[In the following essay, Lanham claims that the theme of Our Mutual Friend is predation rather than money.]

Our Mutual Friend's reputation began in the cellar with Henry James' famous review, and climbed steadily in critical esteem until Edmund Wilson's reappraisal established it at the top of the house. The two opinions make a startling contrast. James had begun his review, “Our Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration.”¹ Dickens was certainly a hard- (if self-) driven man while he was working on the novel, as anyone reviewing the period in Johnson or in the Letters will quickly recall. But the pressures of his readings and of his personal life can hardly have been fatal to his writing, to judge from Wilson's verdict on this, his last complete novel: “Dickens has here distilled the mood of his later years, dramatized the tragic discrepancies of his characters, delivered his final judgment on the whole Victorian exploit, in a fashion so impressive that we realize how little the distractions of this period had the power to direct him from the prime purpose of his life: the serious exercise of his art.”² One could scarcely find a comparable gulf in esteem for one of the earlier mature novels, Bleak House for example. Why for Our Mutual Friend? James was put off, to be sure, by the unrelieved grimness of the novel, by a spectrum of characters who seem never to break out of the shades of grey. His principal objection, though, was more comprehensive; the adverse verdict of a realist against a form of the novel which diverged markedly and persistently from the canons of realism: “What a world were this world if the world of ‘Our Mutual Friend’ were an honest reflection of it!” “Who,” he asks later in the same review, “represents nature?” Wilson, more sympathetic perhaps with Dickens' social views, certainly less doctrinaire critically, was willing to credit Our Mutual Friend for its successes, rather than reproaching it for a failure in what it hardly even aims at—the recreation of everyday reality. These two positions can stand as the two polar positions taken on the novel in our own time. On the one hand, discussion has centered on the artistic quality of the novel: Had Dickens written himself out? Had he soured the well-springs of joy which transformed the equally forbidding urban landscape of his earlier years into the joyous “world,” as it is now called, of the first novels? Is the large cast of minor characters like so many mutilated frogs, as George Henry Lewes charged about the Dickensian characters generally, each capable of but a single response to all stimuli? Is credibility destroyed by Boffin's temporary change of character? And so on. The second locus of debate has been the nature and accuracy of Dickens' social statement: Do we actually learn anything of practical value about the afflictions and evils of the full Victorian prosperity? Or is the novel simply an elaborate emotional, even sentimental, outburst which tells us little more than that something is dreadfully wrong? The later charge has persisted. Walter Bagehot made it of the earlier novels, in fact, even before Our Mutual Friend was written (in the essay on Dickens in Volume II of Literary Studies). It has been elaborated from Lewes down to Orwell. Dickens, Orwell writes, seems always to “reach out for an idealised version of the existing thing,”³ rather than analyzing the structure of society in any mature way. The Marxist critics have maintained precisely the opposite. The novel is a brilliant damnation of the capitalist experiment. Reaching down to those levels of primitive myth and symbol available to all, Dickens has laid before us with his unforgettable vivid particulars the ugly surface and worse than ugly heart of an acquisitive society.

What Dickens has tried to do, then, and how well he has done it have been asked of Our Mutual Friend more often than the perhaps simpler question: how does Dickens embody his social criticism? None of the three can be considered separately, of course. Each problem constantly modifies our assessment of the other two. But to the extent that any one can be singled out, perhaps it should be method. The shortest path to Dickens' method seems to me to be through theme.

Money, it seems generally agreed, is the central theme of Our Mutual Friend. As Robert Morse wrote several years ago: “Each novel, then, is about something, and furthermore about something serious … Our Mutual Friend deals with Money. …”⁴ Money is embodied in the Dust Heap which is the hub of plot as well as theme. The dead hand which reaches out from the grave to set the novel in motion is the force of money. The minor characters all seek money. It is Bella Wilfer's most compelling goal until she is dissolved in sentimentality at the end of the novel. It is the catalyst in Boffin's fake chemical change from Daddy Warbucks to Simon Legree. It is everywhere and in everything. But what, one is entitled to ask, does it represent? Is it intrinsically bad? Hardly. The upper-middle-class, rentier life which Orwell so perceptively isolated as Dickens' version of earthly paradise demands it in quantity. It is the chief force behind the sentimental happy ending in most of the later novels. No, money itself as a central theme would lead to a fundamental inconsistency.

