OUR MUTUAL FRIEND 📚: with Leon Litvack

Dominic is joined by Dr. Leon Litvack whose new edition of Our Mutual Friend for Oxford University Press will be published in November

Leon is a reader at Queen’s University Belfast, and is an expert analyst of Dickens’ letters, manuscripts & handwriting. As well as being the Principal Editor of the Dickens Letters Project and Joint General Editor of the Oxford Edition of Charles Dickens, he sits on the Advisory Council for the UK’s National Records and Archives…

And returning to the series to read excerpts from the novel is actress Carlyss Peer

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SPEAKER_01 0:17

However dark and dangerous the streets of London are in Dickens' novels, the characters at least have a sure and firm set earth to walk upon. The pavements may be thick with mud or frost, but still there is a limit to how far a body can sink. Not so in today's book, which opens on the river. Between Southwark Bridge, which is of iron, and London Bridge, which is of stone. Figures appear out of shadows, and throughout the story rise and fall, pulled by the tide. Sometimes tumbling overboard to sink down to a watery grave, other times seemingly to rise, reborn from the depths. All of London society is carried along, with characters of every station in life overlapping each other, moving from rags to riches and from riches to rags again. It is a thrilling read, intricately spun, with characters catching their reflections in water, glass, or polished furniture as they try to read themselves and examine their true natures. Characters which earnestly spy on each other, obsessively pursue one another, or even try to pass themselves off as each other in various disguises. There are fortunes to be found in dust heaps or from the pockets of bodies dragged out of the river, while penury lurks underneath the brightest silverware. Here to guide us through our mutual friend is the inimitable Dr. Leon Litvak, whose new edition of this remarkable book is being published by Oxford University Press this November. There is a link to order this in the description. Leon is a reader at Queen's University Belfast and is an expert analyst of Dickens' letters, manuscripts, and handwriting. As well as being the principal editor of the Dickens Letters Project, he sits on the Advisory Council for the UK's National Records and Archives, and is a board member of the Charles Dickens Museum. Returning to the series to read excerpts from the novel is the inimitable Carly's Pier. Leon, hello and welcome to Charles Dickens A Brain on Fire. I'm so thrilled to have you here. Thank you very much. I'm ready to set the world on fire. Oh gosh, well, this this novel's set my reading world on fire. I mean, I'm absolutely enthralled by it. My own response is that it contained some of the most powerfully written poetic prose of any of his writing anywhere else.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

The moon had gone down, and a mist crept along the banks of the river, seen through which the trees were the ghosts of trees, and the water was the ghost of water. This earth looked spectral, and so did the pale stars, while the cold eastern glare, expressionless as to heat or colour, with the eye of the firmament quenched, might have been likened to the stare of the dead.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

It's interesting that Dickens had a break from writing. So his last novel was Great Expectations, and then he set about giving reading tours. He, of course, had uh to tend to his mistress, his lover Ellen Ternan, did a lot of traveling, and those things took him away from novel writing. But I think that having a break was very refreshing for him. And of course, he was getting older, and I think that taking a break actually improved the quality of what he produced in this novel. It's his last uh completed novel, it's sprawling, it is one that has fantastic characters, one that takes in the whole of London and beyond. And there's lots of mystery in this novel, and there's lots of red herrings. And it's a novel that I think you have to work at to understand fully. And from my point of view, it it merits uh not only uh reading twice, but reading several times over in order to catch every detail and every little uh uh fact and every little uh uh trap that Dickens sets for you in this novel.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

You saying this makes me think, could you describe it as perhaps a spy novel?

SPEAKER_02 4:27

Perhaps not a spy novel. I think that

hello

SPEAKER_02 4:29

Our Mutual Friend is probably uh a mystery novel. It's one that uh um uh is designed to sensationalize. So this period, the 1850s and the 1860s, marked the rise of the sensation novel. And the sensation novel was one where you had what seems to be an ordinary situation, but there's a lot that's happening behind the scenes. So this was made famous by Wilkie Collins, for example, in his novel The Woman in White, where there is uh a kind of veneer of normality behind which, if you scratch in below the surface of this society, that you find lots of intrigue and lots of motivations that uh don't become apparent initially.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

Yeah, I think that's very interesting. I mean, what's beneath the surface? Yes. Uh because what I find so powerful in this story are the number of characters that seem to have some form of divided inner life. There are two versions of themselves wrestling to get control of their bodies and take charge of them.

