Joseph Conrad had a lifelong fondness for the works of Charles Dickens. In A Personal Record, Conrad, who claimed to have been a great reader since the age of five, cites Nicholas Nickleby as “My first introduction to English imaginative literature” (71). About Bleak House, he admits to an

intense and unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other men's work. I have read it innumerable times, both in Polish and in English; I have read it only the other day.

(124)

As a consequence of this familiarity and esteem, various effects of Dickens are found throughout Conrad's fiction. One such influence is that of Our Mutual Friend on “The Secret Sharer.”

Conrad states in his Author's Note for ‘Twixt Land and Sea, in which “The Secret Sharer” was reprinted,¹ that “the basic fact of the tale I had in my possession for a good many years. It was in truth the common possession of the whole fleet of merchant ships trading to India, China, and Australia” (viii). That tale is the Cutty Sark incident, “on which,” Conrad says,

the scheme of “The Secret Sharer” is founded; it came to light and even got into newspapers about the middle eighties, though I had heard of it before, as it were privately, among the officers of the great wool fleet in which my first years in deep water were served.

(ix)

In the infamous incident aboard the Cutty Sark, which Conrad alludes to as “the fact itself [that] happened on board” (viii), a rebellious member of the crew was murdered by the mate. The ship's captain, Captain Wallace, who later committed suicide, took sides with the mate, even helping him escape from the authorities. For “The Secret Sharer,” Conrad adapted the scheme of the on-shipboard murder of a crewman by Leggatt, the chief mate of the Sephora, and his subsequent escape from the actual voyage of the Cutty Sark. But Conrad's idea for the “double,” or the relationship between Leggatt and the narrator-captain, may have been supplied by Charles Dickens with the George Radfoot–John Harmon relationship aboard ship during the latter's return to England in Our Mutual Friend. In the Radfoot–Harmon cabal Conrad perhaps saw possibilities for a more dramatic story involving psychological and moral issues. Also, John Rokesmith's ordeal throughout Dickens's novel to keep his real identity as John Harmon buried may have suggested to Conrad the captain's nerve-racking ordeal of keeping Leggatt hidden while he was aboard ship. Moreover, Conrad may have realized the principle of the Sephora's captain, as a symbol of duty and social conscience, from the Police Inspector in Our Mutual Friend, who, on the whole, is dull, unimaginative, and suspicious, yet lives by the letter of the law and devotes himself entirely to the standards of duty.

It is possible that Conrad sensed the strongly autobiographical cast of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. The main character in the novel, John Harmon, has “the sexton-task of piling earth above” himself to conceal his real origin and identity. Harmon has reluctantly returned to England after a long absence under the terms of his father's will, which left him a fortune yet forced him into a marriage with the supposedly mercenary Bella Wilfer. Harmon meets George Radfoot aboard his homeward-bound ship and unwittingly confides in him everything about his situation, including the “distrust engendered by his wretched childhood and the action for evil … of his father and his father's wealth on all within their influence” (1: 402). He even conceives a deception, meant to be harmless, to test Bella Wilfer's heart, and then allows Radfoot to participate in the plot. Radfoot betrays Harmon and tries to kill him for his money, ending up murdered himself by another man who has doublecrossed him. When Radfoot's body is discovered, Harmon finds himself mistakenly “placarded by the police authorities upon the London walls for dead” (1: 402). Seeing that his father's money is doing good for the couple who have acceded to it, he decides one morning to assume a new identify as John Rokesmith and to bury John Harmon “still many fathoms deeper than he had been buried in the night” (1: 403).

The burying of the self, the drama of identity, the introspective motive of Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend may have interested Conrad. What must have particularly struck him in the novel, however, is the scene in which John Harmon revisits Limehouse Hole, a stew near the West India Docks, to try piecing together what had happened to him that night he disembarked with Radfoot at London. Harmon begins by recalling how he had felt in coming back to England.

I came back, timid, divided in my mind, afraid of myself and everybody here, knowing of nothing but wretchedness that my father's wealth had ever brought about. Now, stop, and so far think it out, John Harmon. Is that so? That is exactly so.

