy

dominating nineteenth-century England into the structure of the novel itself, as

he will continue to do in Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual

Friend. Dombey and Son investigates the callous indifference of an economic

system that places the cash nexus before human relations. Mr. Dombey, who

represents the enterprising nineteenth century businessman, rejects the love of

his daughter in favor of the son who will become heir to the firm. Dombey's

universe collapses around him as his son dies, he drives his daughter away, his

second wife leaves him, his business goes bankrupt, and he loses his fortune.

Like Scrooge, though, Dombey is redeemed by memory and remorse--and the loving

forgiveness of his daughter.

The importance of memory once again becomes central to Dickens's next Christmas

book, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848), the tale of a man who gets

his wish to lose all memory of sorrow at the expense of losing the attendant

sensibility that comes with the loss of memory. This Wordsworthian concern for

the importance of recollection of the past and the healing influence of

memory--even the memory of sorrow and grief--comes to be central for Dickens, as

he has his story conclude with the prayer, "Lord, Keep my Memory Green."

It is at this time that Dickens is writing the autobiographical fragment he

shares with Forster and which he mined for his most autobiographical novel, The

Personal History of David Copperfield , published in twenty monthly installments

from May, 1849, to November, 1850, the last issue being a double number. David

Copperfield opens with David, the narrator, indicating that the pages of his

book must show whether he will turn out to be the hero of his own life. After

overcoming the brutal experiences based on Dickens's own experience at the

blacking warehouse, David eventually marries, sets up household, establishes a

growing reputation as a novelist, and yet discovers "a vague unhappy loss or

want of something" in his life. He wonders if this unhappiness is the result of

his having given in to "the first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart" by

marrying his child-wife, or if it is representative of the human condition. He

does know it would have been better if his wife "could have helped me more, and

shared the many thoughts to which I had no partner; and that this might have

been; I knew."

Dickens was himself experiencing a similar sense of vague dissatisfaction at

this time and may have wondered if his wife were not partly responsible. Whether

she was or whether Dickens was experiencing the angst that every major Victorian

thinker suffered from we cannot know. David's problem is settled by Dora's early

death and David's recognition that Agnes has loved him all along and that on a

level he was not aware of he had loved her too. They marry, have a lovely

family, and share a fulfilled existence.

The novel ends with David's apostrophe to his true wife: "Oh Agnes, Oh my soul,

so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when the shadows

which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!" In his Preface

to the novel, Dickens talks about "dismissing some portion of himself into the

shadowy world" as he finishes David Copperfield. Both Dickens and David equate

the world of vision with the world of actuality--one is as impermanent as the

other. For David, Agnes is pointing to a world he hopes lasts beyond the worlds

of shadow. In 1842, Dickens had written to Forster in response to the

overwhelming triumph of his welcome in Boston: "I feel, in the best aspects of

this welcome, something of the presence and influence of that spirit which

directs my life, and through a heavy sorrow has pointed upward with unchanging

finger for more than four years past." He is referring, of course, to Mary

Hogarth.

In the novel, David is able to realize his ideal vision, actually to possess the

beauty that is his inspiration and end as artist. Mary Hogarth becomes, for

Dickens, an idealized vision of beauty that cannot be possessed, but she serves

"as a presence and influence of that spirit that directs" Dickens's life.

Whether that ideal can be attained beyond this realm is not the issue. The ideal

has allowed David to become the hero of his life, not by possessing the ideal

but by acting on its inspiration. David the artist becomes artist as the result

of realizing his imaginative vision, of creating art. In the act of creating art

he possesses the vision.

The world David is born into is flawed. He experiences the evil of the world,

deeply at Murdstone and Grinby's, and escapes it. In his adult world he

participates in the evil, contributes to it, unwittingly, as when he introduces

Steerforth to the Peggottys and brings ruin upon that innocent house. He feels

responsible for Dora's death, the loss of Em'ly, Steerforth, and Ham. But in the

end he is able, with Agnes's help, to put his universe back together. He has

been involved in a struggle, with his undisciplined heart on the one hand, with

active evil in the form of Uriah Heep on the other. Agnes tells David that she

believes simple love and truth will prevail over evil in the end. It will, for

Dickens, only if goodness has the measure of evil and if good people are willing

to use their creative energy to work hard to realize that goodness. The evil

that David experienced as a child on the streets of London sharpened his wits so

that, for example, David is able to catch Uriah staring at him while pretending

to write, on their first encounter. And as a result of David's experience on the

streets, he has the help of Mr. Micawber in defeating Uriah in his scheme to

take over the Wickfield firm, indeed to take over the world of the novel.

