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Illustration for "Writing Numbers in Advance"

The publication of Our Mutual Friend, in the form of the earliest stories, extended from May 1864 to November 1865. Four years earlier he had chosen this title as a good one, and he held to it through much objection. Between that time and his actual commencement there is mention, in his letters, of the three leading notions on which he founded the story. In his water-side wanderings during his last book, the many handbills he saw posted up, with dreary description of persons drowned in the river, suggested the 'long shore men and their ghastly calling whom he sketched in Hexam and Riderhood, "I think," he had written, "a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and being dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for years retaining the singular view of life and character so imparted, would be a good leading incident for a story;" and this he partly did in Rokesmith. For other actors in the tale, he had thought of "a poor impostor of a man marrying a woman for her money; she marrying him for his money; after marriage both finding out their mistake, and entering into a league and covenant against folks in general:" with whom he had proposed to connect some Perfectly New people. "Everything new about them. If they presented a father and mother, it seemed as if they must be bran new, like the furniture and the carriages — shining with varnish, and just home from the manufacturers." These groups took shape in the Lammles and the Veneerings. "I must use somehow," is the remark of another letter, "the uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles whom Leech and I saw at Chatham;" of which a hint is in Charley Hexam and his father. The benevolent old Jew whom he makes the unconscious agent of a rascal, was meant to wipe out a reproach against his Jew in Oliver Twist as bringing dislike upon the religion of the race he belonged to. [Book IX, "The Author," ch. v, "Our Mutual Friend. 1864-1865," 371]

Commentary: The Models for Charley Hexam and His Dad Observed at Chatham Docks

Curiously Barnard has passed on the opportunity to depict Dickens's heroic conduct at the Staplehurst Railway Accident (9 June 1865), upon which he commented to Forster in a letter the next day. The biographer notes, moreover, that the accident had a profound effect long afterwards upon Dickens's health; and, as consequence, he could no longer bear to travel by railway. To suggest the verisimilitude of the description in The Book of Memoranda Barnard has included both Forster and Dickens in the background, observing the proletarian father and the bookish son, Charlie, near the Chatham docks. Ironically, Dickens's companion in the episode was not Forster, but cartoonist and illustrator John Leech, who died shortly thereafter, in 1864, much to Dickens's distress.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Barnard, Fred, et al. Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings by Fred Barnard, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), J. Mahoney [and others] printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman & Hall, 1908. Page 581.

[The copy of the book from which these pictures were scanned is in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.]

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872 and 1874. 3 vols.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 22 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879. Vol. XXII.

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