The Sun.
London, England, 1865-03-22 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Charles Dickens's New Serial Story.
Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens. No. XI.
Chapman -and Hall.

This opening instalment of the second volume of
" Our Mutual Friend" is in many ways remarkable.
It is remarkable for its variety—at once in scene, in
incident, and in character. The localities into
which we are here successively introduced are as
diversified, for example, as—Fledgeby's chambers
at the Albany—the interior of Miss Abbey Potter-
son's Fellowship Porters—the Foggy streets and the
Foggy river—and, to crown all, the homely habitat
of Rumpty Willer and his intolerable wife
(the lady with the gloves and the face-ache)
on the day commemorative of their nuptials !
" Lodgers in Queer
.Street" include, amongst
the throng of them, a very conspicuous
representative indeed, selected from 1, from A 1 we
had almost said, in that very questionable locality ;
an arch-representative, recognisable as such, in the
person of Alfred Lammle of the • evil eye and the
gingerous whiskers. Between that said Lammle
—and Riah, the gentle-hearted old Jew—and the
flinty-hearted young (soi disant) Christian, to wit,
Fledgeby, the unfledged, as he may surely be called,
in consideration of his no-whiskers-at-all, or at any
rate to speak of—between these three, as they con-
verse together, or in pairs, there is a maze of by-
play, of cross-purposes, of equivoque, of what
not—so life-like, so real, so touched with the
ineffable touch of genius to the vivid semblance of
truth, that they read far more like actual
than like what they are of course, purely imagi-
nary conversations. Lammle's " little game" in
regard to Miss Podsnap, it may be observed, en
passant, is, by this time, completely blown, and there-
fore dropped. He, himself, meanwhile, is fairly
meshed in the trammels of Pubsey and Co.—little
dreaming, the purblind wight, that the said Pubsey and
Co. are no other than Fledgeby the fatuous, as repre-
sented by the benign but seemingly ruthless Riah.
In the subsequent chapter, we accompany the latter,
as he wends his way, hand in hand with the Doll's
Dressmaker, through the city to the river-
side hostelry kept by Miss Abbey, to wit,
the wedge-shaped Fellowship Porters. Thither the
drenched, drowned body of Rogue Riderhood—run
down by a steamer in the fog, but fished up
sometime afterwards from the depths of the Thames,
—is borne in, as a ghastly, dripping burden, upon
a stretcher, to be subjected to the wise process
now in vogue, with a view to the restoration of life
among those, to all appearance, drowned past all
recovery! Chapter Three relates, with extraordinary
vividness, the application of this benign system to
the insensible body of Rogue Riderhood. Al-
together, a very wonderful description it is—
as real, as true, as pathetic, as ludicrous as
anything Mr. Dickens has penned for years.
The breathless continuance--for a long while
quite ineffectually—of the manipulation of
the dead body, as it appears to be, rivets the reader's
attention in an enthralling way. The neighbouring
doctor, who has been called in, upon this emergency,
has as his assistants in this manipulation certain
waterside folks, hight respectively Bob Glamour,
William Williams, and Jonathan, " family name of
the latter, if any, unknown to mankind !" Their
tender, even tearful care for the drowned man,
when his recovery is matter of profound uncer-
tainty—their grasping each other's hand fraternally,
the doctor's hand inclusively, when the patient has at
length struggled back to life—it is impossible
to read, of as the incident is here related, without a
sense of exquisitely humanising emotion. Then,
however—with the return of consciousness to the
recently deceased, as the wretched creature has
seemed to be—comes the inevitable reaction in
regard to the momentary sympathy the doctor and
his rough assistant have been evidencing to-
wards the vagabond. As he grows warm, we are
told, so do they in proportion grow cool towards him
—" as his lineaments soften with life, their faces
and their hearts harden to him"—the " low, bad,
unimpressible" nature of the rascal emerging to view
as his drowned senses indicate their reawakening.
Out of the disgust, however, with which we needs
must regard the surly rogue on his resumption of
his old brutalities of manner, there peeps forth
under the hands of the great humourist penning
this description—a touch or two the most ex-
quisitely ridiculous. Riderhood, for example, mut-
tering, as he repels the kindly recommendations of
the doctor, that he " Don't want no Poll-Parroting"
—drawing the borrowed shirt on over his head " ex-
actly as if he had just had a fight"--stopping twice
or thrice, while he is dressing, to examine
his arms and hands, as if to see what punishment
he has received in the encounter—under the impres-
sion that his nose is bleeding, several times draw-
ing the back of his hand across it and looking for
the result in a distinctly pugilistic manner—asking
after his fur cap, and when told of its being lost in
the river, growling out, " Warn't there no honest
man to pick it up ? 0' course there was though, and
to cut off with it arterwards. You are a rare lot,
all on you !"—and so, with a lurch on his unsteady
legs and a savage " Hold still, can't you ?" to his
daughter, upon whom he is heavily leaning at
the moment, " What ! You must be a stag-
gering next, must you ?" taking his depar-
ture " out of the ring in which he has
had that little turn-up with Death." In every
minute touch, we repeat, a wonderful description I
A description, now and then, almost in the self-same
breath, intensely affecting and exquisitely ridiculous.
As a relief to this more sombre chapter, we have, as
the last in this exceptionally good instalment of
" Our Mutual Friend," a most exhilaratingly droll ac-
count of " A Happy Return of the Day" among the
'Milers. The Day referred to being the anniversary
of the nuptials of Pa and Ma, otherwise R. W. and
the gloved lady with the toothache. Lavvy's indignant
avowal under her breath to Bella, " I do not believe
there ever was any human creature who could keep
so bolt upright as Ma, or put such an amount of
aggravation into one back r—gives the key, as one
may say, to the whole fun of the Wilfer household.
Lavvy having, to our fancy, just the best of it all
through—as evidenced in her very mode of laying
the cloth for the festive dinner, "performing that
office in a startling series of whisks and bumps ;
laying the tablecloth itself as if she were raising the
wind, putting down the glasses and salt cellars as if
she were knocking at the door, and clashing the
knives and forks in a skirmishing manner, sugges-
tive of hand-to-hand conflict 1" Out of the Con-
fidences between Pa and Bella, at the close of this
chapter, there are glimmering hints of the sequel
—very pointed, hints, some of them, we are pretty
sure of that—yet hints, every one of them, to this
present moment, utterly inscrutable to us! Espe-
cially the one in which Bella declares quite posi-
tively (what we don't believe, nevertheless, for one
single instant) that Noddy Boffin is being "spoilt by
prosperity." The illustrations are, this month, we
regret to observe, as bad again as ever—just worse
to our thinking than no illustrations at all.