David's first-hand experience with the evil streets of London as a boy gives him

the knowledge and wherewithal to take the measure of evil. His imaginative

creativity, inspired by Agnes, allows him to order his universe. The very powers

that allow David Copperfield to succeed as hero are the powers that allow

Dickens to create David Copperfield . He will extend those powers beyond the

world of the novel to continue to address the evils of a social system that is

oppressive and life denying.

Dickens extended his capacity to address social issues and to provide

entertainment by founding Household Words , a weekly magazine that first

appeared on March 30, 1850, and continued until he replaced it with All the Year

Round , which he founded and edited in 1859.

In 1850 he also helped to establish the Guild of Literature and Art to create an

endowment for struggling artists. Money was raised for the Guild through amateur

theatrical performances that Dickens usually performed in, directed, and

managed. Dickens was a brilliant actor and loved the stage, producing plays

throughout his career as fund raisers for the many charitable concerns he worked

tirelessly to support. His love for the theater culminated in his captivating

public readings from his own novels.

Bleak House , appearing in twenty monthly installments from March, 1852, to

September, 1853, is a scathing indictment of government, law, philanthropy,

religion, and society in nineteenth century England. The organizing principle of

the plot is the hopelessly entangled lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which

destroys the lives of all who become enmeshed in the Court of Chancery through

the suit. The legal system is exposed as itself a symptom of what is wrong with

a society that is structurally flawed. The mud, ooze, slime, and fog that

symbolically dominate the world of this novel suggest that this society cannot

be redeemed through a simple restructuring. The spontaneous combustion of Krook,

the counterpart of the Lord Chancellor, indicates that this society must be

fundamentally altered or it will explode of its own internal corruption. Jo, the

crossing sweep, has neither the energy nor the tools to sweep away the mud and

slime into which the slum of Tom-all-Alone's is crumbling. And Tom-all-Alone's

is infecting all of London, just as surely as Jo's smallpox infects the novel's

heroine, Esther Summerson.

If this society is to be redeemed, Dickens insists, it will be through the

values represented by Esther Summerson. Jo's broom cannot sweep away the mud of

Tom-all-Alone's, but the clarity and warmth of Esther's sympathetic love may be

capable, if it becomes contagious, of illuminating this world and dissipating

the fog. Esther and Allan Woodcourt, the physician who attends Jo at his death,

marry, and we believe that their family can contain, in miniature, the order and

love that must be transmitted to the larger society if it is to be saved. But

Dickens is not sure, at this point, if what Esther and Allan represent can

withstand the evils of London: they set up household in a country cottage,

provided by the benevolent John Jarndyce, Esther's guardian.

In order to improve the sales of Household Words , which had started to slip in

1854, Dickens began to publish a new serial in weekly installments in that

magazine. Hard Times. For These Times , an assault on the industrial greed and

political economy that exploits the working classes and deadens the soul, ran

from April 1 to August 12, 1854. The Gradgrind philosophy, based on Facts,

Facts, Facts of utilitarian calculus, is demonstrated as being not only cruel

and destructive to the workers--"hands"--it dehumanizes and exploits but humanly

inadequate to the Gradgrind family it purportedly serves. Mrs. Gradgrind sees

that her husband has missed something, "not an ology at all," in his life, and

Louisa and her brother Tom, "the whelp," are nearly destroyed by the mechanical

philosophy of Gradgrindery. Sissy Jupe, who grew up among Sleary's Horse Riding

Circus, represents the imaginative creativity and generosity that the Gradgrind

family miss. The union of Sissy and Loo, at the conclusion of the novel, is

emblematic of what Dickens believes industrial England needs: "let me lay this

head of mine upon a loving heart," Loo says to Sissy at the end.

