DICKENS/ Listening to an Old “Friend”

When I went through my Dickens period thirty years ago, buying a complete edition and reading it all but cover to cover, I developed a strange favorite. I read all the best-loved titles, from The Pickwick Papers (begun 1836) to Great Expectations (completed 1861), but the book I loved more than all was one I had literally never heard of. It is Dickens’s last complete novel and his darkest, Our Mutual Friend (1865).

We’ve now entered Charles Dickens’s bicentennial month (he was born February 7, 1812), so I thought I would use my monthly credit at Audible.com to listen this old Friend again. On my morning walks, I have been reintroduced to a small galaxy of great characters: the river rat Gaffer Hexam, who may or may not have found the body of wealthy heir John Harmon; a couple of nouveaux riches with one of those amazing Dickens names, the Veneerings; the one-legged “literary man” Silas Wegg; . . . and most especially, the dumpy but incorruptible Nicodemus “Noddy” Boffin.

As caretaker for the dead man whose estate Harmon may or may not have inherited, Noddy has come into an extraordinary fortune worth £100,000. He and his wife reside in Boffin’s Bower, a small dwelling sitting amid piles of highly valuable “dust.” Today, we might say that the Boffins life smack in the middle of a junkyard. With her new wealth, “Henrietty” Boffin has gone in “neck and crop for fashion,” but Noddy continues to boast of her moral rectitude.

I walk with my head down, smiling to myself and laughing out loud. Our Mutual Friend is great entertainment, but why should a Catholic care about Charles Dickens?

This Catholic cares, for starters, because this Catholic is a writer and Charles Dickens is the greatest writer of English literature since Shakespeare. And prolific! He churned out his novels in monthly installments, forced to make 20,000-word deadlines with ferocious, clocklike regularity. Yet he had so much energy that he walked over ten miles a night through the streets of London so that he wouldn’t explode. The walker in me likes that about him too.

Dickens was the father of ten children but, in the end, not a perfect husband. Late in his marriage, when he was falling madly for a young actress half his age, a crush he probably did not consummate, Dickens built a brick wall down the middle of his bedroom and had his wife sleep on the other side. There is a wonderful early scene in Boffin’s Bower where Noddy explains the arrangement of the sitting room to Wegg, who has been hired to read aloud from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The two men sit on rough wooden settles to either side of the fire, with sawdust between them, as in a pub. Meanwhile, Henrietty sits on an upholstered sofa facing the fire, with a carpet under her feet, as in a posh drawing room. The carpet ends where the sawdust begins, and so the Boffins avoid the Dickenses’ marital fate.