Counting Down Charles Dickens' Greatest Novels. Number 5: Our Mutual Friend | TIME.com Follow @TIMECulture When I was living abroad after college, my Aunt Helen, who is the most well-read person I know, used to mail me secondhand copies of her favorite novels. I suspect she thought that the only way she was going to get me to fall in love with Henry James was if his were the sole English-language books in my possession. But once I had done due diligence with The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove, she sent me Our Mutual Friend. I liked the look of it — so pleasing, with its orange Penguin binding and its affable title. I imagined, rather literally, that there’d be a lot of Pickwickian amiability in Our Mutual Friend. I did not imagine it would open with a boat on the Thames at night, a hook trailing through the sludge and snagging on the waterlogged body of a dead man. (READ: Counting Down Dickens’ Greatest Novels. Number 7: The Pickwick Papers ) Our Mutual Friend was Dickens’ last completed novel, serialized in 1864-65. Henry James, who reviewed it for The Nation, hated it.

It is “the poorest of Mr. Dickens’ works,” he writes — “poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” James was right about one thing: Dickens was exhausted. He was suffering from poor health when he began the novel, then he endured a traumatic railway accident in June 1865, and five years later he died of a stroke, at age 58. But Mr. James, if you think this is Dickens’ poorest novel, then I have a paperback called Barnaby Rudge to sell you. Our Mutual Friend has one major flaw, for which I can’t quite forgive it. (More on that later.) But it also has some of Dickens’ strangest, most haunting characters. It groups these characters in some of his strangest, most haunting constellations. And it is a marvel of psychological interrogation tempered by structural discipline. As far as it reaches into the dark recesses of human experience, it always circles back to the river, and the bodies that are fished from its depths.

The older Dickens grew, the fonder he got of overarching metaphors, so make what poetic assumptions you will of the fact that John Harmon, the rich man at the heart of Our Mutual Friend’s inheritance plot, made his fortune as a dust contractor. (Think of it as the Victorian version of waste management.) When to dust Mr. Harmon returns, his will reveals that he has left his money to his estranged son, also named John, but only on condition that this son marry a girl the father has chosen. She is Bella Wilfer, the pretty, spirited, slightly petulant daughter of a humble clerk. But whether young John Harmon would have consented to marry her is a mystery, because the body dragged to shore by Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie in the novel’s macabre opening scene is identified as his. The exposition above is delivered not by an omniscient narrator but as gossip. The denizens of high society are very interested in the fate of John Harmon’s fortune, and led by a glittering nouveau-riche couple called the Veneerings, they question Harmon’s solicitor, Mortimer Lightwood, at the first of a seemingly perpetual sequence of banquets and drawing-room gatherings.

This device runs through the book, allowing the John Harmon plot to perform double duty. For the reader, it is the main, twisting thrust of the narrative, and its characters are the heart of the story. For the Veneerings it is a running soap opera, peopled by two-dimensional players of salacious interest: the boatman and his beautiful daughter, bereft Bella and the “golden dustman” Mr. Boffin, the elder John Harmon’s humble servant, who inherits in place of the son and scales the social ladder by virtue of his windfall. Mortimer and his friend and fellow solicitor, the moody Eugene Wrayburn, travel between the two worlds; they are called from the Veneerings’ home to view John Harmon’s drowned body in the morgue, which begins a connection to river society that alters their lives. You don’t have to guess whether Dickens prefers the air at the high altitude of the Veneerings or at sea level.

He is in great sardonic form describing the newly rich: In the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings — the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle stickey. Dickens doesn’t mind wealthy people in principle — he needs a few kindly philanthropists around, to adopt stray orphans and such. He minds wealthy people behaving badly, assuming airs and authority they haven’t earned either through good works or strong moral fiber. One of his dark triumphs in Our Mutual Friend is the awful couple the Lammles, who begin the book as newlyweds, a match made by the Veneerings. It turns out, though, that the Veneerings deceived themselves and both parties as to the other’s wealth — Mr. Lammle is not a man of property; Mrs.

Lammle does not possess a fortune — and so the pair spend the rest of the novel leeching money from their social peers, all the while hiding their debts and despising each other for their mutual fraud. (READ: Counting Down Dickens’ Greatest Novels. Number 10: Oliver Twist ) Now, for that flaw. I am hampered by the irrational desire not to spoil a novel that’s been around for nearly 150 years, so I’ll be vague. The goodhearted Boffins embrace the disappointed Bella and take her in as a ward, making a pet of her, outfitting her with the best their money can buy and hoping to help her make a prosperous, happy marriage. But in the course of events, it becomes clear that Bella is being tricked — and tested — on several counts that affect her choices significantly. This is arguably done for her own good. But I like Bella, and it galls me that she is expected not only to endure this hoop-jumping but to be thankful for it.

Perhaps more to the point, it galls me that on some of these counts the reader too is kept in the dark — and that once the deception is revealed, it seems implausible and out of character. Writers routinely withhold information, but in Our Mutual Friend Dickens walks the fine line between withholding from his readers and manipulating them. I’d prefer it if the Lammles were the novel’s only conspirators. And yet. I can’t stop thinking about those bodies in the river. Count them at the novel’s end — the ones who drown and the ones who survive — and you’ll see what a feat Dickens has performed, how intricately he has plotted (in both senses, writing and scheming) his resolution. Consider the fascinating Lizzie Hexam, how she unwittingly draws two men into violent passion and rivalry; consider the friendship of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn and all that goes unspoken between them. They are among Dickens’ greatest creations. They are the reason that for many people, Aunt Helen included, Our Mutual Friend is not no. 5 but no. 1. And I totally see their point.

There is a terrific BBC production of Our Mutual Friend (it ran on Masterpiece in 2000), for those who want to see for themselves. As for Henry James, The Golden Bowl has become one of my favorite novels. I just wanted to mention it, so you wouldn’t think I held a grudge. Come back tomorrow for our look at Charles Dickens’ fourth best novel. Our Mutual Friend Our Mutual Friend Date of entry: Sep-22-1999 Summary The multiple plots of Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's last complete novel, twine around the miser John Harmon's legacy of profitable heaps of refuse ("dust"). Harmon dies and leaves the dustheap operation to his estranged son John, on the condition that he marry Bella Wilfer, a young woman unknown to him. When a body found in the Thames is believed to be the younger Harmon, travelling home to receive his inheritance, the dustheaps descend instead to Harmon's servant Noddy Boffin ("The Golden Dustman").

Boffin and his wife respond to their new status by hiring Silas Wegg, a "literary man with a wooden leg" to teach Boffin to read; arranging to adopt an orphaned toddler from his poor great-grandmother; and bringing the socially ambitious Bella Wilfer into their home, where she is watched and evaluated by John Rokesmith, a mysterious young man employed as Boffin's secretary. Rokesmith is actually John Harmon, who has survived betrayal and attempted murder and is living incognito so that he can observe Bella. Boffin's negative transformation by his wealth, Bella's moral awakening as she witnesses the changes wealth produces in Boffin and in herself, and the developing love relationship between Rokesmith and Bella form one key sub-plot. Another is the romance between gentlemanly idler Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of the waterman who finds the drowned body. Class differences and the obsessive love and jealousy of schoolmaster Bradley Headstone threaten their relationship, but they are finally married with the help of the crippled dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren.

