dickens’s thames, and also the medway and the thames ... · web viewno fewer than seven...

Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016

‘The Country in the City: Dickens and the Idyllic River’

We all know what the Dickensian river looks like. Dirty, smelly and murky, it is peopled by

scavengers and murderers, and filled with commercial shipping and the bodies of fallen

women. It’s the river we encounter in Dickens’s journalism as well as in his novels: for the

Uncommercial Traveller “the river had an awful look”, while in Household Words the

Thames is personified as “creeping, black and silent” (Dickens, ‘Night Walks’, 151; ‘On

Duty With Inspector Field’, 269). In Our Mutual Friend no fewer than seven characters meet,

or nearly meet, their maker in or close to the Thames: no wonder then that Dickens describes

the river in London as “such an image of death in the midst of this city’s great life” (‘Down

With The Tide’, 481). But on May 25th, 1868, Charles Dickens sat in his Swiss chalet at

Gad’s Hill and wrote the following description of his view of the river Medway:

Divers birds sing here all day, and the nightingales all night […]. I have five mirrors

in the Swiss chalet (where I write) and they reflect and refract in all kinds of ways

the leaves that are quivering at the windows, and the great fields of swaying corn,

and the sail-dotted river. My room is up among the branches of the trees; and the

birds and the butterflies fly in and out, and the green branches shoot in at the

open window, and the lights and shadows of the clouds come and go with the rest

of the company. The scent of the flowers, and indeed of everything that is growing

for miles and miles, is most delicious. (Letter to Mrs James T. Fields, 119)

This letter presents a rural idyll: Dickens portrays himself in a writer’s retreat up among the

“green branches”. He imagines himself as part of nature, linked by his four senses (sight,

smell, taste and hearing) to his surroundings. However, part of his view of this tranquil scene,

including “the sail-dotted river”, is mediated by the mirrors in the chalet. These “reflect” but

also “refract” the view, and so do not provide a true image of the river and the landscape at

all. Indeed, Dickens himself is also ‘refracting’ reality in his letter, in his personification of

nature; the butterflies and clouds are part of the “company” which comes to call on the writer.

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The whole passage conjures up the sensation of a day-dream, with the sense of movement

and instability generated by the multiple clauses and the present participles “quivering” and

“swaying”. The description is not that of a naturalist, but more like that of Barnaby Rudge,

whose experience of a rural landscape is one of “everything around melting into one delicious

dream” (Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, 372).

Dickens uses rivers (and their attendant imagery of surfaces and depths, noise and

quiet) in his late novels to link country and city. Dickens maps much of the action of his late

complete novels – Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend – along the

banks and bridges of the Thames, its estuary, and the Medway.1 In these novels, Dickens

frequently describes the rivers outside of London as idyllic spaces of peaceful banks and

idealised community life. Discussion of Dickens’s Thames has habitually focused on the

dirty and polluted urban river: Michelle Allen’s work on what she calls the ‘sanitary

geographies’ at play in Victorian literature and culture ably demonstrates how Dickens

addressed contemporary concerns about sanitation, filth, and the polluted Thames in Our

Mutual Friend (Allen 54-114).2 For Allen, the Thames above and below London provides

respite from the city in the novel: “when the pressure of pollution builds, when life in the city

becomes unbearable, characters and readers alike find a temporary release and a saving

resource in the expansive topography of the river”, whether in pastoral Henley or in

Greenwich’s pleasure ground (102). But Dickens’s riverside topographies are even more

complicated than that. Not enough attention has been paid to the fact that across Dickens’s

late novels he was as much interested in the Thames (and the Medway) up- and down-stream,

as he was in the dark and dirty river of inner London. However, instead of exercises in

nineteenth-century pastoral nostalgia, Dickens’s depictions of rural riversides point us back

towards the city. The Thames and the Medway are not just literal watercourses in Dickens’s

novels, but also examples of the river’s function as a site or symbol of progress: in narrative,

in his characters, and in society. The idyllic river offers hope of sustainable progress –

progress that keeps going, like the continuous flow of the river – towards a ‘knowable

community’ (to use Raymond Williams’s phrase) of more ethical relationships across

different classes and walks of life. Dickens’s river complicates any conventional opposition

of country and city, as Allen argues, but not because its rural banks offer a temporary

breathing space from the city to which Dickens’s characters must return: the rural river

provides a daydream of an ethical notion of community with the potential to reform social

relations inside, as well as outside, the Victorian metropolis. Dickens re-maps the city along

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the river to reshape the very notion of pastoral idyll for an urbanising readership, in ways

which previous work on Dickensian pastoral has not adequately explored.

Dickens’s Thames, and also the Medway and the Thames estuary, are a locus for his

concern with how ethical relationships and a benevolent ‘knowable community’ might be

developed and sustained in the testing environment that is the nineteenth-century city. Just as

the concept of sustainability itself implies the quest for a better future, a more sustainable

social system for Dickens is one of increased interconnections, altruism and care for others.

Dickens’s characters learn lessons outside of London which they then bring back with them

into London. Dickens suggests that connections forged on the rural riverbanks outside or on

the edges of London offer hope for increased altruism which will then improve the urban

social system as a whole; characters bring insights from these connections into the city as

they criss-cross the track of the river’s flow. The country is always connected to the city via

the river, which enables quiet retreats – presented as ethical spaces – to be developed in the

city along the river banks and bridges, not just in urban gardens but in the very heart of its

busiest spaces. The river plays a part in the sustainability of ethical space in London against

the surge of urban pollution.

