Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend

A Publishing History

Sean Grass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317168218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

Even within the context of Charles Dickens's history as a publishing innovator, Our Mutual Friend is notable for what it reveals about Dickens as an author and about Victorian publishing. Marking Dickens's return to the monthly number format after nearly a decade of writing fiction designed for weekly publication in All the Year Round, Our Mutual Friend emerged against the backdrop of his failing health, troubled relationship with Ellen Ternan, and declining reputation among contemporary critics. In his subtly argued publishing history, Sean Grass shows how these difficulties combined to make Our Mutual Friend an extraordinarily odd novel, no less in its contents and unusually heavy revisions than in its marketing by Chapman and Hall, its transformation from a serial into British and U.S. book editions, its contemporary reception by readers and reviewers, and its delightfully uneven reputation among critics in the 150 years since Dickens's death. Enhanced by four appendices that offer contemporary accounts of the Staplehurst railway accident, information on archival materials, transcripts of all of the contemporary reviews, and a select bibliography of editions, Grass's book shows why this last of Dickens's finished novels continues to intrigue its readers and critics.

Chapter 1
The Man from Somewhere: Ellen Ternan, Staplehurst, and the Remaking of Charles Dickens

Dickens glided purposefully among the dying and dead, administering what comfort he could to those lying injured at the bottom of the ravine. Minutes earlier he had been aboard the 2:38 tidal train from Folkestone to London, nestled comfortably in a first-class carriage and, just perhaps, talking amiably with his two female companions (one older, one much younger) or imagining the work to be done on Our Mutual Friend’s 16th monthly installment, most of which he was carrying back from his holiday in Boulogne. But a panic, then the scream of grating metal and a terrible wild careening, had changed all that in an instant, and he now moved through a nightmare of splintered wreckage and agonized groans. “No imagination,” Dickens wrote to his friend Thomas Mitton a few days later, “can conceive of the ruin of carriages, or the extraordinary weights under which people were lying, or the complications into which they were twisted up among iron and wood.”¹ As the Times described the scene the next day, “[t]he carriages that went down were so twisted, flattened, and turned upon their sides that it was impossible to say whether the unfortunate travellers inside had been killed outright by the shock or suffocated as they lay in the water and mud.”² Ten passengers died in the accident at Staplehurst on June 9, 1865, and dozens more were injured. The great Dickens, the Times reported—“fortunately for himself and for the interests of literature”—walked away unharmed.³

The next week the inquest into the Staplehurst accident determined that railway workers had caused the problem as they attempted to replace rails on a small viaduct spanning the river Beult. In an unlucky moment, the foreman had consulted the timetable for the wrong day, so he expected no train for two more hours; meanwhile, the flagman, who should have been at least 1,000 yards from the site to warn oncoming traffic, had positioned himself scarcely 500 yards from the dismantled bridge.⁴ Barreling downhill at nearly 50 miles an hour, the train had no chance. The driver whistled desperately for the brakes when he saw the flagman, and a guard immediately applied them, but the engine still reached the bridge at around 20 miles an hour, jumped the 42-foot gap, lurched sideways, and rolled to a stop.⁵ Only three cars back, Dickens’s carriage nearly jumped the gap, too, but came to rest dangling precariously over the side of the ruined bridge, suspended by its coupling to the second-class carriage in front. Behind, all was chaos and ruin. The rear coupling to Dickens’s carriage had broken, and the other first-class carriages had tumbled through the gap and down the riverbank, flipping and smashing to pieces in the muddy ground below. When Dickens realized that the immediate danger had passed, he calmed his female companions, then hailed the guard and demanded a key. In minutes, with the help of a workman and a makeshift ramp made of wooden planks, he had emptied his carriage and ushered its occupants to the safety of the riverbank, where he set about the grisly work of aiding the passengers lying bloodied and broken among the demolished cars. For three hours he administered brandy from his traveling flask and scrambled to and from the river’s edge, retrieving water in his hat.⁶ On June 24 the Penny Illustrated Paper gave a front-page sketch of Dickens tending the injured at Staplehurst, and the directors of the railway company sent him a “Resolution of Thanks.”⁷ Through the hours of dreadful toil, he told Mitton, he preserved his “constitutional (I suppose) presence of mind”—so much so that, in the middle of it all, he had a sudden realization and climbed back up into the still-dangling carriage. There, he retrieved from the pocket of his overcoat the unfinished manuscript of Our Mutual Friend’s 16th number.⁸

Time has erased any sign of the Staplehurst crash from the manuscript of Our Mutual Friend, but the story of the accident and all that led up to it still bears heavily upon the story of Dickens’s last completed novel. Soon after the crash, Dickens’s “presence of mind” gave way to clear signs of just how badly he had been shaken. He sent dozens of letters to friends on June 11, 12, and 13 to reassure them that he was unharmed, but he wrote very few of these himself, for he could scarcely hold a pen. His sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth wrote the lion’s share, leaving Dickens merely to add the occasional postscript, or only to sign, mostly without even his usual flourish.⁹ To his All the Year Round subeditor W.H. Wills and his friend John Forster, he confided that he would “turn faint and sick” after writing just a few notes, and three weeks after the accident he rejoiced that he had finally “even got [his] voice back,” having “most unaccountably brought somebody else’s out of that terrible scene.”¹⁰ In London he could not bear the noise of the traffic, while at Gad’s Hill, where it was quieter, he urged his eldest son Charley incessantly to “go slower” in the basket-carriage, even when they already crept along at a footpace.¹¹ One week after Staplehurst, with his characteristic will, Dickens did force himself back onto a train—a slow one, not an express— to begin conquering his fear, but he nonetheless suffered for the rest of his life from “sudden vague rushes of terror” during train travel, against which he fortified himself with brandy and sheer mental resolve.¹² Years later, in his memoir of his father, Charley called the accident “such a shock to the nervous system as [his father] never quite got over,” and indeed, in a coincidence worthy of Dickens, he died on the fifth anniversary of the crash.¹³