The smaller plots that interweave these sensation/romance narratives comment on the hypocrisy of fashionable life ("Podsnappery") and the destruction of the family lives of both rich and poor by an industrialized, materialistic society. Commentary Beginning as it does with a waterman or "dredger" fishing at night for dead bodies (and their valuables) in a murky Thames, Our Mutual Friend's narrative energy is drawn from human materiality in its more troubling and fascinating forms. The dustheap was quite literally in Victorian London a means to make money out of the material refuse of human lives. Various kinds of waste were sorted by "Dusties" and then sold to manufacturers, resulting in handsome profits for contractors like Old Harmon. The literally dirty gains of the dustheap are reiterated in the work of Hexam the waterman and his rival Rogue Riderhood--who make their living by scavenging dead bodies for valuables and turning them in for rewards--and by Mr. Venus, the "articulator" of human and animal skeletons, who owns Silas Wegg's leg bones. The essential ties between waste and wealth are also figured in the hypocrisy and amorality of the fashionable set.

Dickens figures the damage wrought by modernity in a landscape of fragmented and damaged bodies that spans all social classes and states of moral health. Villain-with-wooden-leg Silas Wegg and the sweet, dying toddler Johnny Harmon (the orphan the Boffins want to adopt) are fairly stereotypical examples. A more complex literary use of embodiment occurs in the dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren, whose back is "bad" and legs are "queer." The child of an alcoholic, infantile father to whom she is a harsh caregiver, Jenny's crippled body works both as a metaphor for the ravages of the cash nexus and more literally as a representative of Victorian concepts of heredity. Hereditarily "entailed" by her father's alcoholism and ill health, Jenny's body expresses its inherited constitutional weakness in a misshapen frame and limbs. If Jenny is a metaphoric and material victim of her society, however, Dickens also casts her as a vocal and canny critic of it, and an agent for the small positive changes that occur in the novel.

Jenny's imaginative and romantic mind produces greater benefits for Eugene and Lizzie than for herself, however; at the novel's end, Dickens suggests that this engaging, acerbically witty character will be romantically paired off with the intellectually impaired Sloppy, a character with whom she has little in common except poverty and the stigma of disability. Other interesting threads include Dickens's brief portrait of a children's hospital (he was himself an advocate for the Great Ormond Street Hospital) and the dying of Betty Higden, a grandmother who would rather starve in open country than subject herself to shame and neglect in a Workhouse infirmary. Miscellaneous First published serially in 1864-65, then published in book form in 1865. Primary Source The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens Publisher What Dickens Can Teach Us About Complex Characters - Helping Writers Become Authors Helping Writers Become Authors December 7, 2007 by K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland 13 Comments Characters What Dickens Can Teach Us About Complex Characters In Our Mutual Friend , Charles Dickens’s final completed novel, he presents for us one of his most comprehensive and well-rounded tales.

Herein is all the darkness of Hard Times , the cynicism of Martin Chuzzlewit , but also the optimism and hopefulness of David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby . G.K. Chesterton wrote of Our Mutual Friend that it “marks a happy return to the earlier manner of Dickens at the end of Dickens’s life.” In it, Dickens introduced the dark tale of a murdered heir and the unexpected turn of events that results when his body is fished from the Thames by unsavory “waterside character” Gaffer Hexam and his beautiful daughter Lizzie. The overarching greed of mankind, both the unabashed grasping of lowlife grubbers and the sophisticated cultivating of social climbers, runs rampant when a sketchy will leaves the entirety of the murdered man’s fortune to two kindly and ridiculous servants, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin. As the “Golden Dustman” and his wife rise to wealth and power, they bring with them the victim’s would-be fiancée—the beautiful and mercenary Bella Wilfer—and an earnest stranger—John Rokesmith—who pledges himself as secretary to the beleaguered Mr. Wilfer. Overflowing with subplots (including that of the nouveau riche Mr. and Mrs.

Veneerings, naively determined to leave their mark on high society; the mismatched and conniving newlyweds Albert and Sophronia Lammle; the scheming Silas Wegg, hired by Mr. Boffin to read him The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone, the two unworthy young men who seek the favor of the lovely and modest Lizzie Hexam, and about whom I will have more to say in a bit), Our Mutual Friend claims for itself a place among the most complex of Dickens’s works—and at the same time one of the simplest. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in his characters. Why write complex characters? As a writer, to strive for and achieve complex characters–both sympathetic and repulsive–is one of the highest marks of success. Without character, story is little more than a fixed narrative, a colorless journey from A to B. Without characters of complexity, a story is nothing more than a farce, a gaudy stereotype. And without characters of realistic complexity, a story lowers itself to the realm of the ridiculous and the pointless.

Although what Dickens offers us in Our Mutual Friend does at times dip into the unrealistic (such as when he asks readers to believe that the ingenuous Mr. Boffin is capable of sustaining a lengthy charade of miserliness), he has also given to classic literature several wonderfully complete characters. The three that particularly stand out to me are Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone—the two men in love with Gaffer Hexam’s daughter Lizzie—and Lizzie’s young friend and protector, the crippled Jennie Wren. Character studies #1-2: Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone Dickens—whose characters, although not always black and white, almost always give to the reader an immediate presupposition of their alignment in the story (good guy or bad guy)—bestows upon his readers a special treat in the creation of Wrayburn and Headstone. Both men are attracted to Lizzie Hexam’s beauty, both men are selfish in their treatment of her (Wrayburn toys with her without ever intending to marry her; Headstone pursues her obsessively, even after she refuses his hand). But each man presents a complicated personality that leaves the reader wondering, Do I like this man or not?

Wrayburn is careless and indolent, telling his friend Mortimer Lightwood that he is undecided as to whether he will respond honorably to Lizzie Hexam or not. Upon being spurned, Headstone lashes out in jealous violence, swearing to Lizzie that he will destroy Wrayburn before that gentleman gains the opportunity to disgrace her. Both also present their sympathetic sides: Wrayburn’s kindness to Lizzie in comforting her after her father’s death and in providing her the opportunity to educate herself reveals a better nature lurking beneath his ennui. He charms all those who know him with his jovial and playful antics, and he is deeply loved by his friend and partner, Mortimer Lightwood. In itself, perhaps, the love and attachment of the honorable Lightwood does more to win over the reader’s affections than any particular act of Wrayburn’s. For the writer, it is an interesting concept: If a character can be loved by another character, he will, at the very least, be found sympathetic by the reader. Bradley Headstone, on the other hand, initially presents the aura of respectability.

As the headmaster of the reputable school attended by Lizzie’s younger brother Charley, he presents every indication of being a good and upright man, right down to his “decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt, with his decent silver watch in his pocket and its decent hair-guard round his neck.” But from the beginning, the reader also glimpses the man’s inflexibility. Although he genuinely wishes to raise Lizzie to the honorable estate of marriage, he never once considers her own feelings in the matter. And when he realizes he has a rival in Eugene Wrayburn—a man who does even trouble himself to reach Headstone’s level of decency and respectability—the schoolmaster is driven into a state of insane rage. He is never a likable character, and yet the reader is still able to maintain sympathy toward him. While Wrayburn’s intentions toward Lizzie remain ambiguous even to himself, Headstone never intends anything but propriety in his attentions to her. He is, at least initially, a more upright man than the cavalier Wrayburn, and when he is spurned in favor of such a man, he is understandably offended.