However, the tidal movement of both the Thames and the Medway pulls against this

image of progress – whether personal, social, or temporal – as tidal currents disrupt the

linearity of flow. Dickens presents the river as a landscape of potential pastoral idyll at the

same time as showing how the rural river and its banks and bridges will always contain an

undercurrent of urban pollution. This essay explores this tension between the urban and the

rural river, between surfaces and depths, and argues that Dickens’s imagery connects rural

riversides outside London with the busy, urban river of dirt and commerce to ask if ethical

relationships can be developed in the city in ways which incorporate the urban landscape,

rather than seek to escape it. In his late novels, Dickens’s London is a system that is

constantly losing some components up- and down-stream, and gaining others. The tidal river

becomes something that both takes away and returns its human resources, but the flow of the

river from country to city pulls characters back to London. The river enables not only the

sanitary escape from the city which allows his characters to be cleansed, but most importantly

it enables their return, enriched, which offers the potential for sustainable social progress.

Dickens’s riverside idylls reappear in the frenetic heart of the city, part of its noisiest streets

and bridges. In so doing, Dickens re-constitutes urban pastoral as a progressive, rather than a

nostalgic, literary mode.

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I: The River as Rural Idyll

Figure 1: Shiplake Church (near Henley-on-Thames, supposed site of Betty Higden’s grave in Our Mutual

Friend, and close to Lizzie’s cottage). Hall 170. © The British Library Board. General Reference Collection

10350.d.32.

Depictions of the Thames in the mid-nineteenth century made strong spatial, metaphorical,

and generic distinctions between the Thames upstream, the urban Thames, and the Thames

and Thames estuary below London. The Thames was polluted with human and industrial

waste long before it reached London, yet upriver became popularly associated with a purity

and cleanliness both physical and moral (Hall and Hall 1; Allen 109-114). Dickens’s protégé

Edmund Yates describes the Thames upstream as “pure and cleanly, at near-lying Richmond

and lock-bound Teddington; at decorous Hampton and quaint old-fashioned Sunbury and

Chertsey; [...] at monastic Medmenham and redfaced Henley” (234). This is the Thames as

seen in books such as H. R. Robertson’s Life on the Upper Thames (1875), where the pastoral

is explicitly invoked through the chapter epigraphs from poems on the Thames by Spenser

and others, and Mr and Mrs Hall’s The Book of the Thames (1859, Figure 1).3 In generic

contrast to the pastoral Thames was the Gothicised space of contamination downriver in the

city. River and city became intrinsically connected in public discourse during the 1858 ‘Great

Stink’ when concern about the polluted state of the industrialised river reached a peak, and

mid-century print and visual culture articulated these concerns. The bridge in the famous

Punch cartoon ‘The Silent Highway-Man’ (Figure 2) crosses the “deadly sewer” of London

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(LD 23), not a pastoral idyll: the rural daydream could not be further from this urban

nightmare.4

Figure 2: THE "SILENT HIGHWAY"-MAN. "Your MONEY or your LIFE!". Punch, July 10, 1858.

The urban Thames possessed its own peculiar attractions. Yates claims that his

favourite part of the Thames is where it is:

thick, yellow, turbid, occasionally evil-smelling; [...] frowned on by the great gaunt black

warehouses, the dreary riverside public houses...the clanging factories, the quiet Temple, the

plate-glass works, the export Scotch and Irish merchants, the cheese-factor’s premises, the

cement wharves, the sugar-consignees’ counting-houses, the slippery slimy landing-places,

the atmosphere of which is here sticky with molasses, there dusty with flour, and a little way

further off choky with particles of floating wool. (Yates, 234)5

The Thames here is figured as an integral part of the commercial heart of London, and

eastwards Yates emphasises its part in London’s maritime trade, with its banks lined with

little poky dirty streets [...] as thoroughly maritime as Hamilton Moore’s Treatise on

Navigation, or the bottom of a corvette that has been for three years on the West India Station

– streets filled with outfitters, sail-makers, ship-chandlers; [...] buyers of parrots and

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cockatoos, thin Trichinopoly cheroots, guava jelly, and Angustura bitters from home-

returning Jack. (234)

This description is full of the tastes of the exotic; the presence of the docks and commercial

shipping below London meant that the lower Thames and the estuary were easily associated

with global trade and travel (Hall 3, 512; Allen 103-5).

Dickens’s late novels appear to set up distinctions between the rural and the urban

river, but do so only to complicate them. Northrop Frye declared famously that “Dickens has

no green world, except for a glint or two here and there” (73); however, Dickens presents the

river as a space of rural idyll both upstream, closer to the source, and downstream from

London, where the Medway and the Thames flow into the Thames Estuary.6 Dickens’s idylls

are often cultivated ones, where nature bears the marks of human intervention: in Little

Dorrit the Meagles’ Twickenham home is “a charming place”, situated “by the river”:

It stood in a garden, no doubt as fresh and beautiful in the May of the year,

as Pet now was in the May of her life; and it was defended by a goodly show

of handsome trees […]. Within view was the peaceful river and the ferryboat…

nothing uncertain or unquiet. (LD 161-2)

Sound is crucial to Dickens’s idylls; the placid river at Twickenham is not just free from

urban hubbub, it is free from anything disturbing or “unquiet”. Dickens’s choice of word here

links mental peace and youthful innocence to the physical space of rural retreat. The “silver

river” upstream to which Lizzie Hexam retreats from her would-be seducer in Our Mutual

Friend is also a place of quiet river sounds, where “the ever-widening beauty of the

landscape” includes the workers on their way home in a scene where it is “as if there were no

immensity of space between mankind and Heaven” (OMF 689). The reference to “Heaven”

reveals how rural idylls have an ethical, even a religious, dimension for Dickens: the beauty

of nature provides moral guidance.7 Dashing man-about-town Eugene Wrayburn starts to

reconsider his plan to seduce working-class girl Lizzie under the influence of this quiet

riverside (OMF 690).8 Dickens’s rural banks and bridges are ethical spaces, where his

characters learn important moral lessons of altruism and greater care for others.