Yet the central theme must be related to money integrally, for its omnipresence in the novel is undeniable. I would like to suggest that money was, for Dickens, symptom rather than disease: the disease, and the real theme, is predation. The thematically typical incident of the novel seems to me that of one man's preying on another. The opening scene of the novel, one few will forget, shows us Gaffer Hexam at his loathsome job of fishing, not for souls, but for bodies. In the Marcus Stone illustration—the first in the novel—we see the Gaffer bent forward in the stern of his dory, watching his taut grappling line like a vulture. He and his daughter are doing something, Dickens remarks bitterly, “that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare … still there was business-like [a phrase the reader should remember when he meets the respectable business world of Podsnap and Veneering] usage in his steady gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with every turn of her wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or horror; they were things of usage.”⁵ Not simply the preying upon one's fellow man, but the habit of it repels us. This ghastly habit is not, however, the final horror for the reader. The Gaffer's attitude toward his work provides that. Lizzie's shudder of disgust at the faint red outline left in the bottom of the boat by a previous corpse, elicits this single-minded reply from a Gaffer intent on his work: “‘What ails you?’ … ‘I see nothing afloat.’” (p. 2) When the corpse is finally hooked and gaffed (surely the pun, in a novel where word-play is so frequent, is intentional), Lizzie blanches at the prospect of sitting next to it. “‘As if it wasn't your living! As if it wasn't meat and drink to you!’” (p. 3) And with this delightfully apt metaphor (which the Gaffer goes on to amplify) the pattern of predation with which Dickens chose to begin the novel comes clearly into focus. Lizzie is not alone in her predicament, the debt her flesh and blood owes to the grisly “business” we have just witnessed. For if the river is the liquid sewer of London, the dust-heap is the dry one, and the two together provide food and drink for the majority of the characters in the novel.

Gaffer's character is not complete as yet. He must encounter a fellow scavenger (Rogue Riderhood) envious of the Gaffer's “luck.” The irony here needs emphasis if not elucidation; in this novel “luck” for someone always implies ill-luck for someone else. Every crust of bread consumed must be snatched from another's mouth. Here at the beginning, by describing the “lucky” catch of a sodden corpse, Dickens burns this inescapable pattern of predation into the reader's mind. The scene closes with the Gaffer's indignation at Rogue's calling him “pardner.” Rogue, we learn, has been caught robbing a live man; he is not fit to associate with respectable folk of the Hexams' ilk, who prey off the dead. The blindness here, so ridiculous as almost but not quite to fall over into humor, is widespread in the world of Our Mutual Friend. Perfectly respectable “luck” is cherished on more than one level of society. As for Gaffer's explanation:

Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? T'other world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse's? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don't try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way.

(pp. 4-5)

The ripples of irony spread out in ever-larger circles through the novel's plot, a plot about the will of a dead man toward another supposedly “dead” man. Gaffer is speaking of money. But his horrible moral blindness, not the money which occasions it, is what we are meant to attend.

“Gaffer,” Dickens tells us, “was no neophyte and had no fancies.” (p. 5) When we turn the page we plunge into a world which is nothing but the fancies of neophytes: “Mr. and Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London.” (p. 6) And off Dickens goes for another tour de force paragraph. The comparison implied by the juxtaposition is clear. The world of Podsnappery and Veneering is scarcely more than a polite form of the predatory behavior we have just left behind. The Veneerings, if we may speak symbolically, have come up from somewhere in the vicinity of the river. As with Gaffer, it is not money, but attitude toward one's fellow-man—cold and mechanical—which is significant. It is the money, though, which attracts that sympathetic and impoverished professional dinner guest, Twemlow. In his own way Twemlow is a “bird of prey,” too. Ludicrous and inoffensive aristocratic furniture that he is, still he lives off the bounty of others.

