[In the following essay, Collins examines the therapeutic quality of Dickens's use of fancy and imagination in Our Mutual Friend, and suggests that this is reflective of the author's preoccupation with his own dwindling creative powers.]

For J. Hillis Miller Dickens's attention to the “otherness of elemental matter” in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) functions as a kind of anti-transcendental vision: “the river, the dust, the wind, and the fire are what they are: mere matter.” They “are not symbols, if that means expressions of some reality which transcends them, and for which they stand.”¹ Yet transcendence and renewal, as Miller well realises, are part of the very fabric of Our Mutual Friend, their presence inseparable from the novel's concern with a world of remorseless physical disintegration. Inseparable from this same “Gestalt,” as I hope to show, is the novel's ubiquitous emphasis on the idea of the fancy. For one reason why the fancy looms so large in the novel is because in writing it Dickens had been made to confront as never before the possible exhaustion of his own creative gift.² Nevertheless Dickens's belief in the fancy, from the time of his first crucial contacts with the contents of his father's library, had long depended on his own experience of the therapeutic potential of fanciful activity at a time of personal crisis. So now, amid the creative vicissitudes of Our Mutual Friend, the fancy continued to make itself available as an instrument of adjustment. It did so, however, not by providing any blessed release from professional or domestic care (for such consolations were all but extinct), but by allowing him to use his vocation to deflect the now unmistakable signs of his own mortality. Thus Hillis Miller is quite right to stress the degree of Dickens's concern in Our Mutual Friend with the problem of “how to assume death into life—without simply and literally dying.”³ But what he does not explore are the connections between his insight and the actual circumstances of composition. The purpose of this essay is to complement Miller's analysis (and more recent work by Andrew Sanders and Albert Hutter) by showing how in Our Mutual Friend Dickens's preoccupation with the terms of his art is rooted in his personal and creative situation, and testifies in particular to his longing for some form of human permanence.⁴

Dickens in Our Mutual Friend is acutely aware of the idea of futurity. Such an emphasis is implicit in some occasional yet very direct tributes to vocational goodness which occur throughout the book, and which contrast so markedly with the more general tone of acerbic disenchantment. Old Harmon, for example, has attempted to tamper with the lives of others from the grave itself.⁵ He has also directed himself to be buried “with certain eccentric ceremonies and precautions against his coming to life.”⁶ Yet even his nature could not remain indifferent to “the moral straightness” of the Boffins, and the recognition brings from Dickens a remarkable statement of affirmation: “In its own despite, in a constant conflict with itself and them, it had done so. And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it! but Good never” (p. 101).

Dickens can rarely have expressed himself so quixotically, yet in a late passage of obvious personal relevance, especially when we consider that he was soon to embark on the calculated conventionalities of his novel's resolution, he again delivers himself of another highly conspicuous tribute, this time to the merits of that “good Christian pair,” the Milveys. The Milveys, he tells us, are representative “of hundreds of other good Christian pairs as conscientious and as useful, who merge the smallness of their work in its greatness, and feel in no danger of losing dignity when they adapt themselves to incomprehensible humbugs” (p. 748). Present here perhaps is a certain amount of professional constraint, suggestive of Dickens's possible impatience as he prepared once more to confront the demands of popular taste in his denouement. Yet the regard for professional dedication is so striking (House notes that the Milveys are “almost alone” in the novels in showing the workings of a well run parish),⁷ that it is by no means impaired by the final shift of tone.

The Milveys then, and the Boffins, Betty Higden, and Lizzie Hexam also, reflect the Dickensian ideal of practical benevolence with particular clarity. “‘No one is useless in this world,’” remarks John Harmon to Bella, “‘who lightens the burden of it for anyone else’” (p. 520). The emphasis is familiar yet at the same time novel, for Dickens in Our Mutual Friend would seem to be writing with an awareness new to him that the life of the work might well outlast his own. Knowing full well that evil, just as much as good, was by no means compelled “to die with the doer of it,” Dickens confronts in this novel all his considerable powers of posthumous influence. Dickens however seems always to wish to hold in check the more destructive possibilities of his own increasing years, and he indulges in none of Old Harmon's attempts to subvert the possibility of life after death. Rather it seems he is concerned (albeit unconsciously) to promote that very thing, and I would submit that with the possible exception of his public readings his most conspicuous instrument in that strategy resides in his work itself. From this perspective the painful yet supremely dedicated composition of Our Mutual Friend is both a memento mori and a means of coping with that same recognition: death is defeated (in a strategy both classic and intensely local) by means of a defiant act of will and an accommodatory insistence on the power of the word.