Headstone presents a fine archetypal villain: never likable, always understandable, and usually, even in his darkest moments, ever so slightly sympathetic. Character study #3: Jennie Wren Finally, we come to Jennie Wren, the young, deformed spitfire who, I personally feel, is the finest character in the book. A decidedly minor character, Jennie transforms her every scene with keen insight and acerbic wit. Dickens, with his perceptive eye for the grotesque and his fine sensibility for the fantastic, transformed the pathetic figure of an alcoholic’s crippled daughter into a captivating and indomitable young woman. The bare fact that her “back’s so bad and [her] legs are so queer” is hardly enough to align her in the reader’s affections. But add to that her determination to conquer life despite her handicaps (and their inevitable affect on other people, her peers in particular), her incisive wit, and her undeniable intelligence—and she presents a formidable scene-stealer. To quote novelist James Scott Bell, she posses the three necessities of a great character, “grit, wit, and ‘it’,” the latter being a certain indefinable charisma.

Altogether, these three characters, along with an accompanying host of Dickens’s trademark buffoons and archetypes, bring his final entrée into the literary world to a level of sophistication not found in most of his earlier works. As we seek to write complex characters of equal realism and interest, we could do much worse than to study a master like Dickens at work. Tell me your opinion: Who is the most complex character in your work-in-progress? What makes him so? Sign Up Today Sign up to receive K.M. Weiland's monthly e-letter and receive her free e-book Crafting Unforgettable Characters: A Hands-On Introduction to Bringing Your Characters to Life. Email: A Serious Reader: Eugene Wrayburn of Our Mutual Friend—A Favorite Character Book Lists, Essays and Reviews for those who take their reading seriously. Thursday, July 7, 2011 Eugene Wrayburn of Our Mutual Friend—A Favorite Character Even on the first reading of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, I had already learned to appreciate Eugene Wrayburn. Dickens gives him so many moments of witty dialogue and of compassion for the under-privileged I could not help but admire him.

His best friend, Mortimer Lightwood, shows such adulation toward Eugene, it seemed natural to enter into the mode of looking up to him, if only out of sympathy with the gentle Mortimer. When Lizzie Hexam falls in love with Eugene, and deep tragedy follows, my feelings deepened into love. By the second reading, I was deeply smitten. Eugene Wrayburn is in many ways a combination of Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennett and Baroness Emmuska Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Blakeney. At first blush it may seem odd to compare a male character to Elizabeth Bennett, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth is a dependent character, because of her gender and her status in a society that subjugated women. Yet, Eugene is also in a subjective state due to his dependence on his father's wealth. As a fourth son, he has no property of his own to uphold himself in the status to which he was born. But, as a son, he is required to live up to that status in spite of the near impossibility of the task.

Like Elizabeth, in order to achieve that objective, he is expected to marry for wealth and, again like Elizabeth, he refuses to marry without love. There is a great deal to be said for his resemblance to Elizabeth in social status, but the way in which Eugene resembles Elizabeth the most is in his character traits. Elizabeth Bennett charms us with her ready wit. Even when she is humiliated by Mr. Darcy, she does not sit and brood, but almost immediately turns her disgrace into a humorous anecdote for her friend's amusement. Eugene also finds himself in humiliated circumstances, with a father who tries to arrange his life. As he explains his circumstances to his friend, he makes light of it, joking with him about not wanting to meet the lady in question. Eugene insists that, in spite of this near tyranny, his father amuses him. "Touching the lady?" asks his friend. "There [my respected father] ceases to be amusing," answers Eugene, "because my intentions are opposed to touching the lady." Both prefer to maintain a playful manner rather than to brood about their misfortunes. Another way in which Eugene resembles Elizabeth is in his keen observation of human nature.

When Charlie Hexam shows his true colors by deprecating his sister, Eugene grabs the boy by the chin to study his countenance, as if he is interested in seeing if his ingratitude was apparent in his face. More telling still is Eugene's behavior toward Charlie's school teacher, Bradley Headstone. When Mr. Headstone's passion gets the better of him, Eugene perks up. As Dickens has it, "Eugene Wrayburn looked on at him, as if he found him beginning to be rather an entertaining study." As to the eponymous character in the Scarlet Pimpernel, Eugene takes on the most appealing characteristics of this character as well. The Baroness' main character plays a double role, as Lord Blakeney the foppish fool and as the Scarlet Pimpernel a swashbuckling hero. At first look, there would appear to be little resemblance between Eugene and Lord Blakeney, because Eugene is neither fool nor hero. The similarity is more subtle. Like Lord Blakeney, Eugene often affects an outward appearance that conceals his true character. When Lord Blakeney acts the fool, we can tell it is mere pretense from the clever way he speaks.

While outwardly Eugene appears gloomy, his lighthearted wit shows his true nature. Lord Blakeney conceals his identity in order to keep himself and his compatriots safe. Eugene uses his affectation more to reveal than to conceal, for through his affected gloom he shows his disdain for the trappings of high society. Yet, both characters only become truly admirable when their hidden nature shines through. Lord Blakeney shows that underneath his affected foppishness he is a hero who rescues the doomed aristocrats in revolution-torn France. Eugene Wrayburn shows that in spite of his lethargic, gloomy and bored exterior he can be both active and passionate in his concern for both Lizzie Hexam and her friend Jenny Wren. There is something so very British about being outwardly able to blend in with any society, but inwardly to burn with a passion for social justice. These are the marks of a true British gentleman. Eugene, in spite of his gloomy front, blends seamlessly into the Verneering's dinner party group, which he qualifies for by his lofty birth. He seems even more at home in the industrious Jenny Wren's parlor-workshop.

He does not even stand out uncomfortably in the lowly hovel of the Hexam family. His confidence makes him at home in the first extreme as his courtesy makes him at home in the last. At the Verneering's party, he feels that justice has been abused by the waste of resources in mere glittery show. At the Hexam's house, he feels that a sensitive soul is languishing for want of those resources, and so he works to right that injustice. Those who would take Eugene Wrayburn as he merely appears to be, or even oft times by his words alone, would misread him disastrously. Lizzie catches a glimpse of Eugene's earnest conviction, behind the façade "usually so light and careless." It is this part of him that she falls in love with. But the true test of Eugene's character is in how his best friend perceives him. Eugene affects gloom, but Mortimer sees him as primarily playful, never able to take anything seriously. He affects a languishing demeanor, but Mortimer notices that he is vigorous enough to outpace the stalking Mr. Headstone night after night.

Eugene affects boredom, but he becomes consumed with introspection so intense that his friend becomes concerned to know what is troubling him so deeply. It is that matter that is trouble Eugene so deeply that most enables us to sympathize with him. He knows that he is falling in love with Lizzie Hexam, but he cannot decide if she is in love with him. Nor can he decide whether loving her is in her best interests. As becomes apparent in the final chapters, the vast majority of society would not accept Lizzie's rise in social status through marriage to an aristocrat. Most of them will make her feel unwelcome, and unworthy. It was serious business in those days to marry outside of one's class. As a consequence, Eugene tries to repress his love, while still working to do as much good as he can for Lizzie. To marry such extremes of class difference could mean to give up society at both ends of the scale, and to be left friendless throughout life. Eugene hesitates to inflict this upon Lizzie, until he sees how passionately she loves him. When he sees that it is as painful for her to deny herself as it is for him to deny himself this love, he is completely torn.

