Our Mutual Complexity

Wikipedia says (and it seems to be properly sourced) that critics didn’t think much at first about Our Mutual Friend because of its complexity. Admittedly, the plot is complex. Lizzie Hexam is on a boat on the Thames rowing her father, Gaffer Hexam, who pulls a dead body out, which is identified as that of John Harmon by a shaken man called Julius Handford. Then a nouveau riche couple named the Veneerings holds a dinner attended by  various people, all of whom seem to be their oldest and dearest friends (although the Veneerings haven’t known any of them for more than a month), and one of the diners, Mortimer Lightwood, tells the story of John Harmon, who, having inherited his father’s dust (i.e. trash) company, sailed home to England only to be murdered, the business and home instead going to the faithful servants, the Boffins. Lightwood further says that Harmon was instructed by the will to marry Bella Wilfer, a pretty girl who says she will only marry for money. Mr. Boffins hires Silas Wegg, a literary man with a wooden leg, to read Gibbon to him at night, and he hires as a secretary a man named John Rokesmith, who looks a lot like Julius Handford. Rokesmith also ends up renting a room at the Wilfers. The Boffins want to adopt a small child and also to take in Bella so that she can enjoy some of the wealth she would have had had Harmon lived. Lizzie’s brother goes to study with Bradley Headstone, who falls in “love” with Lizzie but is loved by his assistant, Miss Peecher. Mortimer’s friend, Eugene Wrayburn, also falls for Lizzie and pays to have her educated, but not by Headstone, who becomes jealous about Wrayburn’s attentions. Then the Lammles, two of the Veneerings’ friends, try to get their friend Georgiana Podsnap married to Mr. Fledgeby, who visits Lizzie one day on the terrace where she and a dolls’ dressmaker named Jenny Wren rent rooms from Mr. Riah. It seems several of the characters owe Mr. Riah money. Meanwhile Wegg meets a taxidermist named Venus and partners with him to begin to search through the old Harmon house for, what? money? a second will? Now we’re about a fourth of the way through the book, and I haven’t even mentioned Mr. Twemlow, Lady Tippins, Betty Higden, Sloppy, and the Milveys. Yes, it’s complex.

Can we even say that there’s a central plot? Lizzie is the first character we meet, and she forms one vertex in a nice love quadrangle. So maybe the book is primarily about her. But Lizzie’s overshadowed pretty quickly in chapter 1 by the appearance of a dead body. So maybe the main plot has to do with John Harmon. Who killed him? What will Wegg and Venus find in the dust heaps? But then there’s the title. Surely an author points to the central story in his title! (Not so surely: Trollope doesn’t in The American Senator.) Rokesmith is called a mutual friend of the Boffins and Wilfers, so maybe he forms the center of the central story. Where does this mysterious stranger come from? But then the book is called *Our* Mutual Friend; maybe “we” are the key. In other words, maybe the story of the Boffins and the Wilfers (especially the Boffins and Bella) takes center stage. Or maybe Dickens will tie all the stories together. Or maybe they will all stay parallel, only intersecting randomly like knights and damsels in The Faerie Queene, held together by the common theme of money and the sudden acquisition thereof.

All I can tell you now is that all this complexity and lack of center, far from bothering my dad and my future wife and me when we read the book together (see the previous post), seemed very exciting. Each of the first five or six chapters introduced a new set of characters, tangentially related at best, and each was as intriguing and entertaining as the last. We didn’t care where it was going because the going was so much fun, and we were glad that we had many hundreds of pages to find out what it all meant.

May I go back to the issue of characters? I’m annoyed every time I read some critic complain about a “shallow” Dickens character. You create fifty of the best, most memorable characters in the history of literature, and then we’ll talk about the characters you didn’t draw out so well! As I said last time, I think the only real dissatisfaction we can have is with a handful of the pretty girls scattered across the novels, novellas, and stories, and we love them in spite of themselves if we truly love Dickens. But let me add a couple more arguments on behalf of the author of the best-selling novel in all of history (I just found that out a few days ago: look it up!), as if such an author needs arguing on his behalf.

First, Dickens was writing at a time when the notion of a character in a novel was changing. Characters had been types before. We watched them act according to their respective sets of virtues and vices, and we enjoyed the plot that came out of it. Only in the nineteenth century did we really start to have an idea that a good character should have a somewhat unusual make-up that would lead him or her to respond to circumstances and change and grow in interesting ways. And only after detectives and psychoanalysts (who are also detectives) became a thing did we really want to find out all the inmost secrets of a character. Dickens didn’t live that late, so don’t expect Joycean character from him. But we can expect some characters full of surprising complexity (e.g. David), heroes with dark flaws (e.g. Pip), and characters who change dramatically (e.g. Sydney Carton). Ugh! I had several other examples in mind, but this post is already getting too long.

Second and last, Dickens’s plan for a novel involved putting on a long parade of characters, of opening up every district of London and the surrounding countryside all at once. Maybe the primary human complexity he intended to portray was social and not individual. And yet in his secondary and tertiary and even incidental characters, Dickens is the master of presenting the tip of what is clearly an iceberg. David Copperfield meets an old carter (i.e. a nineteenth-century Uber driver) named Barkis who has an eye for David’s old nurse, Peggotty. One day he tells David, “Tell her, Barkis is willin’.” A couple more times in later chapters, he gives a knowing wink to David and says, “Barkis is willin’.” I don’t think Barkis says anything else in the book, yet he is a favorite with Dickens fans. We know the diligent old country laborer who doesn’t talk much, so we recognize Barkis’s authenticity. It means something that he has chosen as his beloved an eminently good woman. It means something that he is so shy, he passes along his intentions through a young, involuntary mediator. With a single line, Dickens assures us that Barkis is a man we would respect, a man we could rely on, a man whose faults we could overlook if we met him in real life. That is the work of an ingenious master artist, and I don’t know why we should want any more from him.