SPEAKER_02 5:35

That's right. So the novel turns on the fact that you have this character called John Harmon who enters the novel. He comes from uh South Africa, he spent time at the Cape, and he disguises his identity from early on because he doesn't want to fulfill the promise that his father had made for him to marry Bella Wilfer. And that sets in train um uh a whole series of events in which he he changes identity several times. So he becomes uh Julius Hanford, for example, at one point, he becomes John Rokesmith very quickly. And these are interesting in terms of other selves. And there's a very interesting chapter in which uh there is an interior monologue where Harmon Stroke, Rokesmith, Stroke Hanford, has a deep self-examination and he tries to unpack for himself how he came to London, how he then was drugged and was thrown into the river and almost killed, and how he recovered from that, and how he then went about setting things straight, uh, as happens uh towards the end of the novel, where he finally reveals his identity to his love interest, Bella Wilfer, uh, of course, assisted by uh the police investigation by Mr. Inspector and by other characters who recognize who he in fact is.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

John Harmon is dead. Should John Harmon come to life? If yes, why? If no, why?

SPEAKER_02 7:09

This idea of a divided self was very much to the fore in Dickens' own life. So Dickens uh was someone who uh with the public, he had a public celebrity persona where he was the champion of the poor, where he was the inventor of Christmas, where he was the man who was interested in social issues. And then behind that you had the private man, the man who had family difficulties, the man who separated from his wife in 1858 and issued a press statement to say, at least from his point of view, why he did so. And he then had this other life with his young 18-year-old actress lover Ellen Ternan, whom he was very, very successful at keeping out of the public eye. And so Dickens also had this past of uh growing up uh with a father who was a debtor, uh, growing up working in a blacking factory at a young age of 11 or 12. And that's something that he felt very ashamed of for uh the whole of his adult life. So Dickens had alternative selves, alternative identities, some of which he wished to keep hidden from uh his public and indeed from his his friends and family. And I think that a lot of that is is the inspiration of what we know as our mutual friend.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Yes. And it's not just John Harmon, because Bella, who he ends up marrying, who he falls in love with, she herself has these inner conflicts and she's extraordinary as well, isn't she, in that that sort of inner struggle she has.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

She got up and looked in the glass and said to her image, You have been positively swelling your features, you little fool. Then she took an impatient walk to the other end of the room and back, and said, I wish Pa were here to have a talk about an avaricious marriage, but he is better away, poor dear, for I know I should pull his hair if he was here. And then she threw her work away, and threw her book after it, and sat down and hummed a tune, and hummed it out of tune, and quarrelled with it.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

She, of course, is uncomfortable with the the the promise that uh was made by Harmon Sr. And of course she she dresses in in mourning clothes initially because her intended uh John Harmon has supposedly died. And so she struggles with with that kind of uh identity. And then she struggles also with how she feels she needs to succeed in society, how she feels she needs to marry well, how she feels that she needs to have a lot of money. And uh one of the key elements of our mutual friend is how people go about acquiring wealth, how sometimes it's it's very easily lost, and sometimes how it's found in the most unlikely of places. For example, in our mutual friend in dust heaps. And dust, of course, uh was a kind of euphemism for all kinds of rubbish, not just the kind of cinders that you might expect uh from fires. Of course, the uh the coal was the thing that powered uh the UK in the 19th century, but also um uh household waste, industrial waste, human waste, um, animal waste. And there was a value in some of this. For example, dog waste was used uh in the tanning process. So there was a there was a kind of uh richness to be had in a profession like that of the Harmon family on and of the wonderful character Mr. Boffin, who uh uh is is working for uh uh the Harmons. And his role as a retainer is quite interesting because he he's the most loyal character uh of all in Our Mutual Friend.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Yes, and he uh inherits the wealth in John Harman's absence, doesn't he? Yes, and but he is spoiled at one point by that. He becomes very suspicious and capricious and and misly, and he reads up on misus as an inspiration.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