On the one hand, if he marries her she will become a social outcast, and on the other hand she will be denied her love. He can only decide to leave her because it is her decision to separate, and he respects her wishes. The intimate cluster of friends, who finally join the two in the end, are sufficient to ensure that this loving pair will not be friendless, though the rest of society disdains their union. In short, Eugene Wrayburn is one of the most delightful, endearing and sympathetic characters of all time. His character alone makes Our Mutual Friend a book worth reading, but there are many more worthwhile characters in this novel and many fascinating themes to explore as well. Eugene is just my favorite reason to read and reread this classic. Do you have a favorite Dickens character from this, or his other masterpieces? Mr. Headstone declares his loves to Lizzie Hexam Click Here There is an episode in Dickens’ last novel, Our Mutual Friend that is an extreme illustration of the old view that ‘Romantic love used to be thought of as a kind of temporary madness.’ Today, most people would probably say that Mr.

Headstone was crazy, but perhaps he’s just a point near one end of a continuum. It wouldn’t surprise me if quite a few otherwise sane men are within shouting distance of Mr. Headstone. You can judge for yourself from the video excerpt below, but it will help to have a little background. Lizzie Hexam is at the bottom of social ladder, but she’s good looking and has a lot of natural class. As a result two men who are her social superiors fall for her. Eugene Wrayburn is a impecunious, ne’er-do-well gentleman who persuades her to let him tutor her and her friend. Mr. Headstone is a school teacher who meets her through his student (Lizzie’s brother, Charley Hexam). Headstone is pathologically attracted to her on first sight. He is also insanely jealous of Mr. Wrayburn who treats him with condescension and disdain. Both Charley and Mr. Headstone decide that he should tutor and marry Lizzie, not Wrayburn. The clip below shows this plan being executed with disastrous results for Headstone. It’s almost painful to watch!

Project MUSE - Dickens, Natural History, and Our Mutual Friend Dickens, Natural History, and Our Mutual Friend Sally Ledger Abstract The paper argues that, well aware of the developments in contemporary science, including biology and political economy, Dickens believed in the significance of the scientific paradigm shifts for ordinary human life. Dickens's early fiction constituted, among other things, a passionate critique of para-Malthusian political economy. This critique is resumed in Our Mutual Friend, yet with the new awareness of the shift of dominant paradigms from political economy to Darwinist biological thinking. Whereas the legislature that grew out of political economy could be challenged and modified, Darwin's account of natural selection, a biological theory that had permanent ontological ramifications, had a claim to the stability of a natural law which disabled beliefs in Providential design. Darwin's work, however, did not deny the potential of benevolent sympathetic human agency. Dickens's novel pits such agency against the blind forces of the struggle for survival, even while subverting the confidence in overall ethical design trailed in by the residual elements of the traditional melodrama.

The end of the first book of Our Mutual Friend discovers Silas Wegg, a one-legged seller of ballads, hopping around Boffin's Bower "like some extinct bird" (211). Raised from his lowly social position by becoming Mr. Boffin's "literary man," Wegg repays his kindly master by assessing what he might be able to thieve from Boffin's room and that this might further aid him in his ascent up the social scale. He is, though, like the Dodo and other extinct birds, ultimately unsuccessful in the fierce struggle for survival anatomized in Dickens's final completed novel. Sir Richard Owen, eminent anatomist and a leading figure in the scientific establishment throughout Dickens's career, took a particular interest in "extinct birds"; the megalasaurus that walks up Holborn Hill at the start of Bleak House was central to his theorizing as "the highest form of reptile, with real affinities" to mammals (see Levine). Dickens's fiction is stuffed full of references to animals, but in his later work, and in particular in Our Mutual Friend, such references need to be understood in relation to early and mid-nineteenth-century natural history.

Gaffer Hexam, we are told, is "half savage" with his "wilderness of beard and whisker"; he is a "bird of prey," or, as Rogue Riderhood puts it, "like the wulturs" (14). When Riderhood visits Wrayburn and Lightwood in an attempt to implicate Gaffer Hexam in the Harmon murder, Wrayburn dismisses him in consecutive sentences as "vermin" and "a water rat" (172). The people who make their livings along the shoreline, a "knot of those amphibious human-creatures who appear to have some mysterious power of extracting a subsistence out of tidal water by looking at it" (80), merge with the primeval "slime and ooze" (13) of the Thames with which Our Mutual Friend begins; their world is in tension with the modern world of commerce on which the river and its workers, and London itself, depended in mid-Victorian Britain.

[End Page 363] A vocabulary belonging to nineteenth-century natural history is identifiable in the descriptions of the dust-mounds at the center of the novel's plot and its themes: the dust-heaps are analogous to a geological formation, presenting in the form of detritus a micro-history of the society of which they are a product. Harmon's dust heaps are, we are told, "like an old volcano, and its geological formation [is] Dust. Coal dust, vegetable dust, bonedust, crockery dust . . . all manner of Dust" (24). At least four models of nineteenth-century natural history are embedded in the texture of Our Mutual Friend, a novel which bears traces of the work of Richard Owen, Charles Lyell, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and, perhaps most emphatically, Charles Darwin. Dickens was good friends with the anatomist and providentialist Richard Owen, and he owned and was familiar with Lyell's Principles of Geology in which he would also have encountered Lamarck's theory of evolution, which Lyell explained and attacked. Whilst Dickens's library included a copy of the On the Origin of Species, there is no evidence to suggest that he ever met or corresponded with Darwin.

But, as George Levine has remarked, that "they both participated in the intellectual life of England [right] through the early and middle years of the nineteenth century" is "no little thing" (250). Gillian Beer has argued that 'On the Origin of Species seems to owe a good deal to the example of one of Darwin's most frequently read authors, Charles Dickens" (5), and we know that Darwin uses a description of a snarling mob in Oliver Twist when arguing that human expressions derive from basic animal behavior (1965: 240; see Levine 251 ). Household Words and All the Year Round published many articles on science, including an even-handed if ultimately skeptical "Review of The Origin of Species" in July 1860 that carefully describes its theory of evolution. In the month preceding the All the Year Round review, an essay called "Species" had quoted Darwin at length (although without mentioning him), as though in the voice of the author (see Levine 260 ).

As Levine puts it, "These [articles], often surprisingly sophisticated in exposition, despite their popular audience, demonstrate that Dickens was both aware of what was happening in the world of science and convinced that the new developments had real significance for ordinary life" (256). It is this significance that I want to trace in this paper, specifically in relation to Our Mutual Friend. I shall focus, first, on the political influence of social Darwinism on Our Mutual Friend and its relationship to Malthusian political economy; and, second, on the ontological impact on the novel of the Origin's implied rejection of Providentialism and of natural theology. [End Page 364] The two-way traffic between the "two cultures" of literature and science in the nineteenth century has been a recurrent theme of late twentieth-and twenty-first-century critical scholarship, and the general drift of this body of work has been to assimilate Darwin's theory of evolution into the wider social, political, and literary culture of nineteenth-century Britain.