To follow this pattern of predation out in the minor characters is to establish its centrality beyond doubt. Consider the fetching pair of lovers Alfred Lammle and Sophronia Akersham. Each lives on the fringes of the middle-class world watching, like a pike in a pond, for a fat victim, until with fine poetic justice the two pikes fasten on one another. They wake up, willy-nilly, as a team, and immediately turn on the weakest fish in sight, Georgiana Podsnap. That they should choose to feed her to that young-in-years but old-in-guile whiskerless shark, Fledgby, seems, in the world which Dickens builds up, almost inevitable.

James to the contrary notwithstanding, Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood are two of Dickens' more engaging minor characters. They display a sophistication, are drawn with lightness of touch, in which he did not often indulge himself. Though they are present at the Veneerings' first surrealistic feast, we really meet them in the coach riding home:

‘I hate,’ said Eugene, putting his legs up on the opposite seat, ‘I hate my profession.’

‘Shall I incommode you if I put mine up too?’ returned Mortimer. ‘Thank you. I hate mine.’

(pp. 19-20)

In a novel so intimately bound up with “getting ahead,” “getting rich,” these two are anomalies. The contrast with young Hexam, pushed by Lizzie a step or two up learning's impoverished ladder of respectability, could be deliberate. The contrast with Headstone is intended beyond doubt. The two lawyers contrast too, though in a different way, with Podsnap and Veneering: failure and success. The men of law are Gentlemen, of course, as the other two are not, but all four live in the same world of scrambling acquisitiveness:

‘Then idiots talk,’ said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, ‘of Energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, “Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you?” Yet that would be energy.’

(p. 20)

Though Dickens may simply be drawing two callow young men too lazy even to be wild, such portraits hardly seem adequate motive for their creation. They are, in fact, walking repudiations of that vulgar aggressiveness which has propelled Podsnap and Veneering to wealth and honor in the city. They are against work. Look, for example, at Eugene's rejoinder, when Boffin holds up the bees as a model of pertinacious industry:

‘And how do you like the law?’

‘A———not particularly,’ returned Eugene.

‘Too dry for you, eh? Well, I suppose it wants some years of sticking to, before you master it. But there's nothing like work. Look at the bees.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ returned Eugene, with a reluctant smile, ‘but will you excuse my mentioning that I always protest against being referred to the bees?’

‘Do you!’ said Mr. Boffin.

‘I object on principle,’ said Eugene, ‘as a biped———’

‘As a what?’ asked Mr. Boffin.

‘As a two-footed creature;—I object, on principle, as a two-footed creature, to being constantly referred to insects and four-footed creatures. I object to being required to model my proceedings according to the proceedings of the bee, or the dog, or the spider, or the camel. … I am not clear, Mr. Boffin, but that the hive may be satirical.’

‘At all events, they work,’ said Mr. Boffin.

‘Ye-es,’ returned Eugene, disparagingly, ‘they work; but don't you think they overdo it? They work so much more than they need—they make so much more than they can eat—they are so incessantly boring and buzzing at their one idea till Death comes upon them—that don't you think they overdo it?’

(pp. 93-4)

A curious passage from Dickens, obsessed by work as he was, and still odder in a novel supposedly devoted, as the Marxists would have us believe, to class-hatred. Whom are we to hate? If anyone, surely those who live as unproductive drones on the hive of dutiful proletarian workers. Yet we don't hate Eugene and Mortimer; they are civilization itself compared to that model of energetic work, Bradley Headstone, or even to Podsnap or Veneering. Why? Because they have contracted out of the business of the world. This is admirable, for the business of the world is simply preying on one's fellow man. They are against work. Ergo, they are not predators. The Protestant gospel of work, Dickens seems to be saying through them, is simply apotheosized greed and anyone who has the wit to see it and resign from the rat-race deserves one's admiration, whatever his social class.