Such a contention finds support in one of the novel's most intriguing motifs, that concerned with the preservation or possible cancellation of the name. Thus one of the reasons John Harmon adduces for continuing to live as Rokesmith is that “dead,” he has been able to enjoy the spectacle of the Boffins “‘making my memory an incentive to good actions done in my name’” (p. 372). And the Boffins have indeed insisted that his own name, and that of his sister, written as children on the walls of Harmony Jail, shall be preserved: “‘We must take care of the names, old lady,’ said Mr. Boffin. ‘We must take care of the names. They shan't be rubbed out in our time, nor yet, if we can help it, in the time after us’” (p. 184). Part of Bradley Headstone's tragedy, of course, is that he has created an identity which makes such remembrance impossible. When Charley Hexam rejects him he is totally friendless, and when in the schoolroom scene with Riderhood he erases his name from his own blackboard the image is one with the immense and self-reflexive power of the scene as a whole. For Bradley, in his commitment to earth, merely ensures the triumph of earth. Dickens, in his flawed contending commitment to spirit, seems to envisage the triumph of his own spirit, his memory too preserved as “an incentive to good actions done in my name.” In this way that elemental dissolving otherness of which he seems so conscious, the vision not just of social and moral collapse but of literal, physical disintegration, can be confronted and contained. Thus if Dickens at the time of Our Mutual Friend was burdened by the threat of decline both physical and creative, the idea of imagination continued to be available to him as a resource and defence. Springing as it does from a situation of unparalleled compositional difficulty, but also from Dickens's need to contain the evidence of apparent dissolution, the theme of the fancy in Our Mutual Friend is present in ways that are unprecedented in Dickens's previous work.

The roots of Dickens's theory of fancy are essentially private: fancy functions morally, is a source of private and public redemption, because Dickens had himself known its efficacy, its utility as a means of personal comfort and accommodation. In ways that have by no means been exhausted by previous criticism the supreme exponent of Dickensian fancy in Our Mutual Friend is Jenny Wren.⁸ However, before proceeding to an examination of Jenny's role in the novel, and in particular to the connections between that role and Dickens's own situation, I should like to look briefly at one other character, Mortimer Lightwood's solitary clerk, Blight, who also employs the imagination as a strategy of containment.

Early in the novel Mortimer expresses his doubts about the impact on Blight's moral sense of his confinement, “‘high up an awful staircase commanding a burial ground,’” at which he has nothing to do all day but look. “‘What he will turn out when arrived at maturity,’” Mortimer cannot conceive. “‘Whether, in that shabby rook's nest, he is always plotting wisdom, or plotting murder; whether he will grow up, after so much solitary brooding, to enlighten his fellow creatures, or to poison them; is the only speck of interest that presents itself to my professional view’” (p. 20). Mortimer's question is quintessentially Dickensian, yet Blight does come through, saved by imaginative activity that not only allows him to cope with his predicament, but prevents him from committing the mayhem Mortimer fears because of it. “‘Wearing in his solitary confinement no fetters that he could polish, and being provided with no drinking cup that he could carve,’” Blight has fallen on the device of “ringing alphabetical changes” in Mortimer's Appointments and Callers' Books. “Without this fiction of an occupation” his mind would since have been “shattered to pieces” (p. 87).

Blight's rote permutations of Aggs, Baggs, Caggs, Daggs and so on may seem not at all like the inventions of a particularly active imagination, and they (and his name) may well contain something of Dickens's compositional difficulty. Yet his activities are most certainly therapeutic, and they allow him not only to preserve his sanity but to deflect the pressures of the graveyard with considerable success. For Blight is Dickens's comic and distancing projection both of his own compositional exigencies and of his continuing need to believe in the imagination's accommodatory power. Thus if Blight's “eyrie” is a dusty one (p. 86), he is decidedly not a bird of prey. His real allegiance is to air rather than earth and in this he participates in that central cluster of images that is so important in defining the significance of Jenny Wren. Only in Jenny Wren however does Dickens reveal the full strain to which he was now exposed by the decline of his health and talent.

For Richard A. Lanham, “Our Mutual Friend has far more in common with allegory than with realism,”⁹ and of no scenes in the book is this more true than of those in which Jenny participates. Jenny reveals what Dickens has always seemed to wish to provide for his contemporary audience, the fancy as a means of accommodation and imaginative compensation. She also embodies Dickens's empirical belief in the imagination as moral instrument: her visions come to her not just as an apparent “compensation for her losses” (p. 239), or as a blessed release from her labours, but are invariably associated with her “prettier and better state.” The great difference between Jenny and her creator, however, was that Dickens was now increasingly denied the imaginative release that Jenny enjoys so thoroughly. This difference becomes particularly clear if we consider the most important scenes which involve Jenny Wren, those which take place on the rooftop of Pubsey and Co., for no scenes in the novel embody Dickens's condition more graphically.