(1: 389)

Conrad, who is creating a story with a psychological bias, would have been engrossed in Harmon's mental state. “Divided in mind” and “afraid of myself and everybody here” are phrases that could describe the captain's state of mind in “The Secret Sharer” as he takes charge of a ship for the first time and feels uneasy about his new command. Leggatt's unexpected appearance in the water and arrival on board as a fugitive from a nearby ship put his nerves more on edge and intensify his fears and insecurities.

In Our Mutual Friend, George Radfoot had been the third mate aboard the ship on which Harmon returned to England. Radfoot in effect becomes John Harmon's secret sharer. Harmon reflects:

I knew nothing of him. His name first became known to me about a week before we sailed, through my being accosted by one of the ship-agent's clerks as “Mr. Radfoot.” It was one day when I had gone abroad to look to my preparations, and the clerk, coming behind me as I stood on deck, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Mr. Radfoot, look here,” referring to some papers that he had in his hand. And my name first became known to Radfoot, through another clerk within a day or two, and while the ship was yet in port, coming up behind him, tapping him on the shoulder and beginning, “I beg your pardon, Mr. Harmon—.” I believe we were alike in bulk and stature but not otherwise, and that we were not strikingly alike, even in those respects, when we were together and could be compared.

(1: 389)

After they had exchanged a sociable word or two concerning these mistakes as a means of “an easy introduction between us,” Harmon recalls that:

he helped me to a cool cabin on deck alongside his own, and his first school had been at Brussels as mine had been, and he had learnt French as I had learnt it, and he had a little history of himself to relate—God only knows how much of it true, and how much of it false—that had its likeness to mine. I had been a seaman too. So we got to be confidential together, and the more easily yet, because he and every one on board had known by general rumor what I was making the voyage to England for. By such degrees and means, he came to the knowledge of my uneasiness of mind. …

(1: 389)

Once ashore in London, Harmon and Radfoot carry out the idea that they had cooked up aboard ship of “getting common sailors' dresses … and throwing ourselves in Bella Wilfer's neighborhood, and trying to put ourselves in her way, and doing whatever chance might favor on the spot, and seeing what came of it” (1: 389-90). They plan to disguise themselves to allow Radfoot to form some judgment of Bella, the woman his father's will would force him to marry. However, in a room near Limehouse Church where Radfoot has guided him, they exchange clothes.

He had carried under his arm a canvas bag, containing a suit of his clothes. I had no change of outer clothes with me, as I was to buy slops. “You are very wet, Mr. Harmon,”—I can hear him saying—“and I am quite dry under this good waterproof coat. Put on these clothes of mine. You may find on trying them that they will answer to your purpose tomorrow, as well as the slops you mean to buy, or better. While you change, I'll hurry the hot coffee.”

(1: 391)

Radfoot has poisoned the coffee, causing John Harmon, in a helpless stupor, to remember,

I saw a figure like myself lying dressed in my clothes on a bed. What might have been, for anything I knew, a silence of days, weeks, months, years, was broken by a violent wrestling of men all over the room. The figure like myself was assailed, and my valise was in its hand.

(1: 391)

Conrad's narrator-captain and Leggatt share the same cabin rather than occupy adjoining ones. Both are Conway boys, but as the captain relates, “being a couple of years older I had left before he joined” (101). Like Harmon and Radfoot's, their common backgrounds as schoolboys and seamen provide trust and confidence for such a mutual friendship that Leggatt feels able to tell the captain that he has killed a man aboard the Sephora. The captain and Leggatt are never seen together, so none of the crew can compare their size. But the captain, once Leggatt wears his sleeping suit with the same grey-stripe pattern as the one he has on, and which is “just right for his size,” thinks how much Leggatt looks like his double. In retelling the story, the captain refers to Leggatt as his double or secret self and believes “anybody would have taken him for me.” He also remembers thinking how Leggatt “appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes” (102).