Small wonder, then, that Dickens, having retreated to Gad’s Hill on the evening after the accident, made it known to the authorities that he did not wish to testify at the inquest. Who could blame him? He was 53 years old and in declining health, and he had exerted himself furiously for hours amid appalling scenes on the day in question. More, to Dickens’s unnaturally vivid imagination, the horrors of Staplehurst must have been present daily, hourly, constantly, unwelcome and unbidden. Yet Dickens did use June 12, the day on which the inquest began, to take care of one bit of crash-related business. He wrote to the manager at Charing Cross station on behalf of the younger of his female companions from that day, explaining that she had lost several “trinkets” in her struggle to get free of the carriage: “a gold watch-chain with a smaller gold watch chain attached, a bundle of charms, a gold watch-key, and a gold seal engraved ‘Ellen.’”¹⁴ A simple letter enough, but one pregnant with meaning. For “Ellen” was almost certainly Ellen Lawless Ternan, known familiarly as Nelly, the much younger woman with whom Dickens had carried on a clandestine relationship since 1857, and who, from that time, exerted a powerful influence upon his life and work. And Dickens had almost certainly refused to testify at the inquest for a reason that was cliché long before our postmodern times: he did not wish to explain publicly why he had been traveling with a pretty young woman who was not his wife.

To say that Our Mutual Friend owes much to the presence of Nelly is to say only what Edmund Wilson first made fashionable nearly 75 years ago when he published “Dickens: The Two Scrooges.” Since then, biographical critics have looked for Nelly—and of course found her—in all of Dickens’s later novels, though she seems to have been a rather inconsistent character. She is Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities, young and gentle and pretty and replete with golden curls, and later she is Estella, the heartless gold-digging monster who blights Pip’s life in Great Expectations. In Our Mutual Friend she is both Bella Wilfer and Lizzie Hexam, simultaneously another Estella reclaimed from the dust heap of sordid money-grubbing and an intrinsically worthy young woman rescued from poverty by a gentleman who cannot decide whether to make her his mistress or his wife. For all we know, during the period after 1857 Nelly may have been all of these, dispersed across the later fiction in the same way that Dickens dispersed himself across Sydney Carton, Pip, Eugene, John Harmon, and even the murderous Headstone. For Dickens, as for most writers, some things—the prison, the orphan, the angel in the house—simply became haunting refrains. Yet the biographical critics are not necessarily wrong when they suggest that Ellen mattered generally to Dickens’s later work, or particularly to Our Mutual Friend. They have only misplaced their emphasis by suggesting that she did so in such tenuous ways. The story of Lizzie Hexam or Bella Wilfer may be some version of the story of Dickens’s emotional life with Nelly during the 1860s. But the story of how Dickens came to write Our Mutual Friend—how he envisioned it, struggled with it, and eventually triumphed through it—is undeniably a story about Nelly, and about the ways in which their relationship drove Dickens to remake himself personally and professionally in the years leading up to the novel.

During a remarkable two-year period that began in August 1857, Dickens detonated his private life in a series of decisions that had enormous implications, too, for his life as an editor and novelist. He separated from his wife Catherine, initiated a secret relationship with Nelly, quarreled openly with old friends, and only narrowly escaped the kind of public scandal that would have laid waste to his reputation as the great novelist of Victorian morality and the pleasures of the domestic hearth. As a consequence, he also set about reinventing himself for the public, staking out a bold new professional course that fundamentally altered both the nature and form of his writing activities for the last decade of his life. He broke with his longtime publishers Bradbury and Evans after 15 years, abandoned the editorship of Household Words, and decided instead not only to create but also to finance his own weekly magazine, All the Year Round, which in turn caused him to leave behind for the better part of a decade the monthly publication format that had made his work accessible to enormous numbers of Victorian readers. Determined to face down the scandal and cement his relationship with his reading public, he also embarked upon an unprecedented and wildly profitable career as a public performer, giving readings from his old work and becoming his characters before packed houses in London, the provinces, and eventually the United States. In all of this he was carefully and consciously remaking himself and redefining the meaning of his “authorship”: establishing new financial relations between his editorial work and the Victorian periodicals market, writing and publishing in new formats, and, by merging his identity publicly into the characters he had created, cultivating an unusual intimacy between himself and his readers. The history of Our Mutual Friend thus begins with the story of Nelly and how she came to be with Dickens on the day that the 2:38 tidal train crashed at Staplehurst.

I

So much has been written about Dickens’s relationship with Ellen Ternan that it is hard to imagine doing justice to the subject without giving it a monograph of its own. Fortunately, Michael Slater has very recently done just that, to great effect, in The Great Charles Dickens...