If Dickens had been as blinded by the class-struggle as his later Marxist readers, he would hardly have given us Headstone and young Hexam. Of Headstone it is perhaps not fair to speak, since his true place is not in a social class at all but rather among the Dickens gallery of psychological grotesques drawn for their own sakes. But what of young Hexam? He is the stuff young Socialist workers are made of; young, ambitious, earnest. But he is also progressively more unkind, grasping, selfish and insensitive. He ultimately turns on Headstone, his benefactor and teacher, an apostasy which may offend the reader even more than his abuse of his sister, when she refuses to marry Headstone. No, though a proletarian, he is caught up in the same pernicious ethic of “success” which has forced the young solicitor and barrister into their hatred professions, and which allows Rogue Riderhood, and Gaffer himself, to look upon that latter scavenger as, given his calling and opportunities, a “success.”

Even down to the least important characters, the pattern of predation is traced. Hard, cold, joyless Silas Wegg, for example. He attaches himself to Boffin like a leach. While still at the old stall, he “speculates,” he “invests” a bow in Boffin. It pays off. He spends the rest of the novel in alternate scheming to rob Boffin and comic self-praise for his own virtue and industry in so doing. He replies to Mr. Venus' query about Rokesmith's honesty, after the secretary had stopped by the “Bower” one evening, with: “‘Something against him’? repeats Wegg. ‘Something? What would the relief be to my feelings—as a fellow-man—if I wasn't the slave of truth, and didn't feel myself compelled to answer, Everything!’” (p. 306) It is a comic repetition, at a lower level, of Podsnap's blind, self-righteous indignation at all which might bring a blush to the cheek of a young person. Still more nightmarish a predator, though he is finally redeemed by authorial fiat, is Wegg's co-conspirator, Mr. Venus. That enemy of the fertility his name implies (he is also, one remembers, an unsuccessful lover) keeps a shop which retails the bones of the dead. In the panorama of birds of prey which Dickens gives us, he makes an honest living by keeping the charnel house. Wegg initially finds his way to Venus' shop because Venus had bought the bone of the leg which Wegg had lost in a hospital amputation. Wegg now wishes to buy the bone back, to retrieve it for a keepsake from the tray of “human various” where it lives in Venus' shop:

‘You're casting your eye round the shop, Mr. Wegg. Let me show you a light. My working bench. My young man's bench. A Wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones a-top. What's in those hampers over them again, I don't quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh dear me! That's the general panoramic view.’

(p. 81)

Comic and bizarre as the pair are, their illustration of the general “predation” theme is unmistakable. Venus' shop, like the dust-heap and the river, preys on and purveys a particular variety of human waste.

From the orphan-selling business to the sweat of Rogue Riderhood's brow, the world of Our Mutual Friend is full of predators, each trying to live at the expense of the others. Sometimes the earnestness of effort is comic wholly, as with Mortimer Lightwood's clerk, Young Blight. Blight one remembers is driven by his own zeal and his employer's sloath (he has the energy Mortimer and Eugene lack) to invent a whole file of imaginary clients to labor for. Sometimes the moral blindness is as pathetic as repugnant, as with Gaffer Hexam. But in every case, Dickens' verdict is clear: society is so arranged that its members, if they are to survive, must prey off one another. As Mortimer Lightwood says flippantly to Lady Tippins a few pages from the end of the novel:

‘Say, how did you leave the savages?’ asks Lady Tippins.

‘They were becoming civilized when I left Juan Fernandez,’ says Lightwood. ‘At least they were eating one another, which looked like it.’

(p. 816)

The reader is free to make what he wishes of this kaleidoscopic pattern of predators. He can interpret it as a gasp of horror at the Victorian conception of a flourishing society. He can infer that Dickens felt a change of heart rather than a change of economic system was in order. Or, the novel can be construed as a savage attack on Industrial Capitalism, as a system which converts a presumably benign state of natural society into a jungle. The real core of the Capitalistic malaise, an economy run for private profit, is singled out clearly enough to support such an interpretation. Or, still more grandly, he can credit Dickens with that breadth of philosophic wisdom needful to see that society itself, at all times and places, has been a pike-pond; that mankind is tragically condemned to prey one on the other. Not capitalism, not Victorian vulgarity as a sub-species of it, but drives far older and more difficult to cope with, may be the final theme of the novel.