Each secret sharer eventually disappears into the water at night, Radfoot to his physical death, Leggatt to a metaphorical one. In Our Mutual Friend, Rogue Riderhood, the water-side loner whom Radfoot has brought into the plot to share John Harmon's inheritance, overpowers and then dumps Radfoot into the Thames River along with Harmon. Radfoot's drowned corpse, dressed in Harmon's clothes with his papers in the pockets, is found some days later by Gaffer Hexam, another river-bank character who scavenges the Thames for his meager living. The Inquest officially proclaims John Harmon dead. Similarly, Leggatt, the captain's secret sharer, slips away from the ship at night and disappears into the waters of the Gulf of Siam, dressed in the captain's sleeping suit and hat, which the captain has given at the last minute to help protect him from the sun when he reaches shore. Leggatt is left to wander on the blank land of Cochin-China and then pass “clean out of sight into uncharted regions” (134). The captain recalls that “I hardly thought of my other self, now gone from the ship, to be hidden for ever from all friendly faces, to be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, with no brand of the curse on his sane forehead to stay a slaying hand … too proud to explain” (142).

While the secret sharer of each story experiences a death, the main characters undergo symbolic rebirth. In Our Mutual Friend, almost two weeks after his ordeal of having been poisoned and nearly drowned, John Harmon reads about his “death” on a placard posted at Whitehall. He rushes to the Police Station and discovers Radfoot's corpse. When asked by the Night-Inspector, Harmon writes the name “Mr. Julius Handford” and his temporary address, then disappears. But after the Inquest has declared Harmon dead, he struggles with himself not only for a new identity—“So John Harmon died, and Julius Handford disappeared, and John Rokesmith was born” (1: 394)—but for reasons why John Harmon should or should not come back to life. “So deeply engaged had the living-dead man been, in thus communing with himself” (1: 396) that he wanders about London until he decides to return as John Rokesmith to Mr. Boffin's house, where he has found a position as Boffin's secretary. As Dickens's main character survives the murder plot and is reborn as John Rokesmith, the captain in “The Secret Sharer” survives the test of his first command and, through a process of self discovery, experiences a psychic rebirth. He feels less “torn in two” when Leggatt is in the cabin with him and seems to be made whole and able to act decisively as a result of Leggatt's influence. It is his other self's calmness and reasonableness and his sheer physical strength to swim a long distance under extreme pressure that renews the captain's confidence and assurance in his own abilities. Albert Guerard observes,

The whispering communion of the narrator and his double—of the seaman-self and some darker, more interior, and outlaw self—must have been necessary and rewarding, since the story ends as positively as it does.

(24-25)

The secret sharers in Our Mutual Friend and Conrad's story are both associated with murder—one a water-side murder, the other a shipboard murder. George Radfoot plans John Harmon's death from the moment he realizes how much money he could lay his hands on. His fatal error, of course, is bringing Rogue Riderhood into the scheme. Leggatt, as he explains to the captain, killed a member of the crew aboard the Sephora during a bout of rough weather. The details about this incident, as Leggatt relates them, echo the description in Our Mutual Friend, not of Radfoot's murder but of Rogue Riderhood's, the man who kills Radfoot. Leggatt tells how “just as an awful sea made for the ship. … I had him by the throat, and went on shaking him like a rat” (102). For more than ten minutes, waves crash over the deck. “It was a miracle that they found us, jammed together behind the forebits. It's clear that I meant business, because I was holding him by the throat still when they picked us up. He was black in the face,” relates Leggatt (102). In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens describes the murder of Rogue Riderhood by the schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone, in similar terms. Riderhood knows it is the schoolmaster who has assaulted Eugene Wrayburn, and he also knew that Headstone is trying to cast the blame on him.² He dogs Headstone's steps so that he can extort money from the schoolmaster, whose blood-stained bundle of clothes he has fished out of the river. Unable to shake off his pursuer, Bradley Headstone sees a chance at the edge of Plashwater Weir-Mill Lock, which Riderhood has just drained while waiting for Headstone to start walking again. The schoolmaster “had caught him round the body. He [Riderhood] seemed to be girdled with an iron ring. They were on the brink of the Lock, about midway between the two sets of gates” (2: 405). During a fierce struggle, both men fall over the edge of the Lock into the mud.