While I am much in sympathy with such work — for example, by Robert Young, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Gillian Beer and others — and am influenced by it, I would also claim that Darwin's theory of evolution involved an ontological shift that cannot very simply be reduced to cultural politics. More than one critic has regarded Dickens's Our Mutual Friend as "the last of a series of . . . attacks on mid-Victorian political economy" ( Fulweiler 51 ). Dickens's fierce critique of a Malthusian-inflected political economy found its first expression in Oliver Twist, and subsequently in his Christmas Books from the early 1840s, most particularly in A Christmas Carol and The Chimes. A large number of historians of science have mapped Malthus's essay on population onto Darwin's account of the "struggle for existence," Darwin himself having cited it as an important influence (see Young 1969 , 1972 ; Herbert 1971 ).

Darwin had read Malthus in the late 1830s, and his brother was very closely connected with that most Malthusian of political economists, Harriet Martineau (see Desmond and Moore 275-76 ). Stephen Jay Gould has similarly identified late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century economic theory as an influence on Darwin's theory of evolution, describing it as "the economy of Adam Smith transferred to nature" (12). Malthus's essay argued that exponential population growth would inevitably result in a scarcity of resources and, in turn, a series of "positive" checks on population growth. The emphasis of later editions of Malthus's essay was on moral (i.e. sexual) restraint amongst the poor (see Benton). Dickens's riposte to Malthus was to support early marriage amongst the poor and to assert the right of the poor to eat and be nourished. In a somber moment in Oliver Twist, Dickens reflects bitterly on the competition for food and sustenance of various kinds that preoccupied Malthus and his followers. Mrs.

Sowerberry, the wife of the undertaker to whom Oliver is apprenticed, feeds Oliver with scraps of food that had been set aside for her dog. Dickens's response to Oliver's meager repast is to assault the philosophical scions of nineteenth-century political economy: I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall within him, whose blood is ice, and whose heart is iron, could have seen Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected, and [End Page 365] witnessed the horrible avidity with which he tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine; there is only one thing I should like better; and that would be to see him making the same sort of meal himself, with the same relish. (1954: 44) In a more comic moment in Our Mutual Friend, Nicodemus Boffin and Silas Wegg — the former in the guise of an avaricious miser — are described as two dogs fighting over the wealth that is hidden in the dustmounds in the form of human and animal waste: "Mr.

Boffin eyed him as a dog might eye another dog who wanted his bone; and actually retorted with a low growl" (483). The bonds of human sympathy, benevolence, and gratitude identified by eighteenth-century moral philosophers and warmly embraced by Dickens in his earlier works are, in Wegg's relationship to Mr. Boffin, broken asunder; in this respect their relationship bears a synechdochal relationship to the wider social and moral vision of the novel. Dickens's assault on Malthusian political economy in his earlier works echoes down the years in Our Mutual Friend in his account, in the figure of Betty Higden, of the workings of the to him infamous New Poor Law of 1834. When he wrote Oliver Twist between 1837 and 1839, and The Chimes in 1844, the gradual, piecemeal implementation of the New Poor Law had initiated a flood of anti-poor law literature, which Oliver Twist both influenced and was shaped by.

In the 1860s the New Poor Law had a renewed topicality in that plans had been mooted to remove responsibility for poor relief from individual parishes to a central fund, a shift in responsibility that would benefit poorer parishes and put a greater financial burden on richer ones than they had hitherto borne. Mr. Podsnap, in Our Mutual Friend, is naturally against such a transfer of responsibility. The dog-eat-dog mentality that the novel at once abhors and exhaustively anatomizes means that even the smallest redistribution of wealth is anathema to the novel's most powerful money-maker: "it was their own fault" is Podsnap's refrain, redolent of the character test on which the old poor laws had been based. Podsnap lapses too into offensive shibboleths about Providence (143) which he combines with a Malthusian glance at the population of London: "You know what the population of London is, I suppose," said Mr. Podsnap. The meek man supposed that he did, but supposed that had absolutely nothing to do with it, if its laws were well administered. "And you know; at least I hope you know;" said Mr.

Podsnap, with severity, "that Providence has declared that you shall have the poor always with you?" The meek man also hoped he knew that. (144) [End Page 366] Yet if Dickens is revisiting a familiar theme in his attack on the new poor law in Our Mutual Friend, there is a crucial difference in the way that it is framed in this novel. Whereas Dickens's initial assault against the New Poor Law in Oliver Twist is aimed at a very specific legal and social wrong that he believed could be remedied, his later invective, in 1864-1865, needs to be understood, firstly, as part of a wider social-Darwinian account of the struggle for existence, and, secondly, in terms of the ontological shift effected by Darwin which, in the end, removed the possibility of Providential design. Peter Brooks has argued — and it is a powerful and influential argument — that the ascendancy of melodrama in nineteenth-century culture was dependent on its ability to provide moral certainty in a post-sacred universe.

Melodrama is, according to Brooks, a "drama of morality" which "strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to 'prove' the existence of a moral universe" (20). Already under pressure in Little Dorrit, by the time Dickens came to write Our Mutual Friend, the conventions of melodrama are no longer able — as they were in Oliver Twist — to "prove" the existence of a moral universe (cf. also Gagnier 336-41 ). In Dickens's narrative account of individuals violently seeking their own advancement at the expense of others it is not difficult to see a fictional echo of Darwin's scientific account of the struggle for life. What I want to argue here, though, is that whereas the science of political economy was historically local and rooted in human affairs, Darwin's account of natural selection — notwithstanding its debt to Malthus and its embeddedness in Victorian culture — invokes a seismic ontological shift from political economy to natural science, a shift that is registered in the pages of Our Mutual Friend as in no other work by Dickens.

Whilst political economy, and the legislature that grew out of it, could reasonably be challenged and thereafter modified, the same was not true of Darwin's account of natural selection, a biological theory that had permanent ontological ramifications, implying as it did an absence of Providential design and a contiguity between human evolution and the evolution of the lower animals. When Oliver Twist famously demands of the master of the workhouse that he be given a second bowl of gruel, the officials' outrage that the "surplus" orphan boy is demanding more than his allotted share of scarce resources results in him being caned by the Beadle as he washes outside in the stone yard; he is additionally flogged every night in the dining hall "as a public warning and example" (31).

Dickens suggests with a dark humor that the famine regime of the workhouse, which effectively [End Page 367] imposes a population check all of its own, could result in the boys eating each other out of sheer desperation: Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months; at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that kind of thing (for his father had kept a small cook's shop) hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he should some night eat the boy who slept next to him, who happened to be a weakly youth of a tender age. (29) The gesture here towards the most transgressive mode of consumption known to human kind — cannibalism — is semi-comic; but in Our Mutual Friend, notwithstanding the novel's own comic aspects, the metaphorical eating of other people is presented almost as the norm.

The mutual sympathy and charity between the poor is generally a powerful binding force in Dickens's fiction: I am thinking of the elderly lady who helps Oliver along his way en route to London although she can ill afford to, and of the lockman in the same novel who does the same; of Mrs. Chickenstalker in The Chimes who effectively gives away produce from her corner store to those who need it, as do the Plornishes in Little Dorrit; one might think also of the mutual kindnesses of Jenny the Brickmaker's wife and of Jo the crossing sweeper in Bleak House. In the dog-eat-dog social world of Our Mutual Friend, this kind of sympathy, whilst by no means entirely absent, is in shorter supply than hitherto. Thomas Dixon's The Invention of Altruism ( 2008 ) does important work in asserting that Darwin saw not only competition and selfishness but also sympathy and love throughout the natural world. This alternative account of the moral force of the Origin is consonant with the competing moral currents of Our Mutual Friend, whose very title — perhaps, in the end, ironically — implies mutuality and interdependence.