Downstream from London is also the setting for rural idylls which become ethical

spaces. In Kent, Cooling Village is the likely site of the graveyard in Great Expectations,

from which the Thames Estuary can be glimpsed. This “low leaden line” of marshy landscape

turns into a peaceful retreat under the moral influence of Biddy, as Pip describes it as

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“[s]ummertime, and lovely weather […] we came to the riverside and sat down on the bank,

with the water rippling at our feet, making it all the more quiet than it would have been

without that sound”. (GE 4, 115). Riverside Greenwich in Our Mutual Friend is not just the

pleasure ground described by Allen (105-8): it becomes a place of benevolence and

connection between strangers, linked to the “modest little cottage” and “golden bloom” of

neighbouring Blackheath by the reappearance of the old sailor who wishes Bella well (OMF

666, 667). Such descriptions recall chapter five of Pickwick Papers:

Mr Pickwick leant over the balustrades of Rochester Bridge, contemplating

nature and waiting for breakfast […]. On either side, the banks of the Medway,

covered with cornfields and pastures […] stretched away as far as the eye could

see […]. The river, reflecting the clear blue of the sky, glistened and sparkled as

it flowed noiselessly on (Dickens, Pickwick Papers, 66-7)

The childlike Mr Pickwick’s Medway flows “noiselessly”, while Pip’s Thames Estuary is all

the quieter precisely because of the gentle sound of the “rippling” river”, but both

descriptions emphasise how sound is implicated in mental peace. The ability to hear the

river’s gentle motions is indicative of pastoral retreat, of the moral influence of separation

from urban life, and of a quiet mind as much as quiet water.

For Dickens, the rural river’s association with peace and innocence connect it to the

beginnings of lives and the beginnings of narrative: he frequently links it to childhood and to

beginnings in his writing. One of Dickens’ letters to Maria Winter (née Beadnell) in February

1855 equates the human life-cycle to the progress of a river, as he writes: “[w]e are all sailing

away to the sea, and have a pleasure in thinking of the river we are upon, when it was very

narrow and little” (534). The plural “we” cuts across social differences and implies that we

are all the same, rich and poor, male and female, “all” experiencing the same life-cycle

together. David Copperfield imagines his youth as “flowing water”, while the Uncommercial

Traveller describes a Kent road where “[W]ild flowers grow in abundance on this spot, and it

lies high and airy, with the distant river stealing away to the ocean, like a man’s life”

(Dickens, David Copperfield, 217; ‘Tramps’, 133). The life-cycle of a river, from source to

sea, is mapped onto the progress of a human life, with death being the “ocean”. The Thames

and its Estuary becomes an image of temporal progress in human life as the waters flow from

country to city and onwards to the sea. Therefore, the rural river and its banks are often

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figured as spaces where individuals encounter innocence and purity – either in others, or in

their lost childhood selves.

There is something saccharine about these kinds of representations of the river, which

evoke it as a place of rural escape and nostalgia, a “bourgeois pastoral fantasy” (Allen 76) of

lost innocence and a vanished way of life. Pastoral has always been a mode of writing

associated with idealisation. Alexander Pope admitted, in his ‘Discourse on Pastoral Poetry’

(1717), that “Pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age […] We must therefore use

some illusion to render Pastoral delightful […] exposing the best side only of a shepherd’s

life, and in concealing its miseries” (10). Pastoral and fiction-making go hand-in-hand for

Pope. For Raymond Williams, pastoral is a damaged genre precisely because it became

idealistic: Williams argues that from its origins in what he sees as Theocritus’s realistic

recognition of countrymen’s conditions (15), it then came to serve the purposes of the ruling

classes, and of emerging agrarian capitalism, because it obscured rural realities. It became

polluted, interested in cultivated land and gardens whilst ignoring the workers and cultivators.

Williams attacked William Empson implicitly for defending Renaissance pastoral as a kind of

allegory for “general truths”, arguing that this theory only served to hide the plight of the

workers even more (21).9 For Williams, pastoral lost its true, Theocritan way, and became

false idealisation masking real, unpleasant conditions.

