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Robert Morse
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
"In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year
there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable ap–
pearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between
Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is
of stone, as an autumn evening was closing
in."
The sinister search
on the water has begun, and the first chapter of Dickens' sinister
masterpiece. We find ourselves on the water, and muddy water is
to trickle and seep through all the following pages. The two figures
in
the boat are Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie. Lizzie shows
a strong dislike for her father's occupation, which is that of robbing
the pockets of drowned men. Gaffer remonstrates with her in such
terms as these: "How can you be so thankless to your best friend
[the river], Lizzie? The very fire that warmed you when you were
a baby was picked out of the river alongside the coal barges. The
very basket that you slept in, the tide washed ashore. The very rockers
that I put it upon to make a cradle of it, I cut out of a piece of
wood that drifted from some ship or another." Such rhetoric from
the mouth of a man who is pictured as the roughest of waterside
scavengers is likely to seem to us, in our day, as Dickens at his most
improbable. And when his daughter answers
in
speech of even
greater refinement and purity of grammar, the question arises: How
realistic did the works of Dickens seem to his contemporary Lon–
doners?
It is possible that the question of true-to-life did not arise, and
that Dickens' contemporaries accepted his dark vision of England
and London and London's creatures as readily as we today accept
Raymond Chandler's California with its brutal and neurotic crew
of killers and private-eyes--or even the sweet mirage of New York
presented by our women's magazines. And yet we have been trained