The mutual sympathy and love between Jenny Wren, Lizzie Hexam, and old Riah is thrown into sharp relief by the actions of the lockman on the canal (who turns out to be Rogue Riderhood), who pitilessly robs Betty Higden of her last shillings. And the socially-mobile Charley Hexam readily casts off both his sister and his mentor, Bradley Headstone, the instant he senses that they may hinder his social ascent. The Bitzer mentality of Hard Times has multiplied exponentially in Our Mutual Friend, framed as it is by a social-Darwinistic account of the struggle for existence. Even old Riah, the kindly Jewish man often taken as a riposte to Fagin in the earlier novel, could just as readily have turned out to have been a fairy [End Page 368] tale wolf as a fairy godmother — he shares the same instability of identity as Nicodemus Boffin. It is not quite as easy to distinguish "good" characters from "bad" in Our Mutual Friend as it had been in the clearer melodramatic moral universe of Dickens's earlier works of fiction. In Our Mutual Friend a Darwinian vocabulary is frequently deployed to express class distinctions.

The half educated Charley Hexam is described as a mixture of "uncompleted savagery and uncompleted civilization": "His voice was hoarse and coarse, and his face was coarse, and his stunted figure was coarse" (28). Interesting here is Dickens's use of the imperfect tense: Charley Hexam's savagery and levels of civilization are respectively "uncompleted" rather than "uncomplete." The suggestion of process is significant, implying as it does the process of socio-biological evolution, a possibility which is dealt a harsh blow in this novel, but a possibility nonetheless. An important distinction between Malthus's and Darwin's respective accounts of the struggle for existence needs to be made at this point. Malthus's essay posited "a natural equilibrium in which change . . . served only to reinforce the existing relationship between the distribution of people and resources'" ( Jones 6 ), suggesting a static, conservative social and economic view. According to Darwin's theory of evolution, by contrast, "population theory promoted evolutionary change rather than inhibited it" (7); Darwin's is a much more mobile, dynamic theory that allows for the possibility of progress.

In Our Mutual Friend this possibility is, though, barely admitted, Dickens's view of social mobility in this novel being, arguably, at its most restricted. If Dickens's characterization of Charley Hexam is harsh, harsher still is the account of Bradley Headstone, between whom and his gentlemanly "decent" set of clothes, there is, we are told, a "want of adaptation" (218). Dickens remarks that, by contrast, Headstone fits Rogue Riderhood's rough set of clothes, when dressed as a bargeman, much better: whereas "in his own schoolmaster clothes, he usually looked as if they were the clothes of some other man, he now looked, in the clothes of some other man or men, as if they were his own" (619). Headstone is described as "sullen" regarding his origin — he had started in life as "a pauper lad" (218). "You reproach me with my origin," Headstone complains to Eugene Wrayburn (291) — indeed, unlike Bella Wilfer, who is described as "so adaptable" (314), he is unable to transcend his origin.

The to-the-death struggle between Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone over Lizzie Hexam can be understood in terms of Darwin's theory of sexual selection, with the woman choosing the apparently "fitter" mate, several years before Darwin articulated his theory in The [End Page 369] Descent of Man. 1 Headstone, whose "large lower jaw" (381) and "wild energy" (389) seem atavistic, is unable to prevent his rival, the socially and intellectually superior Eugene Wrayburn, from marrying Lizzie Hexam. Ruth Livesey has argued convincingly that the perplexingly unsympathetic presentation of Bradley Headstone and his ambitions needs to be understood in terms of the class anxieties provoked by debates about the extension of the suffrage in the late 1850s and 1860s in the run up to the Second Reform Bill of 1867, the novel's antagonism towards Headstone representing "the limits of the democratic imaginary" in the novel (22).

Whilst politically this seems to me to be spot on, I would also want to argue that the configuration of Headstone as unable to transcend his lowly origins is also associated with the transcendental biology of Richard Owen. Owen's position — at odds with Darwin's — was that there existed among all living creatures an archetype or "ground plan" on which all forms of life are modeled by a divine ordnance (see Bowler 123-24 ). Discrete forms of life, though, are distinguished for Owen by a "divine spark" that animates human life-forms but not other species ( Levine 260 ). Owen's transcendental biology was widely disseminated in Dickens's weekly journals, not least in the essay "Our Nearest Relation" (see Gilchrist) which, in the end, denies a consanguinity between gorilla and man, with the writer demanding of "this apex in the pyramid of brute creation, this near approach to the human form," "what can it do?

The great hands have no skill but to clutch and strangle; the complex brain is kindled by no divine spark." 2 This, it seems to me, could be read as an allegory for Bradley Headstone's learnt behavior in Our Mutual Friend: Lauren Goodlad's description of him as "a freak of nurture" (176) seems to me to be exactly right, contained as he is by the novel's own apprehension of the implications of Victorian biological and evolutionary theory. With Headstone dead, and Eugene sufficiently alive technically to be married to Lizzie Hexam, Ruth Livesey has commented interestingly on the inversion of the traditional cross-class love triangle characteristic of earlier Victorian domestic melodrama: the socially mobile lower-class Headstone rather than the seducing aristocratic Wrayburn is cast as the villainous point in the triangle. In social-Darwinistic terms, though, whether Lizzie's union with Wrayburn will be sexually reproductive is a moot point, with Eugene a physically broken man at the novel's close.

[End Page 370] As he lies apparently fatally injured, he tells his life-long companion, Mortimer Lightwood, that he loves him; these sound like nothing less than his last dying words, and the scenes of domestic happiness between the two public school boys are generally more convincing than the final heterosexual union between Eugene and Lizzie, as Holly Furneaux's work on Dickens has so amply demonstrated (see also Sedgwick's more violent apprehension of homosexual encounters in the novel, 161-79). Notwithstanding the homosocial bond between Wrayburn and Lightwood, the basic sexual instinct is shown to be as relentless — if altogether less brutal — in Wrayburn as it is in Headstone. Having hunted Lizzie down to the rural paper mill where she has found refuge and work, he says to her, "I can't go away!" And although, when she pleads with him to leave her alone so as not to damage her reputation amongst her new workmates, he looks at her "with a real sentiment of remorseful tenderness and pity." This sentiment "was not strong enough," Dickens tells us, "to impel him to sacrifice himself and spare her" (675).

In social-Darwinistic terms the sexual instinct is no respecter of class, but Lizzie's inferior class position leaves her particularly vulnerable to the sexual advances of a social superior. The novel is haunted by the possibility that Lizzie, the girl of the river, could end up dead in the river like so many of London's so-called "fallen women" in the nineteenth century. That she escapes that particular narrative is testament to her adaptability in the novel's social-Darwinistic scheme. Unlike her self-centered brother, Lizzie Hexam inherits nothing from her father other than his rowing skills, which she uses to save Eugene's life. In a novel that centers in an old-fashioned melodramatic manner on an inheritance, and on misplaced and missing wills, the meaning of the inheritance plot shifts towards a somewhat Darwinian grammar. Lizzie is not alone in being retrievable from the low-life of the Thames body-dredging community: whilst Pleasant Riderhood inherits from her recidivist father his swivel eye, she inherits nothing else, and is recuperated at the novel's close into respectable domesticity, as is Lizzie.