Riderhood went over into the smooth pit, backwards, and Bradley Headstone upon him. When the two were found, lying under the ooze and scum behind one of the rotting gates, Riderhood's hold had relaxed, probably in falling, and his eyes were staring upward. But, he was girdled still with Bradley's iron ring, and the rivets of the iron ring held him tight.

(2: 406)

The captain of the Cutty Sark would not have been recast as the captain of the Sephora, since Captain Wallace protected his murderous mate and later aided his escape. But Dickens's Night-Inspector in Our Mutual Friend could have helped Conrad shape the character of Captain Archbold. Mortimer Lightwood, the lawyer who was to have arranged John Harmon's affairs upon his return to England, conducts Harmon (alias Julius Handford), along with Gaffer Hexam and his son, through some muddy alleys to the Police Station where the Night-Inspector sits

with a pen and ink and ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office, as studiously as if it were in a monastery on the top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the backyard at his elbow … he finished ruling the work he had in his hand (it might have been illuminating a missal, he was so calm), in a very neat and methodical manner. …

(1: 24)

As devoted to his work as an Abbot in a monastery, yet as methodical as a bookkeeper and just as unimaginative and business-like, the Night-Inspector is undisturbed by the howling woman or the corpse that Hexam has brought in from the river. But outside of his whitewashed room, the dutiful Abbot Inspector suspiciously prowls about the Thames waterfront below Ratcliffe and Rotherhithe, looking for evidence connected with Harmon's murder that “caused him to stand meditating on river-stairs and causeways, and to go lurking about in boats, putting this and that together” (1: 32).

In “The Secret Sharer” there is something about the Sephora's captain's unrelenting and determined search for the criminal Leggatt that is suggestive of Dickens's method of the police tale. And, like Dickens's policeman, Captain Archbold, whose “pitiless obligation” to the law is born from “Seven-and-thirty virtuous years at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last fifteen in the Sephora” (118), is unimaginative, business-like, suspicious, and tenacious. A more interesting parallel to Our Mutual Friend, though, is the narrator-captain's reaction to the Sephora's captain as he greets him aboard ship, then dissimulates politeness and feigns deafness to keep him from discovering Leggatt, who crouches on the other side of the bulkhead. John Harmon, under the steady and suspicious eye of the Night-Inspector, who casually asks him at the Police Station about what missing person he is looking for, also tries to put him off with the vague and impromptu evasion about how families “may not choose to publish their disagreements and misfortunes, except on the last necessity” (1: 26). Then he dissimulates further, just as the narrator-captain does to hide his double or identity, by signing his name “Mr. Julius Handford, Exchequer Coffee House, Palace Yard, Westminster” (1: 26).

Finally, in Our Mutual Friend, John Harmon's studious avoidance (as John Rokesmith, Mr. Boffin's secretary) of Lawyer Lightwood provides comic byplay yet adds suspense and plot tension that Conrad may have adapted for use in “The Secret Sharer.” As Julius Handford, Harmon first meets Mr. Lightwood at the Police Station to view Radfoot's body. Lightwood's, as well as the Night-Inspector's, subsequent search and reward for information about the mysterious Mr. Handford precludes John Harmon from meeting each of them again so long as he wants to keep secret his real identity. He employs any dodge that he can, including outright refusal, to avoid running into Lightwood. For example, he manifestly objects to communicating with Mr. Boffin's solicitor, transferring that task to Boffin himself or writing letters instead. Later, when Lizzie Hexam asks Lawyer Lightwood to bring Bella to see her married to the bedridden Eugene Wrayburn, husband John declines to accompany her. “No, my dear, it's quite out of the question. Not to be thought of,” he says (2: 344). He even refuses to go downstairs to meet Lightwood, telling her, “I positively cannot see him, my love” (2: 344). Puzzled by this unaccountable behavior, Bella returns to the waiting lawyer.

“Mr. Rokesmith goes with us?” he said, hesitating, with a look towards the door.

“Oh, I forgot!” replied Bella. “His best compliments. His face is swollen to the size of two faces, and he is to go to bed directly, poor fellow, to wait for the doctor, who is coming to lance him.”