Dickens forces not one of these constructions on the reader. He presents us with a concrete series of human encounters which together form an abstract pattern of predation. We are free, as we are in life itself, to make of it what we choose. I myself would opt for the last conjecture. Dickens has not, it seems to me, stayed very long or convincingly within the boundaries of topical satire. Victorian England, like the money which most directly represents it, was not the cause of evil but only one of its manifestations. This is but to say that Our Mutual Friend is satire, and that satire always uses current abuses as a platform from which to inveigh against eternal evils. Satire owes to society, properly speaking, no explicit rebuilding duties at all. Implicit in its criticism, of course, must be the values society needs to recreate itself in a more pleasing image. But satire is under no constraint to say, “You must tear down slums! You must open homes for unwed mothers!” The satirist is not obliged to be a social worker; still more importantly the social worker's solutions are bound to damage the strength and blur the focus of the satire. Surely this is Dickens' mistake here, indeed in all the satirical novels; he is too explicit. Special abuses, special laws are touted up in passing; not used as building blocks for a larger pattern of indictments but introduced to impel the mass of his readers to specific action. Thus those embarrassing, maudlin passages we should all like to forget: the turgid, inflated rhetorical expostulations to the political powers about Jo, the half-wit crossing sweeper in Bleak House; the shouts of pathetic rage at the poor laws which accompany the unforgivable sentimental slaughter of Betty Higden. When Dickens is specific in his social criticism, he commits the satirist's fatal error. He bores us.

What satirist, after all, has ever made really valuable, forward-looking criticisms of the transformations which the Industrial Revolution has brought about? These transformations have been clearly the real subject of satire in England and America since Pope's time. The satirists from Pope onward have all been wrong, backward, blinded. From the beginning they have regarded industrialization as a wild horse which must be beaten but will never be tamed. They have celebrated none of its promises. They have been conservative because it is their business as satirists to conserve. However progressive the satirist may be when he takes up the pen on other occasions, when he sits down as satirist he becomes a partisan of the status quo ante. His job is to point out the values in the old scheme of things which are in danger of being lost. However good life may become, however pregnant with hope for all, he is forced to be a prophet of doom. If we are not willing to grant this constraint of the form, satire has been largely a blind alley for the last two and a half centuries. Fielding is, I suppose, the consummate prose satirist of the 18th century, as well as the one most comparable to Dickens (Jonathan Wild is clearly an ancestor of Our Mutual Friend). Fielding's diagnosis of society's ills was sound, but his remedies were worthless. Wordsworth could point out precisely how the world was too much with us, but his proposals for disengaging us and it were infantile. So with Dickens. Orwell is perfectly right: Dickens wanted not to abolish bosses, but to make them kind. Not to alter society but to make it get along. This advice is not much help to a social planner. The charge that Dickens the social critic is inept, not a thinker but a feeler, has been persuasively stated, from Bagehot to Lewes and Orwell. T. S. Eliot will stand as the social critic of our 20th-century poets, yet he is subject to the same strictures. His social remedies begin as repulsive and finish as irrelevant. But this does not really detract from the value of his diagnosis of what is wrong with our society. This diagnosis will remain pertinent, just as Dickens' will, because it is not tied to the particular circumstances which gave it birth.

The fundamental irrelevance of the Orwellian criticism of Dickens' satiric novels can be illustrated from one of Orwell's own satires, Coming Up for Air. This is a longish, rather entertaining narrative by a middling-successful English insurance salesman speaking in 1938. He is nostalgic over the relaxed life-style which prevailed before the War, and which the War partially destroyed and the coming Second War will finish off. What is wrong? What has changed? One doesn't know. The pace of life, the struggle for a phantom “success,” the drummed-up competition of capitalism, the obsession with money, all are suggested. They are the same problems which concerned Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, in fact. Orwell's protagonist Bowler by name, is really a feeler not a thinker. He knows that something is very wrong, but cannot quite make out what. He is like Gaffer Hexam when he becomes a suspect character among the “honest” waterfront birds of pray: “‘Have we got a pest in the house? Is there summ'at deadly sticking to my clothes? What's let loose upon us? Who loosed it?’” (p. 76) Isn't this the satirist's perennial, unavoidable question?