Although Eugene Wrayburn is, as his name suggests, well-born, he too is arguably ill-adapted to the struggle for survival in modern London, lacking the force and energy associated with normative middle-class masculinity that is needed there: "If there is any word in the dictionary under any letter from A-Z that I abominate, it is energy," he tells Mortimer Lightwood, who is deeply troubled when Wrayburn stirs into action in pursuit of Lizzie (29). Whilst Mortimer Lightwood is recuperated into normative Victorian masculinity by his transformation, at the [End Page 371] novel's close, into a successful solicitor, Wrayburn remains weak, and feminized by his dependency on Lizzie. In terms of power — social, political and economic — the landed aristocracy is anatomized as a spent force in Our Mutual Friend. Throughout his novel-writing as well as in his journalistic career, Dickens frequently held aristocratic government as well as laissez-faire economics accountable for social distress.

In the 1850s it was the inbred Coodles, Doodles, Boodles, and Noodles of Bleak House who aimlessly passed power between themselves whilst the country sickened around them; closely allied to them are Little Dorrit's Barnacles and their hangers-on in the Circumlocution Office. Dickens wrote a series of essays in Household Words in the mid-1850s that attacked the inertia of aristocratic government and its parasites, most memorably "A Thousand and One Humbugs," "The Toady Tree," and "Cheap Patriotism." In Our Mutual Friend, though, the old aristocratic classes that had been ridiculed and scorned, but which nonetheless remained powerful in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, are now represented by the inebriated and inappropriately flirtatious old Lady Tippins, and by the abject Twemlow with "his neat little silk stockings of a bygone fashion" (19). In social-Darwinistic terms the aristocracy is a spent force in Dickens's last completed novel.

Whilst the well-born Eugene Wrayburn refuses his father's plans for him and marries, as Lady Tippins delicately puts it, "a female waterman turned factory girl" (794), the Boffins play at being aristocrats in their "eminently aristocratic family mansion" (208). The scheming Silas Wegg gets his social capital (or so he thinks) from the imaginary aristocratic family in which he casts himself as a faithful retainer: "Our House," as he calls it. And Jenny Wren repeatedly assaults old-fashioned models of deference (see also Livesey 27 ). If Our Mutual Friend is peculiarly resistant to the social mobility of Bradley Headstone, the hard-working respectable school teacher with whom one might have expected Dickens to sympathize, it nonetheless holds the line on the upper class, which Dickens pre- and post-Darwin characterized as a dogged force against progress.

His investment in Eugene Wrayburn — and I would agree with Lauren Goodlad that the novel does have a large investment in this figure — is all the more perplexing: it is as if Dickens is unable entirely to let go of public school "well born" models of masculinity even as he repudiates, here as rarely before, the industrious masculinity of the rising lower middle class. If Dickens leans on a social-Darwinistic vocabulary in his account of the struggle to survive amongst the lower echelons of society, the gradations [End Page 372] of social class and culture in the upper echelons have been somewhat flattened out by the language of the finance markets: traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Directors in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares.

(118) The world of shares, though, could be apprehended as analogous to — if not exactly an allegory for — the novel's representation of the struggle for survival as an amoral dog-eat-dog mentality. And even the poorest of the poor, in Betty Higden's Brentford, mimic the behavior of the stock-market dealers when it becomes apparent that a market in orphans has come into existence. As the Reverend and Mrs. Milvey seek out a suitable orphan for the Boffins to adopt, they discover that the instant it became known that anybody wanted the orphan, up started some affectionate relative of the orphan who put a price upon the orphan's head. The suddenness of an orphan's rise in the market was not to be paralleled by the maddest records of the Stock Exchange. He would be at five thousand per cent discount out at nurse making a mud pie at nine in the morning, and (being inquired for) would go up to five thousand per cent premium before noon. The market was "rigged" in various artful ways. Counterfeit stock got into circulation. Parents boldly represented themselves as dead, and brought their orphans with them.

Genuine orphan-stock was surreptitiously withdrawn from the market. (195) Our Mutual Friend was written more than half a decade before the publication of Darwin's 1871 The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex, and yet in certain ways it seems to anticipate it. In The Descent of Man Darwin reflected that when writing The Origin he was "not able to annul the influence of [his] former belief, then widely prevalent, that each species had been purposely created; and this led to [his] tacitly assuming that every detail of structure, excepting rudiments, was of some special, though unrecognised, service" (1981: 153). Such a belief in design — in Providential design — is as fundamentally absent in Our Mutual Friend as it was to be in The Descent of Man.

The result is a vision of the world in which the amoral "traffic in shares" can become, as Dickens puts it, "the one thing to have to do with." The world of Shares and finance has its parasites in the shape of Lammle, who attempts to live off other people's wealth, and Fledgeby, who [End Page 373] deals in unpaid bills and debts. Darwin was fascinated and repelled by parasites, frequently using them in his evolutionary hypotheses. Travelling in the Andes he wrote of Giant Vinchuca bugs that it was "horribly disgusting" to wake at night and feel them, "an inch long . . . black and soft," crawling over "your person — gorged with your blood" ( Desmond and Moore 164 ). Lammle has "too many large teeth to be visible at once without suggesting a bite" (407), and the more subtly cruel Fledgeby, the fledgling vulture, sucks the life's blood out of those debtors against whom he feels class antagonism and who are at their very weakest.

One recalls also the Barnacles in Little Dorrit, with Darwin writing vividly of the barnacles he collected in Chile in 1835 as "ill-formed little monsters" that bored parasitically into the conch shells of mollusks ( Desmond and Moore 339 ). Our Mutual Friend is caught between Mayhew's London full of marginal workers (Mayhew was himself in some senses a natural historian of the metropolis), and a more modern conception of the Victorian city. Mudlarks, a doll's dressmaker, Thames body dredgers, an articulator of bones, a mangler, a lady innkeeper, a would-be middle-class schoolmaster — the jumbled occupations of the old city and the nascent professions jostle in an unequal struggle with the modern juggernaut of "shares" and international finance.

In this respect there is a key conversation between Charley and Lizzie Hexam in which the young brother insists that they should look away from the primeval river and towards the "real world" — for him the modern world of the professional ladders that he might climb: "Never look back," he says to the more reluctant Lizzie, who feels the pull of the river and feels constrained by her class origins. "What we have to do," Charley tells his sister, "is, to turn our faces full in our new direction, and keep straight on" (227). Normally on the side of modernity and progress, Dickens is less certain here, given that the narrative of progress is put into the mouth of a self-seeker. George Levine has commented that Dickens was more ambivalent about change than Darwin, and in respect to this novel at least I would have to agree with him (252). For at the heart of Our Mutual Friend is a powerful evocation of Death in the heart of the modern city. Let us now turn to Dickens's anatomy of Death in this his last completed novel, and its relationship to the destruction of transcendental meaning in Darwin's later writing.