Dickens’ imagery is never quite this straightforward. Dickens consistently presents

rural idylls in his novel as ethical spaces, because they connect characters together. The

riverbanks and bridges which form a frequent part of these idylls are places where characters

are drawn together to realise their connections, in ways which reveal and create links across

social divides and develop individual altruism. It is by the rural riverbank in Our Mutual

Friend that Bella and Lizzie become “friends” despite their different circumstances (524-5),

and the strands of Eugene’s, Bella’s, Jenny Wren’s, Betty Higden’s and the Boffins’ stories

are brought together, as characters from the different plot lines converge up-river. Lizzie is

strongly associated with the river that her father calls her “best friend”, and her healing

influence recalls Eugene to new physical and moral life in the riverside cottage. The

riverbank at Twickenham in Little Dorritt is where the plot lines of Miss Wade, Doyce,

Arthur, the Gowans and so the Merdles meet and touch, and where Arthur sees with horror

the selfishness of the Gowans and Barnacles. Lizzie’s riverside cottage by the paper mill is

hardly a realistic depiction of the living conditions of rural poverty, with its “wonderful

winding narrow stairs” and “pure white chimney” (OMF 523),10 but it is here that Bella

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begins to re-assess her mercenary town ways. Such individual progress is shown to benefit

their society as a whole, not just the character themselves. Mrs Merdle declares “I am

pastoral to a degree”, but she suffers because she is too selfish to do more than pay lip-service

to the pastoral ideal (LD 239). And it is definitely an ideal: Dickens the enthusiastic walker

would have been well aware that the Thames was industrialised up and down-stream of

London.

Dickens’s glimpses of a rural Thames are not an exercise in nostalgia; he claims for

fiction the role of presenting aspects of a world where Lizzies can befriend Bellas, as a

manifesto for social change. Modernity itself is not a bad thing; it is the nature of that

modernity that is in question. Raymond Williams suggests that what he calls the ‘knowable

community’ of “face-to-face contacts” (165) is hard to find in a city novel, due to mass

urbanisation. Although “[m]ost novels are in some sense knowable communities”,

…the transition from country to city – from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban

society – is transforming and significant […] in changes like these, any assumption of a knowable

community – a whole community, wholly knowable – became harder and harder to sustain. (165)

The knowable community is “an epitome of direct relationships […] within which we can

find and value […] personal relationships”, exemplified in fiction by the trope of the

idealised rural village, because “people are more easily identified and connected” within

them (165-6). In a knowable community, then, the connections between characters are

obvious and characters can understand each other. Williams does note that Dickens develops

“unknown and unacknowledged relationships, profound and decisive connections” between

Londoners, and he rightly emphasises the importance of these connections to Dickens’s

“social and personal vision” (155; 156). But for Williams, the idea of a knowable community

cannot be sustained in the city. However, Williams argues that the idea of a benevolent

knowable community is actually a “willing, lulling illusion of old country life”, which masks

social realities; the country becomes something viewed nostalgically, and current poverty and

“suffering” is ignored (180). Therefore, Williams believes the traditional ‘country versus

city’ dichotomy is incorrect, because both places exploit the poor. In Dickens’s late novels

any such dichotomy is also challenged, but from a very different angle. The movement of the

river towards the city offers hope that what Ackroyd calls “those virtues of harmony and

sympathy” (Dickens, 728) may be brought into the heart of London as well, as a

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counterbalance to the values of the Merdles and their like. The river becomes associated with

social and personal progress – with connection and understanding, not urban alienation.

As Sarah Lumley and Patrick Armstrong have shown, a connection between social

and economic development, the environment, and human welfare “is not new to social and

environmental policy” (368). Lumley and Armstrong trace the origins of the sustainability

concept to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and identify what they call “a commonality

of ideas” between such diverse thinkers as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, William Paley,

Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin. They identify this commonality as:

order emerging from the apparent disorder of competition; the importance of the population

as a whole, rather than the individual; the environment (whatever it might be) providing the

‘invisible hand’ that provides directionality to change; the notion of a dialogue between the

population and the environment. (374)

For Lumley and Armstrong the key theme in much nineteenth-century thought on

sustainability is “[a]ltruism, behaviour that benefits others, by furthering the success of the

group” (374), a lack of selfishness in the use of any kind of resources. Dickens places his

emphasis firmly on the importance of the individual, but shows how connections formed by

the rural river teach greater selflessness and altruism to characters in ways which provide

small steps of sustainable progress towards pockets of a more ethical ‘knowable community’.

Dickens links the temporal movement of the river, its linear flow, to social progress.

The Uncommercial Traveller describes his “summer idling” by “the Thames and the

Medway” and declares that “[r]unning water is favourable to day-dreams, and a strong tidal

river is the best of running water for mine” (Dickens, ‘Chatham Dockyard’, 289). Given the

link made by the Uncommercial between a tidal river and creativity, his choice of location is

not surprising: the Thames is tidal above London as far as Teddington Lock, and the Medway

is also tidal as it flows into the Thames estuary (Pudney 7).11 Tidal rivers are more complex

images than may at first appear, however, as they move back and forth as well as in a linear

direction. This disrupts the potential of a river to be an image of sustainable progress –

whether moral, social, or narrative – because the back-and-forth movement of the tide

disrupts the linearity of flow. The rural day-dream can turn into a stultifying nightmare.

