Dickens and his old horror of the dark river

Our Mutual Friend By Charles Dickens: Chapman and Hall

Mr Dickens, who has so long been accustomed to let his novels dribble forth in weekly instalments, is carrying us back to old times by bringing out a story in monthly parts.

In much which those thirty pages contain, we recognise the beginnings of original ideas which have not had their development in any previous novel. Especially we recognise the easy mastery of language and the fanciful style which distinguishes all of Mr. Dickens's writing.

Quaint adjectives which embody an idea as vividly as a gleam of sunshine will reveal a landscape, and a richness of imagination which is playfully poured out over every subject he treats, may always be observed in any utterance by the great author of "David Copperfield".

Mr. Dickens's old horror of the dark river comes out again in the very first sentences. A man who gets his living fishing for dead bodies in the Thames is the first personage introduced.

In the mystery concerning the disappearance of a certain Mr Harmon, who was to come over from the West Indies to inherit a large fortune and marry a young lady left to him under the will, there is already a good deal of interest.

It is a body which is supposed to be his which is found by the river searcher when we first see him at his work. The clothes on it are identified and everything appears to show that the body is really that of Mr. Harmon, but perhaps some persons inclined to speculate will think that it may not be Mr. Harmon after all.

In the opening passages, Mr. Dickens's early style reappears :

"... A boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames as an autumn evening was closing in. The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, kept an eager look-out. He had no net, hook or line, and he could not be a fisherman; and he could not be a waterman ... but his eyes watched every little race and eddy. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror."

For some time to come there will be a new interest in the first of each month, for a new novel by Dickens is a literary event.