Our Mutual Friend opens with the dredging of a dead body from the River Thames, a body that is wrongly identified as John Harmon, and which propels the romantic plot of the popular novel that Our Mutual Friend became. Only a few chapters later, [End Page 374] though, the reader is confronted with a really quite extraordinary account of Lizzie Hexam's apprehension of the relationship between the River Thames and Death, a gloomy apprehension that seems overdetermined in relation to the narrative's account of death in the river and the suspicion of her father's guilt: as the tidal swell of the river broke at her feet without her seeing how it gathered, so, her thoughts startled her by rushing out of an unseen void and striking at her heart. . . . And as the great black river with its dreary shores was soon lost to her view in the gloom, so, she stood on the river's brink unable to see into the vast blank misery of a life suspected, and fallen away from by good and bad, but knowing that it lay there dim before her, stretching away to the great Ocean, death.

(76-77) Dickens had used the river and the sea as symbols of death many years before, in Dombey and Son; but here they serve not as symbols but as part of the young girl's extraordinary consciousness of the darker recesses of the city, ancient and modern, ahead of her down the river. In a post-Darwinian world, the boundary between life and death became arguably more significant given that the human body may, after all, be nothing more than an animal carcass. The fascination with Mr. Venus's workshop, in which human bodies are re-articulated, can partly be explained by the uncertainty concerning the afterlife, increasing from the mid-century. Our Mutual Friend is full of dead bodies that almost miraculously return to life, the boundary between life and death in this novel generally so much less clear than it had been when Dickens had given his moving accounts of the deaths of Little Dick, Little Nell, and Jo the crossing sweeper in earlier novels.

It is only in his narrative of Little Johnny's death in Great Ormond Street hospital, in a chapter called "The Orphan's Will," that readers can hear a distinct echo of a corresponding chapter in Bleak House, "Jo's Will," and feel secure that they are witnessing a traditional deathbed scene. Elsewhere in the novel one can never be sure that a dead person won't spring back to life: Rogue Riderhood, although apparently dead, a "dark carcass," a "flabby lump of mortality" (430) is reanimated by the doctors' efforts; "John Harmon is dead," the man himself reflects; "Should John Harmon come to life?" (366). And as Betty Higden sits dying by a tree, she asks of Lizzie Hexam, "Have I been long dead?" "Am I not dead?" (505). Eugene Wrayburn seems to speak his dying words when he tells Mortimer Lightwood that he loves him; he nonetheless lives to marry Lizzie.

Jenny Wren's childhood dream of children in white dresses who take away her pain and sweep her up to them, and make her "light" (238) is in [End Page 375] one sense a traditional, sentimental vision of angels taking a child off to Heaven. But it is complicated by Jenny's almost surreal account, further on in the novel, of what it means to be dead. For Jenny, to be dead, up on the roof of the house that old Riah inhabits courtesy of Pubsey and Co., is to enjoy "the quiet, and the air" (279). To be "alive" is to be in one's "grave" down in the dark of the city streets. Of Riah, Jenny remarks: "I fancied I saw him come out of his grave! He toiled out at that low door so bent and worn, and looked all round him at the sky, and wind blew upon him, and his life down in the dark was over!" (279).

When Riah leaves with Fledgeby to go back to the money grinding business, Jenny bizarrely calls out to him, "Come back and be dead, Come back and be dead!" (279). John Harmon also thinks it preferable to be (or to be thought of as) dead: "Dead, I have found the pure friends of my lifetime still as true as tender and as faithful as when I was alive" (367), and one of the more affirmative images of the novel is the prelude to Betty Higden's death as she sits on the ground, gently tended by Lizzie Hexam. In earlier novels by Dickens, death would be an occasion for mass weeping and mourning, as his readers well knew; in Our Mutual Friend the relationship to death is altogether more complex, lacking as it does a firmly Christian teleology. The trope of Death in Our Mutual Friend is associated with this novel's alienated vision of the modern metropolis in which "nobody knows who the Veneerings are, and . . . they know nobody" (248).

In a conversation relatively early in the novel Mortimer asks Eugene about his "design" regarding Lizzie Hexam: "My dear fellow," Eugene responds, "I don't design anything. I have no design whatever. I am incapable of designs" (292). The fear is, in the novel, not only that there is no design in the desultory desires of a languid son of the landed gentry or in the irrational amoral world of London's powerful money markets but, more generally, and much more troublingly, that there is no ethical design in the wider post-Darwinian world. In this respect Lizzie Hexam's overde-termined apprehension of death early in the novel can be related to the spiritual death, and, ultimately, to "the horror" as of Joseph Conrad's nihilistic fictional world that Our Mutual Friend anticipates by over thirty years. Whilst Dickens's novel overlays an old-fashioned melodramatic plot, with an attendant clear moral design, onto his bleak spiritual vision of the modern city, by the 1860s his fiction carried more intellectual and ethical freight than the by now rather worn contours of the melodrama could readily sustain.

[End Page 376] Sally Ledger Royal Holloway, University of London Works Cited Beer, Gillian. 1983. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Benton, Ted. 1995. "Science, Ideology, and Culture: Malthus and The Origin of Species." In David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace, eds. Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 68-94. Bowler, Peter J. 1984. Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brooks, Peter. 1976. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven: Yale University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1965 [1872]. The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1981 [1871].

The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Desmond, Adrian J., and James Moore. 1991. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. New York: Warner. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. 1954 [1838]. London: Collins. ———. 1997 [1864-1865]. Our Mutual Friend. Ed. Adrian Poole. London: Penguin. Dixon, Thomas. 2008. The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fulweiler, Howard W. 1994. "'A Dismal Swamp': Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend." Nineteenth-Century Literature 49/1: 50-74. Furneaux, Holly. 2009. Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gagnier, Regenia. 2011.

"Freedom, Determinism, and Hope in Little Dorrit: A Literary Anthropology." Partial Answers 9.2: 331-46. Gilchrist, Anne. 1859. "Our Nearest Relation." All the Year Round (May 28): 112-15. Goodlad, Lauren M. E. 2003. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State:Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Gould, Stephen Jay. 1977. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton. Herbert, Sandra. 1971. "Darwin, Malthus, and Evolution." Journal of the History of Biology 4: 209-17. Jones, Greta. 1980. Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory. Brighton: Harvester. Levine, George. 1986. "Dickens and Darwin, Science and Narrative Form." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 28/3: 250-81. [End Page 377] Livesey, Ruth.

2007. "Homelessness and the Representation of the People in Our Mutual Friend." Key Notes: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 5: 12-25. "Review of The Origin of Species." 1860. All The Year Round (July 7): 293-99. Sedgwick, Eve. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. "Species." 1860. All The Year Round (June 2): 176. Young, Robert. 1969. "Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory." Past and Present 43: 109-41. ———. 1972. "Darwinism and the Division of Labour." The Listener 2264 (August 17): 202-205. [End Page 378] Footnotes * The team of Partial Answers joins Victorianists around the world in mourning Sally Ledger's untimely death.

We are grateful to her husband, Jim Porteous, for providing the all-but-fair copy of the article, and to Regenia Gagnier for her help with negotiating this publication as well as with editing the article. 1. This is what Konstantinos Makras argues in his unfinished University of London doctoral thesis on the Victorian Madman. 2. All the Year Round (May 28, 1859): 115. Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Question: In which Dickens novel does 'Eugene Wrayburn' marry 'Lizzy Hexam'?
Answer: 'OUR MUTUAL FRIEND'