The novel’s plot turns on the identity of the drowned man Mr. Inspector calls “you,” “him,” and “it.” This body is hauled from the Thames by Gaffer Hexam and his daughter, Lizzie, who then hand the corpse over to the authorities. The papers found on the body lead them to identify it as John Harmon, son of a London dust mogul and heir to a fortune. With the son dead, the money goes to the Boffins, The Golden Dustman and his wife, formerly loyal servants to Old Harmon. Silas Wegg, a sly observer of the Boffinses’ new wealth, plots against them. A cash reward, offered for information leading to the perpetrator of the crime, inspires Rogue Riderhood, a low-life river rat, to a deception that takes him to the offices of Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood, lawyers for the Harmon estate. Riderhood then falsely accuses Gaifer Hexam, the man in the boat who found the body, of murder. This brings the highborn Eugene Wrayburn and the lowborn Lizzie Hexam together, and their love story begins. But the authorities are wrong. The body found in the river did not belong to John Harmon but to George Radfoot, a friend of Harmon’s who bore a resemblance to the heir. This mistake allows John Harmon, who has been away from home for many years, to pose as someone else and become a spectator of his own death. He changes his name to Rokesmith, goes to live in what was once his father’s house, works as a secretary to Boffin, and there observes the beautiful but spoiled Bella Wilfer, ward to the newly flush servants and the woman to whom he has been given in his father’s will — his marriage to her being a condition of his inheritance — and their rocky courtship begins. Through social connection or simple coincidence all the dispersed elements of the story intersect: Lizzie and Bella meet. Bradley Headstone, schoolmaster to Lizzie’s brother, and Eugene Wrayburn are thrown together and become rivals for Lizzie. In the grip of a terrible and fatal passion for Lizzie, Headstone allies himself with Riderhood. Mayhem ensues. Riderhood, Headstone, and Gaffer all drown. Eugene Wrayburn almost drowns, but in the end couples are united, the wicked are punished, and most of the good characters seem headed for the fairy-tale state known as “happily ever after,”
Seeing Things
Metaphor always changes the way we see things in our minds, When one thing is compared to another in a sentence, I merge the two in the mental picture I create while I’m reading. Dickens’s metaphors, however, are more radical than those of most writers because they dismantle the lines of conventional perception, and I am continually reorienting the images I see in my mind as I read his books. Normal vision is determined to a large degree by our expectations. We learn to distinguish things as isolated identities out there through the way our brains develop to order visual and linguistic material that make “whole object” representations possible. To put it simply, we don’t see a naked world but a visual field that has been determined by experience, memory, and language. Every reader of Dickens notices that in his work objects often have human traits and people often resemble things. This mixing of the inanimate and the animate is both funny and subversive. When Fascination Fledgeby wants to gain entrance to a house, for example, the reader is told, “he pulled the house’s nose again and pulled and pulled … until a human nose appeared in the doorway.” When the metaphorical nose is followed by a literal nose, the comic tension it creates undermines the status of both noses, making the “real” one appear alien and disembodied, as if it were floating alone in the dark space of a doorway. Dickens’s language plays havoc with whole object representations by breaking them down. Rather than isolate the human body from its environment and make neat distinctions between the living and the nonliving, Dickens confuses these “normal” separations until, over time, he rearranges our expectations entirely.
In Silas Wegg, Dickens creates a character who is already literally part object. He has a wooden leg, which the narrator tells us Wegg seems “to have taken to naturally,” perhaps because the man is also metaphorically wooden: “Wegg was a knotty man, and a close grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman’s rattle.” Both his body and facial tics are more thing-like than human. Then, in a chapter titled “Mr. Wegg Looks After Himself,” we discover that the wooden gentleman has been reluctant to give up what he has lost, and obeying a wonderful logic all his own, he goes to a dingy little shop in London and calls on himself:
“And how have I been going on, this long time, Mr. Venus?”
“Very bad,” says Mr. Venus, uncompromisingly.
“What am I still at home?” asks Wegg with an air of surprise.
‘Always at home.”
The first time I read this passage, I had no idea what was going on, but when it became clear to me that the “I” in this remarkable exchange is Wegg’s lost leg bone, I burst out laughing. In order to arrive at this “I,” Wegg has to wrench the familiar pronoun from its usual place and force it into another: He adopts what is normally the third person as the first. The French linguist Émile Benveniste makes an important distinction between what he calls the polarity of person and non-person: “There are utterances in discourse that escape the condition of person in spite of their individual nature, that is, they refer not to themselves but to an ‘objective situation.’ This is the domain we call the ‘third person.’“ The difference between polarity of person and nonperson is clear — in dialogue person is always reversible. I can become you, and you, I, while this is not true of he, she, and it. By moving the first person outside of dialogue, Wegg’s person has become nonperson, a leap that brings me back to Mr. Inspector’s earlier confusion about how he should address a dead man. The “I” bone, after all, is a corpse piece of Wegg, one that has made its way to the morgue a little earlier than the rest of him.
Wegg is only one of many characters in Dickens who has a body that has fallen apart. The novels abound with amputees, bloody messes, bodies that explode, disintegrate, or liquefy, as well as countless metaphorical references to going to pieces. In Dombey and Son, a train steams over Carker with “its fiery heat and cast his mutilated fragments into the air.” In Bleak House, Krook spontaneously combusts. In Oliver Twist, Sikes leaves the murdered Nancy “a dark heap in a blood-stained room.” In Little Dorrit, Blandois is crushed and found “in a dirty heap of rubbish,” his head “shivered to atoms.” In Martin Chuzzlewit, Joseph Willet loses an arm and Simon Taper-tit’s legs are crushed and replaced by wooden ones. In the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it’s obvious that Jasper has disposed of his nephew with quicklime, an acid that eats skin and bone. And this is the short list. The crushed body is a leitmotif in Dickens — an image central to the writer’s imagination. In Our Mutual Friend, this destroyed corpse becomes the vehicle for the obsessive question: How does one construct a self?
Wegg’s dearly departed leg is in the possession of Mr. Venus, a man in the business of articulating bones. I like to think that in this dingy bone shop Dickens gathered together all the smashed corpses from his earlier books and gave Venus the impossible task of rebuilding them. Venus faces three problems— seeing, recognizing, and finally identifying the fragments he has in front of him. Throughout the narrative, Dickens isolates each step, which echoes the realities of perception. In a dense fog I may see shapes in front of me but not recognize any of them, or, as often happens, I may recognize a face but can’t identify it with a name. Venus, underworld Encyclopedist that he is, sets about trying to order the bits and pieces of the dead from what the narrator tells us is “a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick …. among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct.” This “muddle” isn’t limited to the bone shop; it is continually present in the story from its beginning. The novel opens in the gloom of twilight on the Thames. The narrator points out two people in an unmarked boat, which has “no identifying marks whatsoever.” Four paragraphs later, the setting sun illuminates the craft’s hull for an instant, and the reader catches a glimpse of “a rotten stain” that bears “some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form.” Muffled and muddled are words that pertain to the whole world of the book. Perceiving what’s out there is difficult. Dust blows in the streets. Obscure figures appear and disappear. “Misty, misty, misty,” says another character, Jenny Wren, as she tries to make sense of who is who and what is what in her own life. “Can’t make it out.”