The Crimean War, which broke out in March, 1854, prevented the government from

addressing the domestic social ills Dickens had been railing against since at

least as early as Oliver Twist. The inept government, which cannot seem to get

beyond just muddling along, is captured brilliantly in the portrayal of the

Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit , published in monthly numbers from

December, 1855, to June, 1857. The dominant symbol of the novel is imprisonment,

and society itself becomes the prison of its inhabitants. Dickens had begun the

novel, significantly, with the title "Nobody's Fault" in mind, but later

entitled the work after its heroine, Amy Dorrit. Amy is the daughter of the

"Father of the Marshalsea," who has been confined in debtors' prison for twenty

five years. Arthur Clennam, whose gloomy childhood resembles what David

Copperfield's would have been had he been raised by the Murdstones, is a

middle-aged man looking for meaning in life. Clennam and Little Dorrit escape

the imprisonment of this stultifying society by discovering their love for each

other, a love that is difficult to discover since Arthur is so much older than

Amy and she has the goodness, and physical resemblance, of a child. Importantly

for Dickens, Arthur and Amy are willing to engage the fallen society of London

and to attempt to change it. After their wedding Arthur and Amy "went quietly

down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along

in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward

and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar." Unlike Esther

Summerson and her husband, Arthur and Amy stay in London where they live "a

modest life of usefulness and happiness."

On April 30, 1859, Dickens launched the weekly journal, All the Year Round . To

get the journal off to a good start, the first installment of A Tale of Two

Cities appeared in the inaugural issue and continued in weekly installments

until November 26, 1859. Set in the time of the French Revolution, this novel

once again looks at the potential for revolutionary violence Dickens had

explored in Barnaby Rudge . If the ruling class in England does not take

seriously the lesson of the French Revolution, Dickens appears to be saying,

such a violent outburst is possible again. While Dickens deplores violence, his

sympathies are clearly with the victims of oppression. Only the kind of

sacrificial love represented by Sydney Carton's willing sacrifice of himself for

his loved ones will be able to prevent such a revolution if society continues

along its present course

In an effort to pick up declining sales of All the Year Round , Dickens once

again published a novel in weekly installments of the journal. Great

Expectations ran from December 1, 1860, to August 3, 1861. Dickens and Catherine

had recently separated after over twenty years of marriage. Perhaps in an

attempt to come to terms with his personal unhappiness, Dickens returns to the

first person narrator in Great Expectations. To assure that he did not fall into

"unconscious repetition" as he wrote this story of a "hero to be a boy-child,

like David," he reread David Copperfield.

Pip is "raised by hand" by his shrewish older sister and her husband, Joe

Gargery, whom Pip treats "as an older species of child." Pip comes into Great

Expectations as the result of befriending the convict, Magwitch, but is led to

believe that it is actually the eccentric and half-mad Miss Havisham to whom he

is indebted. Pip is also under the misapprehension that the beautiful Estella,

Miss Havisham's daughter by adoption, will become part of his inheritance. Pip's

real education begins when he realizes that Magwitch is his benefactor and that

he has betrayed the loving Joe for the false society made available by ill

gotten gains from an escaped convict. His redemption comes as the result of his

coming to love and value Magwitch, who, he realizes, has been much truer to Pip

than Pip has been to Joe.

In the earlier novel based loosely on his own life, Dickens has David

Copperfield marry Dora, has him suffer the consequences of yielding to the first

mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart. When Dora dies, David is able to

discover his true wife, Agnes, who had seemed almost supernaturally removed from

him. Here, Pip falls hopelessly in love with Estella, who is as icily

indifferent to him as are the stars, because, as she says, she has no heart.

Dickens originally intended for Pip and Estella to remain apart in the end, but

Bulwer Lytton persuaded him to change the ending. Dickens has Estella discover,

through suffering inflicted in a brutal marriage, her own heart and the value of

Pip's love. At this time in his career Dickens seems clear about the values that

must be embraced if society is to succeed, the values of selflessness,

compassion, and sympathetic love. He does not seem as sure that those qualities

can sustain personal happiness, at least not for him at this point.

In Our Mutual Friend, published in twenty installments from May, 1864, to

November, 1865, Dickens makes still another advance in his artistic vision.

Dominated by the dust heaps and the spiritual wasteland they symbolize, the

vision of this novel suggests that we must die to ourselves if we are to be

redeemed, and society must forego material pursuits if it is to become

spiritually and culturally whole. The recurrent theme of death and resurrection

indicates Dickens's developing understanding of the meaning of personal

fulfillment that he explores in earlier novels, particularly in David

Copperfield and Great Expectations .

There is no first person narrator in Our Mutual Friend , as there is in David

Coppperfield and Great Expectations, although we are given an interior monologue

as John Harmon recounts his own near death by drowning. However the novel is

framed by Mortimer Lightwood's stories: he tells the story of "The Man from

Somewhere," John Harmon, at the beginning of the novel; his story of Eugene

Wrayburn's marriage to Lizzie Hexam horrifies the "society" to whom he recounts

this tale at the end. The narrator/hero role that is central to David

Copperfield is shared in Our Mutual Friend among Harmon, Wrayburn, and

Lightwood. The roles of the heroines are altered from the earlier novels as

well. The Agnes who has been associated with stained glass windows becomes

Lizzie Hexam, daughter of the water rat Gaffer Hexam; and the cruel Estella

becomes the willful, mercenary Bella Wilfer. Dickens is reworking his themes and

relationships from the earlier novels here, particularly those themes he

explored in the novels written from the first person point of view, the more

autobiographical novels.