2: Urban pollution

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We might want to be dubious, therefore, about Dickens’s riverside idylls.12 Many parts of the

Thames and the Medway in the nineteenth century were not obvious candidates for such a

role. Brentford in the 1850s and 60s was not the rural backwater as described in Our Mutual

Friend “[i]n these times of ours”, but “a centre for the trans-shipment of goods [with]

numerous industries and wharves ranged along the bank” (Croad 40), which can just be seen

in Figure 2. Punch described Brentford in 1842 with typical sardonic tones as “the most

important feeder of the Thames above bridge. Fell-mongers, gut and gin spinners, brewers,

and gas-makers here abound, and Unite their energies and their offal to enrich the consistency

of the water” (‘The Thames and Its Tributaries’). The river here is a hungry mouth, a kind of

glutton eager for its own contamination. Walter Thornbury, chronicler of London past and

present in the decade after Dickens’s death, describes the “the vast and tumultuous procession

of human beings” on London’s bridges (Thornbury 17). No peaceful oases these: the crowds

on the bridges above, and the rush of the tidal water below, combine in George Borrow’s

1851 description of the Thames:

There was a wild hurly-burly upon the bridge which nearly deafened me. But if upon the

bridge there was confusion, below it was a confusion ten times compounded […] Truly

tremendous was the roar of the descending waters, and the bellow of the tremendous gulfs.

(111)

Figure 3: Brentford. Unknown photographer, 1850s. Howarth Loomes Collection. Historic England Archive.

BB70/01580.

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The urban river is one where the noise of industry, of traffic, and of people turns into the

“roar” of the waters themselves, as if the river is a metonym for the metropolis.

Cultural concerns about river pollution seep into Dickens’s descriptions of the

Thames and its Estuary, and complicate any associations of the river with rural idyll and

ethical space. In Dickens’ late novels the tidal river carries urban influences away from

London and pollutes the landscape in both directions, up- and down-stream. As Allen argues,

“[t]he real threat of pollution […] is that it precipitates out” (63), and in a river that was a

national symbol, this threatens the entire national community. Not only that, but, as Wiggins

fears in The Polluted Thames, it is extremely difficult to eradicate (4). In Little Dorrit, Arthur

connects his own nightmares about the family secret with:

the secrets of the river, as it rolled its turbid tide between two frowning

wildernesses of secrets, extending, thick and dense, for many miles, and

warding off the free air and the free country swept by winds and wings

of birds. (LD 453) 13

The river here is like the fog which opens Bleak House, dark and all-encompassing; the

punctuation renders the water and the riverbanks indistinguishable. There is no sense that the

tide moves anywhere but back and forth, trapped between the land. The shadow that clouds

Arthur’s “imagination” turns the banks of the river outside London into “two frowning

wildernesses of secrets” where even the birds are culpable, and pollutes them with urban

intrigues.

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Figure 42: A Dog in the Thames. Engraving (Godwin 57). © The British Library Board. General Reference

Collection 8276.d.39.

This tidal flow creates the phenomenon of ‘retention’, or “the extent to which the

river holds on to its contents” (Ackroyd, Thames, 273). Retention contributed to the ‘Great

Stink’ and was illustrated by Godwin with this image of the dead dog (Figure 24). The sketch

shows how “sewage matter is washed back and forwards by the tide” instead of flowing away

out to sea; Godwin’s dead dog “after describing various circles, as shown by the arrows in the

sketch, [was] deposited in the slime” (56).14 Dickens’s waterside characters often feel as

trapped by the Thames’s watery grip as the dog’s corpse, as if they themselves are just

another item of flotsam and jetsam on the dirty tide. In Little Dorrit, the Meagles’ riverside

home may be beautiful but it feels like a prison to Tattycoram. The Pockets’ home in

Hammersmith in Great Expectations may have a beautiful garden leading down to the

Thames, but it is almost as badly run as Mrs Jellyby’s, and is a place from which Herbert

struggles to escape. Lizzie, too, wishes to escape from the river, but feels trapped by it,

declaring “I can’t get away from it, I think […] It’s no purpose of mine that I live by it still”,

at which Charley accuses her of “[d]reaming” (OMF 228). Bakhtin characterises idylls as “a

spatially limited world” (225), and sometimes the river is yet another Dickensian prison.

Characters that are ‘imprisoned’ in Dickens’ novels are represented as grotesquely beyond

the passing of time represented by nature’s seasons and the flow of the river. Miss Havisham

declares: “I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of weeks of the year” (GE

56), in an echo of Mrs Clenham’s statement that “[a]ll Seasons are alike to me” (LD 28). This

stasis comes to affect Pip, too, who is unable to break the “influence” of the house and

continues to feel like a “coarse and common boy” in the presence of Estella (GE 113, 215).

Because “in shutting out the light of day, she had shut out […] natural and healing

influences” (367), Miss Havisham is unable to see what she has done to Pip and Estella until

it is too late. In Little Dorrit it is the cunning Mr Casby who is “as little touched by the

influence of the seasons, as the old rose-leaves and old lavender in his porcelain jars”, and Mr

Dorrit who has never seen “sunrise on rolling rivers” from his “living grave” (LD 121, 194).

Callous ‘Society’ is represented in Our Mutual Friend by Lady Tippins, who tries to hide her

age and fails grotesquely. An ability to empathise and care for the well-being of others is tied

up with one’s ability to progress and not stagnate.