Here our understanding increases immeasurably if we consider the actual context of composition. For the chapter in question belongs to number seven in the original parts publication, the number which Dickens began immediately after receiving news of the five thousand drop in circulation that occurred between the first and second number. “This leaves me,” he wrote to Forster (10 June 1864), “going round and round like a carrier pigeon before swooping on number seven.”¹⁰ His choice of verb implies confidence perhaps, yet his letters of July and August contain some of his most anxious statements about his failing health and powers. “This week,” he wrote on 29 July, “I have been very unwell, am still out of sorts, and, as I know from two days slow experience, have a very mountain to climb before I shall see the open country of my work.”¹¹ The novel was obviously proving an immense burden for him, and as sales continued to fall he turned to the Christmas story of that year as a kind of liberation, even though it was adding to his labours. So on 1 October he wrote to W. H. Wills: “Mrs. Lirriper is again in hand. I have flown off from the finish of No. IX of Our Mutual, to perch upon her cap.”¹² But since October marked the appearance of number six of the novel, it is clear that between June, when he was very close to being on schedule, and October, Dickens had indeed lost one number of his original four number advance. Some of the most memorable and intimate scenes in all of Dickens stem from the onset of this period of intense private and creative stress.

Crucially, therefore, the sole reason Jenny and Lizzie are on the rooftop is that it is a holiday: “‘Busy early and late … early and late … in bye-times, as on this holiday,’” Jenny and Lizzie “‘go to book-learning’” (p. 280). And they do so up in the air, in a rooftop garden amidst an “encompassing wilderness of dowager old chimneys” looking on “in a state of airy surprise” (p. 279). Clearly present here is what Garrett Stewart has described as Dickens's version of the myth of romantic haven,¹³ but so also is that pole of Dickens's romantic dialectic which Stewart tends to underplay. The rooftop partakes not just of the pastoral bower but of the schoolroom: it is “a relief and a leniency”¹⁴ certainly, but also a shaping, a strategical retreat which makes possible a moral strengthening. The scene describes a conscious moment apart that is also a preparation for return, a return that is clearly perceived and accepted in the knowledge that it can now be borne more easily.

Above all, however, the rooftop sequence is a lyric epitome of Dickens's view of his own function while at the same time it springs from deep within his personal situation. For if Jenny Wren's visions are unquestionably therapeutic, propounding a mode of transcendence necessary for everyone who labours, this was a condition which Dickens knew all too rarely as he toiled over a work which so often failed to take flight. So at the heart of Jenny's remarks is the sense of a world of work and deprivation, of the needs of all those “‘who are alive, crying, and working, and calling to one another in the close dark streets’” (p. 281). They too need to be taken up and made light: their needs are Dickens's needs as Jenny's speech embodies the possibilities of imagination not just in a new dark age but in a time of private darkness.¹⁵ “‘Come up and be dead,’” says Jenny, “‘come up and be dead.’” Dead, that is, to the world, to the self, to its burdens, and its otherwise intolerable loneliness. Dead, that is, in order to be reborn, reborn through fancy, so as to be able to re-enter the world and shoulder its burdens afresh. Dickens by contrast had to shoulder the burden of physical and mental decay without that sense of creative release with which he had been long familiar, and from which his theory of fancy ultimately derives. The rooftop scenes are replete with all of Dickens's nostalgia for a form of therapy that he now found increasingly unavailable, but which out of the pressures of his own situation he continued to wish to make available to others.

Thus in Our Mutual Friend we have the spectacle of a novelist who suspects himself to have reached the decline of his powers but who nonetheless contrives to find in imagination the means of his own salvation. For if Dickens at this time was increasingly deprived of those moments of imaginative release that had formerly helped buttress his creative commitment, so was he impelled as never before by the need to use imagination to contain his own mortality. Dickens's need to complete the novel was therefore enormous. At the same time, however, his desire for an end to the pressures of composition appears to have been intense. So, in a letter written about this time to the book's eventual dedicatee, Sir James Emerson Tennent, Dickens resorts to the same revealing imagery of imprisonment he had used for Blight and Jenny Wren. “After receiving your kind note,” he writes (26 August 1864), “I resolved to make another trial. But the hot weather and a few other drawbacks did not mend the matter, for I have dropped astern this month instead of going ahead. So I have seen Forster and shown him my chains, and am reduced to taking exercise in them like Baron Trench.”¹⁶