He does, but but of course, that's all a ruse because he's doing that in order to test uh Bella Wilfer and uh to see how how much her love of money uh will extend. And so this is a so-called pious fraud that is orchestrated between John Harmon and the Bothins. Uh, and of course, it all comes good at the end. There's a spectacular scene in which Bella takes leave of the Bothins and she accuses Mr. Bothon of being this terrible miser. But of course, he's just putting on an act. But I think that Dickens is very interested in the idea of not only the acquisition of wealth, but also in miserliness. And he has a jolly good time with it in terms of telling those stories. From uh, there's an author called Meriwether who put together these uh anecdotes of misers, some of whom uh became members of parliament, for example, that there was one called John Elwis, who was a famous miser, but also member of parliament, but lived in absolute seeming penury and uh hid wealth up uh up chimneys and this kind of thing. So it's it's a wonderful comic aspect of this novel.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

Yes, and uh I think with this particular novel, it felt to me like all ages of Dickens converge. So I think a character like Silas Wegg would stump his way straight out of the Pickwick papers, couldn't he? I mean, how do you explain Silas Wegg to listeners that don't know him?

SPEAKER_02 12:41

So Silas Wegg is a balladmonger. He's somebody who enters the novel uh early on and he attaches himself to uh Mr. Boffin, but he's an eccentric. Uh he stands out in front of a house and he imagines himself to be the retainer of this family, which he in fact is not. He has a trestle table, he's got an umbrella, and he's got uh these ballads that he's selling for pennies, but he's also got bits of stale gingerbread.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Assuredly, this stall of Silas Wegg's was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the faceache to look at his apples, the stomach ache to look at his oranges, and the toothache to look at his nuts.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

Silas Wegg, he's a comic character very often, and he attaches himself to Mr. Boffin because he sees uh in Mr. Boffin somebody who who seems naive, and Boffin has just inherited uh the Harman fortune. So Silas Wegg attaches himself to Mr. Boffin in order to uh try to acquire some of his wealth, and there's a whole intrigue in the novel concerning wills, wills that were left by uh old Harman, who has died. And uh Wegg is trying to steal away the Harmon fortune from Mr. Boffin, and he's in league with a man called uh Mr. Venus. Mr. Venus is uh an articulator of bones, he's a kind of taxidermist. Um, so Sidus Wegg blunders his way through the novel with this avaricious scheme of taking over the Harman fortune. He's eventually found out and is eventually carted off in a dust cart by another wonderful character called Mr. Sloppy. But uh it just shows you how how from uh seemingly disparate materials, Dickens is able to bring them together. And he's able to use some of them, of course, for serious purposes, and he's able to use some of them for uh comic purposes. Now, I think that there's actually a whole school of criticism in Dickens' studies concerning disability. And there's a bit of a serious side to this in Our Mutual Friend, not just to do with Cyrus Weg, but also to do with a wonderfully positive character called Jenny Wren, um, who has uh a bad back and legs, and uh she she's uh uh disabled, um, but she becomes um a great friend to Lizzie Hexham, who is the daughter of a river scavenger. And uh she um ends up having a relationship with Eugene Rayburn, who is the other main male protagonist in the novel. So you've got these two pairs, you've got Harmon and Bella Wilfer on the one hand, and you've got Eugene Rayburn and Lizzie Hexham on the other end. And their paths do cross eventually in the novel, but they're they're at um uh different ends of society. Um, Eugene is a well-to-do barrister, though he doesn't practice, he's very lazy and lives off of his family funds. And Lizzie is the daughter of a river scavenger. So river scavenging at this time was a lowly profession, but unfortunately one that was necessary in order to recover not only uh flotsam and jetsum from the River Thames, but also in the case of our mutual friend, a body. And it's that evocative scene of uh uh um the recovery of a body from the river that opens the novel. So, in terms of uh sensation that we were talking about before, the the idea that this is a sensation novel, a novel in which uh surprising, scary, uh somewhat gothic uh elements emerge. So, starting off with a dead body in the river that is being dragged along by Lizzie Hexham's father, Gaffer Hexham, is what starts off the novel. And Dickens shows you how from these very ominous beginnings, eventually something positive can emerge. So that there's a very long and complicated trajectory that is followed through the novel and until we get to the eventual resolution. But it's not clear, even till nearly the very end, that things are going to end well for the protagonists and their love interests.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Eugene is a fascinating character, isn't he? Because he suffers also in the same way that Bella has done with what's been preordained for him by his father, you know, his whole path in life to be a barrister, and he's trapped, and then he falls for Lizzie.