“It is curious,” observed Lightwood, “that I have never yet seen Mr. Rokesmith, though we have been engaged in the same affairs.”

“Really?” said the unblushing Bella.

“I begin to think,” observed Lightwood, “that I never shall see him.”

“These things happen so oddly sometimes,” said Bella with a steady countenance, “that there seems a kind of fatality in them. But I am quite ready, Mr. Lightwood.”

(2: 346)

John Harmon successfully stonewalls until one day, out walking with Bella, he turns the corner of a London street and faces Mr. Lightwood, who stops as if he were petrified. Harmon's secret is out.

The narrator-captain in “The Secret Sharer” also maneuvers to prevent the ship's steward from discovering Leggatt, his double, in his stateroom. Like John Harmon's evasions, his odd behavior puzzles and dismays the steward. Innocently blundering into the cabin with the captain's morning coffee, the steward is shouted at rather than spoken to. He suddenly returns to close the ports for washing decks and remove the empty cup, which causes the captain to jump up quickly and demand, “What do you want here?” A third time the captain rings for him, ostensibly to tidy up the cabin but really to afford him a good look around. With much scrubbing, whisking, banging, and clattering, the steward performs his duties and finally leaves. Like Lawyer Lightwood, however, the ship's steward is baffled by these strange acts that are designed of course to keep hidden the fact about the captain's second self. In forestalling—or preventing—recognition, Dickens's John Harmon and Conrad's narrator-captain actually increase the tentativeness of their situations and make them dependent upon some sort of resolution.

The existence of the secret sharer in Our Mutual Friend and his resemblances to the watery and dreamlike character in “The Secret Sharer” are strong enough to suggest a possible source for many of the psychological aspects and details of plot in Joseph Conrad's story. Conrad, who frequently reread Dickens, may have seen, for example, how a study of the alter ego or split personality could be developed from this quasi-autobiographical novel of buried identity. Dickens creates a complex plot rich in characterization and atmosphere, while Conrad writes a more suspenseful and tension-filled tale that he invests with complex psychological features and frames with dramatic compactness. Both tales end happily. John Harmon, already married to Bella, sees his inheritance and real identity restored. In a similar fashion, the narrator-captain, out of anxious circumstances in which he faces shame of failure and some crippling fragmentation of the self, is made whole and succeeds in carrying out the responsibilities of his new command.

With irony that he himself might have used, had he written a story about a writer who crows in private over his recent achievement, Conrad says in a letter to Edward Garnett:

5 Nov. ‘12

Dearest Edward

… Thanks for your letter on the 3 tales [‘Twixt Land and Sea]—very much of sorts. I daresay Freya is pretty rotten. On the other hand the “Secret Sharer,” between you and me, is it. Eh? No damned tricks with girls there. Eh? Every word fits and there's not a single uncertain note. Luck my boy. Pure luck. I knew you would spot the thing at sight. But I repeat: mere luck

(243)

Notes

1. The story was originally published in Harper's Magazine, Aug.-Sept. 1910.

2. The relationship between Rogue Riderhood and Bradley Headstone in the novel suggests a parallel to the John Harmon-George Radfoot double. Before his attack on Eugene Wrayburn, Headstone put on “rough water-side second-hand clothing” of a bargeman that looked exactly like the clothes worn by Riderhood, even to the detail of a bright red handkerchief that Riderhood had added to see if he was being copied. Later, the schoolmaster flung a bundle of bargeman's clothes, torn and spattered with Wrayburn's blood, into the river. As part of his plot to cast blame as the assailant on the Lock-keeper, Bradley then put his clothes back on and resumed his own identity.

   The bundle of clothes, incidentally, provides another possible detail for “The Secret Sharer.” Leggatt, on the islet he had swum to after jumping off the Sephora, took off all his clothes and “tied them in a bundle with a stone inside, and dropped them in the deep water on the outer side of that islet” (108).

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. A Personal Record. New York: Doubleday, 1924.

———. ‘Twixt Land and Sea. New York: Doubleday, 1924.

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Riverside, 1922.

Guerard, Albert J. Conrad the Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1966.

Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895-1924. Ed. Edward Garnett. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.