In the opening chapter of Dickens’s dark novel, Our Mutual Friend, Lizzie and her father, Jesse Hexam, are rowing in “a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance.” Her father’s business is sinister: he trawls the Thames for dead bodies, which he sells for a small fee to the police, who try to identify the corpses.
There is real horror in this opening scene: the boat is “allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface,” as is this masterpiece. Lizzie is terrified of the corpses, but Hexam is proud of his skill, so much so that he keeps the placards describing the victims. Although he cannot read, he knows what each placard says, and remembers the circumstances under which each body was found.
And he cannot understand Lizzie’s repulsion. When she refuses to change places with him in the boat, because she cannot bear to be next to a corpse, he cannot understand her sensitivity.
“What hurt can it do you?”
“None, none. But I cannot bear it.”
“It’s my belief that you hate the very sight of the river.”
“I -I do not like it, father. “
“As if it wasn’t your living! As if it wasn’t meat and drink to you!”
At these latter words, the girl shivered again…
Lizzie loves her father deeply, and we are spellbound by her loyalty, though it might seem extreme to cynics, who consider Dickens’ women weak, compliant, and stereotypical. Lizzie makes compromises, but is surprisingly tough in a subtle, feminine way. This motherless girl has raised her younger brother, Charley, the only literate family member, because she has contrived secretly to send him to school . He offers to teach Lizzie to read, but she refuses because it would alienate their father, who despises people of a higher class. And she intends to stay with her father forever, because she believes he needs her. And he does need her. In his way, he is a family man: he drinks at a cozy bar after work, but is not a drunk, nor is he a womanizer. Work and family (and an occasional drink) are everything to him.
Dickens understands the psychology of father-daughter relationships. Whether good or bad, the father is the first man in a girl’s life, and even if she is not proud of him, she tries to please him. Lizzie is torn between her coarse father, who “resembles a… bird of prey,” and her bright brother, who has a chance to climb the ladder of class through education. Early on, Lizzie tells Charley to run away to his school, because their father has become hostile to him, and he is not safe at home anymore. Lizzie is both mother and a non-sexual surrogate wife. These roles are impossible to balance.
The darkness of Dickens’s vision dominates this novel: a young crippled girl, known as the doll’s dressmaker, financially supports her alcoholic father; an impecunious “mature young woman” and a”mature young man” get married because each has been told the other has a fortune; a vicious man with a wooden leg becomes obsessed with cheating his employers, who have inherited the fortune of the Golden Dustman. There are, of course, admirable characters, charming characters, and comic characters, but in Dickens’s magnum opus fortune-hunters abound.