We cannot expect Dickens to prescribe the needed changes. This is foolish. No one knows even now what they should be. The most we can legitimately expect is that Dickens will answer Gaffer's question, tell us what has been loosed upon us. The central thesis of the novel does precisely this. What has been loosed is man's natural rapacity, and not only loosed but institutionalized and applauded. To support this central theme, subsidiary ones have been introduced. Here, as elsewhere, critics of Dickens have been tempted to take the symptom for the disease. Robert Morse, for example, points to a sub-theme of “Doubleness.”⁶ But this is only an indication of the real problem: loss of identity. The plot turns on mistaken identity, of course. But the theme goes deeper. The Veneering-Podsnap world, all the new arrivals in Our Mutual Friend, really are plagued with the doubt of, or with a plain absence of, real identity. The instances of this are nearly endless in the novel: Podsnap and Veneering have trouble in identifying one another in the first of the grisly banquet scenes; the divine Tippins double character—the shrivelled hag and the adolescent mask; the self-doubts that beset Harmon-Hanford-Rokesmith during the course of his deception; the change of identity that Boffin (and, in a different direction, Bella Wilfer) go through. The fear of losing identity, traced often now to a change in social class, is a commonplace in contemporary fiction. Its presence in Our Mutual Friend indicates powers of analysis only grudgingly accorded its author.

What of the theme of money? This is scarcely new. But look at the aspects of it Dickens chooses to emphasize: not the traditional hollow rewards of greed, but rather the mechanization of personality and of personal relations. The anonymity of money, its depersonalizing pressures, have been widely discussed in our own time by social scientists and by occasional literary critics, Ian Watt for example. As this novel proves, those pressures Dickens saw clearly. In any society organized primarily for private profit, money is bound to be part of most daily encounters. In Dickens' world, it becomes the primary agent of contact between man and man. People have but two roles to play: buyer and seller. All other human attributes are squeezed out. Human personality becomes a plain matter of poor or rich. The spontaneity which for Dickens constituted essential humanity simply dries up. People tend to become indistinguishable from things, and vice versa. The novel is full of imagery making precisely this point. The grisly humor of Twemlow as a table, in the early pages of the novel, is a good illustration:

There was an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy castors and was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint James's, when not in use, to whom the Veneerings were a source of blind confusion. The name of this article was Twemlow … Mr. and Mrs. Veneering … arranging a dinner, habitually started with Twemlow, and then put leaves in him, or added guests to him. Sometimes, the table consisted of Twemlow and half-a-dozen leaves; sometimes, of Twemlow and a dozen leaves; sometimes Twemlow was pulled out to his utmost extent of twenty leaves.

(p. 6)

Bradley Headstone has learned his job purely by rote:

He had acquired mechanically a great store of teacher's knowledge. He could do mental arithmetic mechanically, sing at sight mechanically, blow various wind instruments mechanically, even play the great church organ mechanically. From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage. The arrangement of his wholesale warehouse, so that it might be always ready to meet the demands of retail dealers. …

(p. 217)

In metaphor as in character, human personality and potentiality is sacrificed to the demands of commerce. From here, of course, it is but a step to Dickens' persistent theme that society warps and perverts innate—and benign—human capacity. And but a step further to the general mechanization of the spirit which has been a literary theme since the Industrial Revolution began.