The tension between the idyllic river and the polluted river, between daydream and

nightmare, makes Dickens’s river imagery unstable in these late novels. The river is used as

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an image for a cruel mob, or a revolutionary crowd; the mob in Barnaby Rudge is a “stream”

that “poured” (412), and “floated”, while the Paris crowd in A Tale of Two Cities is “a

whirlpool of boiling waters” (262). In the late novels an indifferent flood of citizens is

imagined as a river; the very opposite of the benevolent knowable community. Jo the

crossing-sweeper at Blackfriars Bridge watches “the river running fast, the crowd flowing by

him in two streams - everything moving on to some purpose and to one end - until he is

stirred up, and told to ‘move on’ too” (Dickens, Bleak House, 291). In Little Dorrit, ‘Society’

is characterised ironically as “the majestic stream” that sweeps away all weaker forces in its

path (470), while in Our Mutual Friend the anonymous crowd is “a living stream” (275),

language which directly echoes Dickens’ description in Little Dorrit of “the turbid living

river” Thames (65). Such movement means that the bridges and banks can be read as sites of

tension just as much as connection, such as the meeting between Eugene, Headstone and

Charley on the bridge at Millbank in Our Mutual Friend (229). Here, the bridge becomes a

no-man’s land, “the place of suspension of social identities” where different classes can meet

(Tambling 245), yet the ultimate end is not social cohesion but violence.

Narrative progress, then, can be undone by the failure of social cohesion achieved

upriver to flow into the city. In Our Mutual Friend, the flow of storytelling creates

connections just as much as the river:

Thus, like the tides upon which it had been borne to the knowledge of men, the

Harmon Murder- as it came to be popularly called- went up and down, and ebbed and

flowed, now in the town, now in the country, now among palaces, now among hovels,

now among lords and ladies and gentlefolks, now among labourers and hammerers and

ballast-heavers, until at last, after a long interval of slack water, it got out to sea and

drifted away. (31)

Narrative and the river are explicitly linked, but the tale of the Harmon Murder fails to unify.

The speculations come to nothing, no consensus is reached, and each place and group of

people remains distinct, separated by commas. The multiple clauses in this passage enact the

movement of the tide.15 Elsewhere the urban river defeats narrative progress, producing

confusion and disinterest as much as connection.16 Despite the fact that Dickens’s characters

seek out named geographical locations on the Thames, they get lost near it with remarkable

ease, time and time again. Pip hunts for Clara’s home by the river, but despite his repeated

litany of the address, “Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks’s Basin, and the Old Green Copper Rope

Walk”, he still “found that the spot I wanted was not where I had supposed it to be, and was

14


anything but easy to find” (GE 344, 342). In Our Mutual Friend, Jenny and Riah encounter

“puzzled stoppages” on their way to Limehouse, John Harmon “cannot understand” his route

around the river on the night he was attacked, and Bella is “in the state of a dreamer” when

she is taken to the river with John and the Inspector to solve the Harmon mystery, “perfectly

unable to account for her being there” (436, 370, 762). It is almost as if Dickens’ combination

of real and imaginary locations creates a dream-like world for his own characters.

Figure 5: Marcus Stone. The Parting by the River. Engraving. Our Mutual Friend vol 2 plate 14.

Senate House Library.

Dickens exploits the tension between shiny surfaces and troubled depths to show that

he is well aware of the potentially sinister, as well as the potentially idyllic, nature of rivers.

Eugene’s “crisis” over how his relationship with Lizzie will progress occurs on the rural

riverbank, where “[t]he rippling of the river seemed to cause a corresponding stir in his

uneasy reflections. […] [T]hey were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way

with a strong current” (OMF 698). The flow of narrative and the river’s flow are again linked,

as a strong signal of the course of action Eugene contemplates. Rivers are dangerous because,

like people, they have hidden depths as well as visible surfaces. As Wemmick says of Mr

Jaggers in Great Expectations, “[a] river’s its natural depth, and he’s his natural depth” (188),

in which lurks many secrets.17 Magwitch warns Pip that, despite the lovely surface of the

water, “we can no more see the bottom of the next few hours, than we can see to the bottom

of this river”; we cannot penetrate its depths (400). Although the banks of the river upstream

15


in Our Mutual Friend appear “placid” when compared with the “grinding” of the city (603),

danger still lurks, even above the reach of the tide. All seems “peaceful, pastoral and

blooming” in “the great serene mirror of the river” (522), but this same mirror will later

reflect the attempted murder of Eugene (just as the Medway is associated with the

disappearance of Edwin Drood).18 Marcus Stone’s illustration The Parting by the River captures this sense of foreboding already present in the text, with Lizzie’s dark clothing and

drooped posture (Figure 5). Later in the novel, the beauty of the river near Rogue

Riderhood’s lock is undermined by Riderhood’s failure to hear “tranquil” memories in the

“voice” of the river (629). Not only an intimation of the future, where the beauty of the lock

is turned “spectral” by Headstone’s attack on Eugene, this paragraph also suggests that

Riderhood’s failure of imagination contributes to his downfall almost as much as his other

crimes. Riderhood has no “sentiment”, so “nothing in nature” can teach or rescue him (703,

629). For him, the riverbank is not so much an idyll as a wilderness.

3: The River and Ethical Space Within the City

Dickens’s riverside idylls are not just the victims of polluting influences, however. The tidal

river spreads urban problems, but also develops narrative connections. Dickens’s characters

use the river to carve out quiet space inside the metropolis, whilst the association of imagery

draws upon ethical lessons learnt outside London. Franco Moretti sees country and city

spaces as fundamentally different, and so argues that connections between characters are

different in these two locations (64-5). For Moretti, cities are more “complicated”. His theory

rests on the conviction that spaces cannot be linked, or merge, but must have clear-cut

distinctions, as “this specific form needs that specific space” (70). However, a river is a

liminal space which complicates Morretti’s theory of distinct spaces, as Pamela Gilbert points

out (97). The flow of the tidal river links up- and downstream in Little Dorrit, Great

Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, and so complicates the traditional distinction between

country and city.19 This suggests the potential for sustainable progress within London, as well

as without.