Blight and Jenny Wren on their respective rooftops knew what it was to lose such chains. “‘And such a chain has fallen from you,’” says Jenny, “‘and such a strange good sorrowful happiness comes upon you’” (p. 281). Debarred almost entirely from joining them there, Dickens, only a few months later came to indite his remarkable comments on the half-drowned Riderhood: “And yet, like us all, when we swoon—like us all, every day of our lives when we wake—he is instinctively unwilling to be restored to the consciousness of this existence, and would be left dormant, if he could” (p. 444-45). The pressure of personal statement is visible here to an extraordinary extent, for the passage's intrusive insistence is matched by the fact that for many in the book's original audience it must have seemed seriously lacking in application. Again, however, the actual context of composition proves illuminating. For the passage comes from the second chapter (“A Respected Friend in a New Aspect”) of number eleven. If we remember that number nine was complete by October 1, it seems clear that Dickens should have been at work on number eleven some time in November. Yet in this same month he again wrote to Forster complaining that he had not done his number, and on this occasion ascribing his difficulties to the death of his friend Leech.¹⁷

Leech's death on October 29 was the latest in a long series of bereavements that Dickens had experienced since the beginning of the decade: Dickens's mother, his son Walter, the novelist Thackeray (with whom Dickens had only recently been reconciled), and a variety of other members of Dickens's family and circle of friends had all died during the period of the novel's gestation and composition.¹⁸ Death for Dickens in these years is all-pervasive, and clearly there were times when he was not indifferent to it as a solution to his difficulties. Death, however, may not only seduce but inspire, and inspire by suggesting the strategies of its own defeat. For if Jenny Wren sings (as in part she does) of the sweetness of oblivion with all the compassionate restful inclusiveness for which Dickens longs, Dickens, in creating her, resists her nightingale-like song, and finds, with Keats, his true “high requiem” in the work itself. Death in those famous scenes on the rooftop most certainly announces a movement back into life, not simply as a general existential emphasis such as Miller describes, but immediately, specifically, into the life of the work as it will outlast and preserve the man.

Notes

1. “Afterword,” Our Mutual Friend (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 910.

2. For a still important early survey of the concept of fancy in Dickens, see P. A. W. Collins, “‘Queen Mab's Chariot among the Steam Engines’: Dickens and ‘Fancy,’” ES [English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature], 42 (1961), 78-90.

3. Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 316.

4. See Andrew Sanders, Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist (London: Macmillan, 1982), and two essays by Albert D. Hutter, “Dismemberment and Articulation in Our Mutual Friend,” Dickens Studies Annual, 11 (1983), 135-75, and “The Novelist as Resurrectionist: Dickens and the Dilemma of Death,” Dickens Studies Annual, 12 (1983), 1-39.

5. This, of course, was a power with which Dickens was himself familiar, and changes in one of his own wills date from 1861, the year in which the novel's title was conceived. See Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), II, 1110-111, and xcv, note 23a.

6. New Oxford Illustrated Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 15. All subsequent page references are to this edition.

7. The Dickens World, 2nd ed. (1941; London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 110.

8. See in particular Garrett Stewart, “The Golden Bower of Our Mutual Friend,” in Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 198-221.

9. “Our Mutual Friend: The Birds of Prey,” Victorian Newsletter, 24 (1963), 11.

10. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. A. J. Hoppé (London: J. M. Dent, 1966), II, 293. Robert L. Patten indicates an initial printing of 40,000 copies (of which 35,000 were stitched), this declining by the time of the sixth number in October to 28,000 copies (24,000 stitched), and to 25,000 (19,000 stitched) by the time of the final double number in November 1865. See Robert L. Patten, Charles Dickens and His Publishers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 446.

11. Forster, II, 293.

12. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter (Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press, 1938), III, 399.

13. Dickens and the Trials of Imagination, p. 199 ff.

14. Ibid., p. 221.

15. Compare Dickens's famous rebuttal of the criticism of Hippolyte Taine that his work suffered from an imaginative excess akin to madness: see Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, II, 279.

16. Letters, III, 396.

17. Letters, III, 404.

18. For a full account of Dickens's losses in these years, see Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, II, 970, 997-1017. See also Andrew Sanders's chapter, “This Tremendous Sickle …,” in Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist, pp. 37-63.