The themes could be discussed at great length but the discussion would add little to the point to be proved. Dickens' satire was not brilliantly original, but it aimed at the same targets English satire had shot at for two centuries and more. It hit them as well as most. But it hit them as it were with a new weapon. Dickens' satiric method differed markedly from that of his predecessors. To gain what Kenneth Burke has called a “perspective by incongruity,” look for a moment at a novel mentioned earlier in this essay, Fielding's Jonathan Wild. The similarities between the two are unexpected, especially if one remembers G. H. Lewes' remark that, “Compared with Fielding or Thackeray … [Dickens] was merely an animal intelligence.”⁷ Both novels are studies in predatory behavior. The psychology of the pike pond dominates both. In both, all human relations, with the exception of those between the good but put-upon characters who support the sentimental plot, are reduced to terms of gain or loss. The sentimental characters, with nothing to offer more formidable than love and sincerity, are constantly defeated—until the author steps in to set all straight in the end. Both novels use money as a prominent symbol and impetus to plot-development. Especially strong in the two is the awareness that money, because it is anonymous and tells no tales, will be a fundamental agent in the dissolution of the traditional bonds holding society together. Implicit in both novels is the assumption that a civilization knowing no effective principles of regulation higher than dog-eat-dog has really ceased to be a civilization at all. For all the noticeable difference between the two in this respect, the great age of Capitalist economic theory might never have taken place.

Both novels are sentimental, but the sentiment is much less important in Fielding's. The last-page reward is so patent that it hardly affects the preceding several hundred pages' grim and sustained irony. The path of the heart is plainly a chancy solution—though it may be the only one—and Fielding knows it. Only a thoroughgoing overhaul, a radical revision of society will do any lasting good. And of course Fielding had such a revision in mind; a return to the old ideal agrarian, church-centered, stratified society which had served Christendom for a thousand years. For Fielding, the traditional cosmology still lived and he could present it in his satire as a norm against which to measure the conduct of his “great men.” Such a background, still implicitly accepted by most of his readers, enabled him to create a unified, consistent and sustained ironic framework which Dickens could not support. It is the lack of this implicit background, finally, which coarsens so much of Dickens' irony, makes it seem sometimes blunt and abusive. Dickens' characters, like Lightwood and Wrayburn when they do have the sensitivity and intelligence to resign from the rat-race society tries to force upon them, have no place to go. Their traditional roles, whatever they might have been, have evaporated. So Dickens substituted the passive tranquility of the Victorian gentleman of independent means:

His heroes, once they had come into money, and “settled down,” would not only do no work; they would not even ride, hunt, shoot, fight duels, elope with actresses or lose money at the races. They would simply live at home, in feather-bed respectability, and preferably next door to a blood-relation living exactly the same life.⁸

It is even more inadequate than that quiet life in the country which was the 18th-century's most common last-page reward. Like the older pastoral dream from which it derives, it is frankly impossible. It is clear from Jonathan Wild that Fielding knew this, but not clear from Our Mutual Friend that Dickens did. Yet any less passive solution would put a character right back in the ambitious struggle Dickens wished him to escape. In the Dickens world, certainly in the world of Our Mutual Friend, there is no room for significant, for effective action. There is the good Reverend Frank Milvey to be sure, but like even the sympathetic do-gooders in Dickens' novels, he is ineffective. Dickens was, in fact, too far on the road to our modern world to turn back, though all his instincts told him he should. His satiric posture was weakened by having no informing world vision behind it. As has been said often enough before, there is no God in any meaningful sense in Dickens' novels—sentimental kindness takes His place, but cannot fill it. Kindness brings no specific social order with it.

The most striking difference between Fielding's view of an acquisitive society and Dickens' is in scope and vividness. Though Dickens' intellectual framework is narrower and thinner, his panorama of character is vast by the side of Fielding's, and infinitely more vivid. Fielding concentrates on a single group of characters, Dickens on a large array: “There is no central protagonist in Our Mutual Friend. Far more even than Bleak House, it is multi-plotted novel.”⁹ This technique, a spectrum of characters, is one answer to the charge brought by James and others, that the minor characters of Our Mutual Friend are flat and incredible. They were meant to be flat, to present but a single facet of the grim predatory world of the novel. Jenny Wren, a cripple trapped by a drunken father who depends upon her like a child, is but one example of the pressure of society on the defenseless in it. Of herself she is not of great importance. As one variation of a pattern repeated again and again, she is highly indicative. Realistically construed, of course, she is incredible. But the novel is not a realistic novel. If she had been credible she would have taken up too large a share of the reader's attention.