Like David Copperfield, Lizzie Hexam has much to be grateful for in her sordid

background. David's experiences on the streets allow him to take the measure of

evil; Lizzie's sordid work with her father gives her the strength and the

experience literally to save Eugene Wrayburn from drowning. As a result, Eugene

is empowered to renounce the false society and indolent existence of his former

self and to be redeemed by Lizzie's love. Bella Wilfer sees her own selfishness

and vanity played out in Noddy Boffins's pretended miserliness, and sacrifices

her great expectations in defense of John Harmon. In so doing, Bella

demonstrates herself as worthy of Harmon's love, just as Eugene demonstrates his

worth of Lizzie's love in repudiating the society he had been surrounded by.

Unlike earlier Dickens heroines, though, Bella wants to become "something so

much worthier than the doll in the doll's house," and does. Both Bella (the

Estella figure) and Eugene (the Pip figure) prove themselves after marriage,

when the real tests come. Marriage is no longer an end for Dickens, the symbol

of order and success. Rather it is something that needs to be worked at and

worked out. And Bella, who proves to be "true golden gold at heart," and Lizzie,

whom Eugene calls a "heroine," live together with their husbands in London

where, for Dickens, the real work needs to be done. Dickens celebrates the

moment of Bella's marriage with John with the message that has been central to

his vision from the beginning: and "O there days in this life, worth life and

worth death. And O what a bright old song it is that O 'tis love 'tis love, that

makes the world go round."

Our Mutual Friend ends with Mortimer Lightwood, who feels that, like Dickens, he

has "the eyes of Europe upon him" as he tells his stories at the Veneerings'

dinner parties, seeking the true voice of society while he reports the story of

Eugene and Lizzie. He discovers it in Twemlow, who knows what it means to act

nobly. Dickens must himself have been wondering about the voice of society with

regard to his personal situation, and probably with Mortimer's perspective.

Neither Dickens nor Mortimer participates directly in the happiness of those

they tell stories about. But they share the vision and take joy in seeing the

results of the stories and the effects those stories have on their audiences.

Dickens, our greatest storyteller, may not have discovered the personal

happiness in his own marriage that Eugene and John Harmon, the Pip and David of

his last completed novel, achieve, but in the end he achieves personal

fulfillment through his art. David realizes, in the life of his novel, what

Dickens saw represented in Mary Hogarth, and what was not attainable in his own

life. That Dickens's own fulfillment is in creating the vision rather than

attaining it here may be explained in part by the fact that Dickens is an artist

and in part by the kind of artist he is. According to Forster, Not his genius

only, but his whole nature, was too exclusively made up of sympathy for, and

with, the real in its most intense form, to be sufficiently provided against

failure in the realities around him. There was for him no 'city of the mind'

against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter. It was in and from the

actual he still stretched forward to find the freedom and satisfaction of an

ideal, and by his very attempts to escape the world he was driven back into the

thick of it. But what he would have sought there, it supplies to none; and to

get the infinite out of anything so finite, has broken many a stout heart.

Dickens has shown us how the real can more nearly approximate his vision of the

ideal through his novels. In his later years he told those stories in brilliant

public readings from his novels in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and in

America, where people stood all night in lines one half mile long to purchase

tickets to see him perform.

His last novel, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood , was to be issued in twelve monthly

numbers from April, 1870, but he died in June, having completed half the

mystery. In this novel, Dickens extends his vision beyond England to include the

empire itself. It appears as if he would continue to make yet another advance in

his artistic development in this unfinished novel.

Dickens died June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In a letter to

Forster, Carlyle sends his condolences: "I am profoundly sorry for you and

indeed for myself and for us all. It is an event world-wide; a unique of talents

suddenly extinct; and has "eclipsed," we too may say, "the harmless gaiety of

nations.' No death since 1866 [the year of Carlyle's wife's death] has fallen on

me with such a stroke. No literary man's hitherto ever did. The good, the

gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens, -- every inch of him an

Honest Man."
 
 
 
 

(c) Bob Heaman 1996.