This link between urban and rural spaces enables Dickens’s narratives to develop.

Arthur connects the possibility of Amy being in love in Little Dorrit, with his experiences

with Pet; the narrator asks coyly: “had the suspicion been brought into his mind by his own

associations of the troubled river running beneath the bridge with the same river higher

up…?” (220). River imagery connects across countries as well as country and city: in Little

16


Dorrit, the expatriate community is “a superior sort of Marshalsea”, showing “general

unfitness for getting on” whether on “the shore of the yellow Tiber or the shore of the black

Thames” (428, 491). In Great Expectations, Pip finds that the escape attempt with Magwitch

finds him in a part of the river “like my own marsh country” (401), as the end of the novel

brings Pip back to the beginning. As Jeremy Tambling puts it, “this journey downstream is

linked with the first part of the novel […] the locales are not two, but one, and the marsh

country is not different from London, but its expression”; the river connects across time as

well as space. The banks and bridges of Dickens’s rivers are liminal spaces where different

classes can meet, and this occurs inside as well as outside the city. As well as Arthur and

Amy’s encounters on the Iron Bridge, Eugene first encounters Lizzie down by the bank at

Limehouse in Our Mutual Friend, and crosses the bridge at Millbank to visit her at Jenny

Wren’s. Pip’s precarious status as a gentleman is threatened from the start by the Thames as

he is told by his rowing tutor that he has “the arm of a blacksmith” (GE 179), but it is on the

river that Pip learns to value Magwitch as “a much better man than I had been to Joe” (408).

These connections stake a claim for attention on behalf of the lower-class characters. The

movement of characters like Magwitch, Old Nandy, and Jenny Wren along and across the

Thames gives them a voice and a presence in the community. It establishes a space for them

in the novels, and so a status. Bridges were used as a metaphor by George Godwin in Town

Swamps and Social Bridges (1859) for “the need for behavioural change, such as the more

frequent mixing together of different social classes, and the promotion of art as a means of

social and moral development” (King 15), as he cried “blessings on those who build and

maintain bridges” (Godwin 1).

The river presents opportunities for peaceful idyll and ethical space within the

metropolis. At Lizzie and Jenny’s dwelling by Millbank, Jenny Wren remarks: “this is not a

flowery neighbourhood. It’s anything but that. And yet, when I sit at work, I smell miles of

flowers” (OMF 239), as if Lizzie is such a force for good that she brings with her Nature

itself. Amy’s Iron Bridge (Southwark Bridge, opened in 1819) in Little Dorrit offers her just

such a quiet retreat in the midst of the city. Southwark Bridge is “as quiet after the roaring

streets, as though it had been open country” (79), or a rural riverbank: like the numerous

urban gardens in Dickens’s fiction, it preserves elements of the country within the city.20

Dickens allows the reader to see Amy through John Chivery’s eyes “standing still, looking at

the water. She was absorbed in thought, and he wondered what she might be thinking about”

(182). The reader is of course in on the secret: the bridge reminds her of Arthur, and so

becomes, as Simon Petch puts it, “a kind of oasis within the urban desert” (113). It is a retreat

17


precisely because it allows her to day-dream, to experience what Bachelard called the

“intimate immensity” which he associates with staring at water, an activity which for

Bachelard creates the ideal conditions for “quiet daydreaming” (Poetics 184). Of course,

Southwark Bridge, though quieter than London Bridge due to its toll booth, was a busy

crossing point in the heart of London (Pudney 76). Yet the power of fancy and fiction-making

can turn it into the Iron Bridge, a site of day-dreams where Old Nandy, too, can look “over at

the water” and imagine the world transformed (LD 308).

In early Dickens, idyllic rural settings are associated with ideas of the home as a

retreat from urban corruption and in particular, with cottages (Armstrong; Robison). Happy

homes and young love in Dickens are often to be found in cottages: David Copperfield takes

Dora to a cottage, Nicholas Nickleby and his family are installed in a cottage in Bow by the

philanthropic Cheeryble Brothers, and Esther leaves London for the sanctuary of a rural

retreat at the end of Bleak House. But the later novels give less support to such easy

escapism. Dickens mocks Mrs Plornishes’s ‘Happy Cottage’ mural in Little Dorrit:

No Poetry and no Art ever charmed the imagination more than the union of the two in this

counterfeit cottage charmed Mrs Plornish. […] [I]t was still a most beautiful cottage, a most

wonderful deception. […] [It] was perfect Pastoral to Mrs Plornish, the Golden Age revived.

(478-9)

Mrs Plornish is mocked for retreating into a fiction of her own making, one which attempts to

quite literally paint over urban realities. Pastoral cannot involve such a retreat any more, nor

should it. Pip’s original reconciliation with Estella was to take place in a London street, not in

a ruined garden in Kent. Peter Bailey describes the “innumerable Victorian suburban villas

and back-gardens” of the burgeoning metropolis as “hopeful invocations of rural peace and

strongholds against the sounds of the city” (203), but Dickens’s Thames raises the possibility

that quiet can be found within the city, in its commercial heart, and not solely in suburban

gardens. The connections enabled by the banks and bridges of the river offer an alternative to

domestic retreat, a way of improving understanding between otherwise disparate people, as if

values of benevolent knowable community have flowed with the river into the city.