Our Mutual Friend has far more in common with allegory than with realism. Dickens hardly even pretends to keep up the realistic mask. The dialogue is frankly incredible most of the time. Riah, for instance, replies to Eugene Wrayburn's rude importunities that he leave the deserted Lizzie Hexam to his care, “… Christian gentleman … I will hear only one voice to-night desiring me to leave this damsel. …” (405-6) Allegorically, “damsel” is perfect. Or pick at random any line of Mrs. Wilfer's: it is impossible to believe anyone ever said it. But as the representation not of a person but of an attitude toward wealth and position, her speech is unforgettable. Then too, the novel is far and away the most frankly grotesque of the later novels. The Veneerings' banquets are surrealistically drawn and Dickens never pretends they are not. Not realism, but a pattern of abstractions, is the satiric technique of Our Mutual Friend. Making the obvious qualifications, one could call it satiric allegory. Allegory is not far to seek in any of the mature novels, but in this one it is closest to the surface. Boffin lives in a Bower; “sailors to be got the better of” are necessary to Pleasant Riderhood's “Eden”; Jenny calls Riah “Fairy Godmother”; Fledgby, when he is to be paid off in lashes, is got up in Turkish trousers like a pagan devil. We should be careful not to press these instances of superficial allegory too far. Dickens is not writing a thoroughgoing allegory obviously. Yet, in fact, the novel is closer to the Fairie Queene than to a novel by Henry James, in the methods it employs to make us believe in it. Character consistency, for example. One of the standard criticisms of Our Mutual Friend is the inconsistency of some of its characters. Yet in a novel which is controlled by theme and not by character consistency of character is largely irrelevant. As with the Faerie Queene, it is not the consistency of the whole structure but the vivid scene, the dramatic confrontation, which does the work of the novel. The spiritual cousin of Headstone's grief-scene after being rejected by Lizzie is the Cave of Despair. As with allegory in general, it is not the intellectual subtlety of Dickens' vision which strikes us so much as the unforgettable vividness of its crucially symbolic scenes. A pattern of scenes, each an amplification of the general theme of predation, of joy only at the expense of grief, is Dickens' technique of persuasion. The demands of allegorical intensity completely dominate probability. Dickens' characters were doubtless as real in his own mind as Spenser's were in his—real as only the figments of the pure imagination can be—but they can hardly have seemed real, fully three-dimensional, to his readers then or now. No, the effect is made another way. The birds of prey rise clear of everyday reality, of time and place, and become a vision of man everywhere and at all times.

They do not, unfortunately, rise altogether clear of an overlong, offensively sentimental ending. Dickens' weaknesses in this direction have been so thoroughly illuminated that no more light is needed here. But if the charges of excessive gloominess, of unnaturalism, of failing creative powers, cannot be made to stick, that of sentimental falsification of experience can. The tender-hearted way out offends here as nowhere else in the canon. For the symbolism of the first two-thirds of the novel is too strong to allow the reader, caught up and appalled as he must be by the picture Dickens so powerfully draws, to feel anything but offended when this power is systematically sapped by wishful thinking and an eye to the marketplace.

Notes

1. In a review of the novel in The Nation of 1865, reprinted in The Future of the Novel, ed. Leon Edel (Vintage Books, 1956), pp. 75-80, and elsewhere.

2. “Dickens: The Two Scrooges,” in The Wound and the Bow (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), p. 75.

3. “Charles Dickens,” Inside the Whale and other essays (London, 1940), p. 53.

4. Our Mutual Friend, reprinted in The Dickens Critics ed. George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr. (Ithaca, N. Y., 1961), pp. 204-05.

5. Our Mutual Friend (“The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens”), ed. E. Salter Davies (Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 1-2. All subsequent citations in the text are to this edition.

6. Morse, pp. 206ff.

7. “Dickens in Relation to Criticism,” Fortnightly Review, vol. 17 (Feb. 1872), 151. (Reprinted in Ford and Lane.)

8. “Charles Dickens,” p. 64.

9. J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens, the World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 281.