The London Review of Politics, Society, Literature, Art, & Science

Saturday, April 30, 1864 | No. 200.–Vol. VIII

MR. DICKENS’S NEW STORY.*

Few literary pleasures are greater than that which we derive from opening the first number of one of Mr. Dickens’s stories. The chief of modern novelists, or at any rate among the chief, he has now, by the intimate knowledge of many years, become a cherished familiar friend. We associate his “Pickwick” with our younger days, and thence, down a long array of wonderful creations, track his course in pleasant memories and abiding impressions. it is so long since we have had a new novel from him in the old form of monthly numbers that we welcome the present return to that mode of issue with all the greater zest. the small morsels of “Great Expectation” which he used to give us from week to week in All the Year Round were only sufficient to provoke, not to satisfy, our appetites, and we always felt that nothing could permanently supplant the monthly parts. Here, then, we have them again. Here is the pleasant green cover, with its pictorial foreshadowing of the story ; here are the well-known thirty-two pages demy octavo ; here are the two illustrations–not, however, steel engravings by Mr. Hablot K. Browne, but woodcuts by Mr. Marcus Stone. This is an alteration which, we confess, we regret ; for, although Mr. Stone’s drawings are striking and artistic, we cannot readily give up the old companionship.

The story opens with a scene on the river at sunset, at which time a dirty and disreputable looking boat, with two figures in it (a man and a girl) is floating between Southwark and London bridge. The man is looking out for waifs and strays in the current ; the girl is rowing, with a “touch of dread or horror” in her face. We do not see or hear much of these characters (father and daughter, as the reader may suppose) in the first chapter ; but they come in again in the third, where we find that the ‘longshoreman has discovered a dead body in the river, in which a gentleman named Mortimer Lightwood has some species of interest. In the intermediate chapter, Mortimer Lightwood has related at the dinner-table of a friend a strange story of this man, whose death he is not then aware of, from which it appears that he is the son of an eccentric old dust-contractor, deceased, who has left him the bulk of his property, on condition of his marrying a certain girl. The son has been at the Cape, and is on his return to England, after his father’s death, when he meets with his own, seemingly by foul play. The future course of the story is very obscurely intimated in this first instalment, and the tale is evidently intended to be one of mystery and gloom ; but enough is foreshadowed to make us all eager for the next number. A lurid glare invests the scene on the river and in the riverside colony of Rotherhithe ; and all the component parts of the picture are painted with the mingled fidelity and poetic insight for which Mr. Dickens is remarkable. The comic, however, is not overlooked. The sketch of the Veneerings, and of their pretentious dinner parties, is admirable. Here is what the looking-glass reflects on one of those grand occasions :–

“The great looking-glass above the sideboard, reflects the table and the company. Reflects the new Veneering crest, in gold and eke in silver, frosted and also thawed, a camel of all work. The Heralds’ College found out a Crusading ancestor for Veneering who bore a camel on his shield (or might have done it if he had thought of it), and a caravan of camels take charge of the fruits and flowers and candles, and kneel down to be loaded with the salt. Reflects Veneering; forty, wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy—a kind of sufficiently well-looking veiled-prophet, not prophesying. Reflects Mrs Veneering; fair, aquiline-nosed and fingered, not so much light hair as she might have, gorgeous in raiment and jewels, enthusiastic, propitiatory, conscious that a corner of her husband’s veil is over herself. Reflects Podsnap; prosperously feeding, two little light-coloured wiry wings, one on either side of his else bald head, looking as like his hairbrushes as his hair, dissolving view of red beads on his forehead, large allowance of crumpled shirt-collar up behind. Reflects Mrs Podsnap; fine woman for Professor Owen, quantity of bone, neck and nostrils like a rocking-horse, hard features, majestic head-dress in which Podsnap has hung golden offerings. Reflects Twemlow; grey, dry, polite, susceptible to east wind, First-Gentleman-in-Europe collar and cravat, cheeks drawn in as if he had made a great effort to retire into himself some years ago, and had got so far and had never got any farther. Reflects mature young lady; raven locks, and complexion that lights up well when well powdered—as it is—carrying on considerably in the captivation of mature young gentleman; with too much nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much torso in his waistcoat, too much sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk, and his teeth. Reflects charming old Lady Tippins on Veneering’s right; with an immense obtuse drab oblong face, like a face in a tablespoon, and a dyed Long Walk up the top of her head, as a convenient public approach to the bunch of false hair behind, pleased to patronize Mrs Veneering opposite, who is pleased to be patronized.”

“Our Mutual Friend” opens well, and we are soon to know what the title means.

* Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens, With Illustrations by Marcus Stone, London: Chapman & Hall.