Mrs Clenham from Little Dorrit is a Dickens character who emerges from their

isolation to do the right thing, and she is rewarded with a beautiful summer scene by the

river, like Mr Pickwick before her:

18


The vista of street and bridge was plain to see, and the sky was serene and beautiful. People

stood and sat at their doors, playing with children and enjoying the evening [...]. As they

crossed the bridge, the clear steeples of the many churches looked as if they had advanced out

of the murk that usually enshrouded them and come much nearer. The smoke that rose into

the sky had lost its dingy hue and taken a brightness upon it. The beauties of the sunset had

not faded [...]. From a radiant centre, over the whole length and breadth of the tranquil

firmament, great shoots of light streamed among the early stars, like signs of the blessed later

covenant of peace and hope that changed the crown of thorns into a glory. (LD 661)

Here Dickens takes his river descriptions a step further, as now the beauty of nature and its

vision of hope are located firmly within London itself. Instead of down to the dirty river, the

reader’s eye is directed up to the “serene and beautiful” sky, while the bridge gives a clear

view of the “churches”, not the “murk”, and seems to bring them “nearer”. “The beauties of

the sunset” allows a moment of connection amongst city dwellers, who “sat at their doors”,

communally “enjoying the evening”. There are no easy resolutions at the end of Little Dorrit,

Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend: Arthur and Amy remain isolated in their peace

in the famous final paragraph of Little Dorrit; when they go “quietly down into the roaring

streets”, they are still surrounded by the “usual uproar” (LD 688). Pip and Estella are alone in

a ruined garden, and Eugene and Lizzie must fight Society for recognition of their eventual

marriage. Dickens is well aware that in idealising aspects of the world through idyllic

imagery, his fictions may be unachievable fancies. The fundamental problem of fiction-

making is shown in his novels, when the fictions which characters build for themselves

becomes all-consuming, selfish, or ridiculous.

But Dickens’s late complete novels still propose altruism – and greater connections

and understanding between people – as a route to sustainable progress, in which lessons

learnt in a rural environment can improve the urban one. Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Composed

Upon Westminster Bridge’ treats sunrise on London’s river as if it were a picturesque

landscape; the city is beautiful because it is empty of people. Mrs Clenham’s view of sunset

from Southwark Bridge, on the other hand, is beautiful partly because there are city-dwellers

present to appreciate it. In a moment of shared appreciation, the urban community (including

the narrator and the reader) is connected, however briefly. The “murk” of urban pollution has

not gone away, but for a moment Dickens’s characters can look above it, and see each other.

19


20

1 Hereafter LD, GE, and OMF.2 See also Gilbert on the sanitary topographies of OMF.3 Pastoral began as a poetic mode, but expanded to include prose fiction in the nineteenth century (Empson; Johnson).4 THE "SILENT HIGHWAY"-MAN. "Your MONEY or your LIFE!". Punch, July 10, 1858. Accessible at

http://www.oldlondon.net/the-great-stink-the-silent-highwayman-by-john-tenniel-1858/, accessed 13.06/16.

The physical pollution of the river was linked to fears of moral pollution: see Allen 61-2. For an articulation of the

concerns associated with the ‘Great Stink’, see Wiggins.5 Attributed by Oppenlander (132). Also quoted in Allen (74-5).6There is a small, yet significant, body of work that considers Dickens to portray a ‘green world’ within his largely

urban novels. These (mostly twentieth century) critics place Dickens, to varying degrees, within the English pastoral

tradition. See, for example, Robison, who argues that Dickens frequently invokes “the central pastoral image of the

garden” (409), and Burgan, who argues that in Dickens’s later work he “revitalize[s] pastoral style by causing it to

register that sharp awareness of threatening realities that he had earlier employed it to suppress” (315).7 See Smith on the religious significance of the river from Dombey and Son onwards (148-177), and Burgan (293).8 Lizzie herself is soothed by the “peaceful serenity” of the rural riverside (OMF 699).9 See, by contrast, Empson.10 See David (83-4).11 Gaston Bachelard also links water and day-dreams, and argues that water is crucial to the human imagination (Water

and Dreams 5). For Bachelard, water has a “body, soul, and voice”; it is like the human mind because its depths are as

important as the visible surface (23). According to Bachelard, water is a “mirror” for human emotions and thoughts

(21), which induces our own ‘reflections’ and creativity.12 Gilbert, for example, is suspicious of “[t]he apparent cleanliness of the rural river” (94).13 See also Allen (93-4) on the fascinating similarities between this cartoon and Marcus Stone’s first illustration for

OMF.14 Quoted in Gilbert (91).15 See Allen (90).16 J. Hillis Miller claims that the Thames in Our Mutual Friend defies “the rationalities of cognitive mapping” because

the river is both a real place, and a site of metaphorical transformation (222), while Julian Wolfreys argues that Dickens

is “re-inventing the space of London into something not-London”(161). For Wolfreys, the whole point of Dickens’

London is that it is not ‘knowable’, and that provides its magic and mystery (169).17 See Smith (158). See also Robison’s comment that the Thames is a “vulnerable pastoral refuge” (422).Bachelard

argues that water is more than just a glittering surface, and thus is a productive metaphor for the workings of the

unconscious (Water and Dreams, 8).18 See Burgan (306-311) and David (85).19 For the opposite view see Sicher (357).20 See Edgecombe and Robison on the urban garden in Dickens.

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