SPEAKER_02 17:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

And he has a very close friend, Mortimer, who I think has an unrequited love for Eugene. It seems very, very powerful his feeling for him. Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

We have long been much more than brothers, unfulfilled. I shall break down if I try to say more.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

I think we must remember that at this period, male friendships and the way in which both men and women express themselves to one another in terms of these strong friendships was, I think, different from uh the way they would be perceived now. So I think that those, for example, those critics who are interested in gay and lesbian issues, for example, they would see that kind of close friendship and living arrangement between Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Rayburn as a kind of same-sex relationship. I don't think it was that, and I don't think that the Dickens had any intention to present it as such. He presented it as two close friends, uh Mortimer, a solicitor, and uh Eugene, a barrister. Um, Mortimer has uh one client, Mr. Boffin, and maybe he only needs one because uh Boffin is so wealthy and so generous. But Eugene lives on the monies that are given to him by his family. And uh he talks about MRF, my respected father, and what his father wants for him and from him. So uh I think that various siblings of Eugene have have become, I think what one has become a minister, and there are various others who have done, who have become successful. And there is, as you say, this kind of preordained path for Eugene. Eugene strays away from that and he strays away from expectations. And so uh from early on in the novel, he sees Lizzie Hexham when he comes to visit the Hexham household, and he develops this interest in her that blossoms all the way through the novel.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

He turned his eyes upon the building where, as he had been told, the lonely girl with the dark hair sat by the fire. He could see the light of the fire shining through the window. Perhaps it drew him on to look in. Perhaps he had come out with the express intention. She had no other light than the light of the fire. The unkindled lamp stood on the table. She sat on the ground, looking at the brazier, with her face leaning on her hand.

SPEAKER_02 19:57

So it's interesting how you've got a well-to-do character, an upper middle class character, who falls in love with a woman who is the daughter of a river scavenger. So that could be seen as one of the lowest professions on a kind of social scale in this society. But uh he falls for her and then he he pursues her through the novel, and uh eventually they they end up together, but it takes an awfully long time, and he too suffers a near-death experience as a result because he's attacked by his rival, who is a man called Bradley Headstone. And Headstone is an interesting character because

MISSING BRADLEY INTRO

SPEAKER_02 20:42

he he's he seems to be uh somebody who is following the prescribed rise in society where somebody who wishes to better himself, in the case of Bradley, undertakes teacher training. But Dickens says that he's done so in a mechanical fashion.

SPEAKER_00 21:01

He had acquired mechanically

cut brad

SPEAKER_00 21:03

a great store of teacher's knowledge. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face. It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now that it was gotten.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

So he's not somebody who lives and breathes being a teacher. He's not doing it as a kind of vocation, he is somebody who sees his position as a teacher as a way to better himself in society. So it's it's giving himself a leg up. And so there's an interesting scene where he comes to visit uh Eugene Rayburn, and Eugene constantly calls him schoolmaster. So he uses it as a term of derision. Bradley uses it as a as a kind of accolade, but by refusing to use Bradley's proper name and using this term schoolmaster, which Dickens capitalizes in the text, you can see how he uses as a term of derision.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Eugene looked on to Bradley Headstone with consummate indolence. He turned to Mortimer, inquiring, and who may this other person be? I am Charles Hexham's friend, said Bradley. I am Charles Hexham's schoolmaster. My good sir, you should teach your pupils better manners, returned Eugene. Composedly smoking, he leaned an elbow on the chimney piece at the side of the fire and looked at the schoolmaster. It was a cruel look, in its cold disdain of him, as a creature of no worth. The schoolmaster looked at him, and that too was a cruel look, though of the different kind, that it had a raging jealousy and fiery wrath in it. In some respects, Mr Eugene Rayburn, said Bradley, answering him with pale and quivering lips, the natural feelings of my pupils are stronger than my teaching. In most respects I dare say, replied Eugene, enjoying his cigar. Though whether high or low is of no importance. You have my name very correctly. Pray, what is yours? It cannot concern you much to know, but true, interposed Eugene, striking sharply and cutting him short at his mistake. It does not concern me at all to know. I can say schoolmaster, which is a most respectable title. You are right, schoolmaster.

SPEAKER_02 23:41

And Bradley uh becomes increasingly desperate in the course of the novel, not just to uh attain his position, but also to attain the love of Lizzie Hexham, but is unsuccessful in that regard because he is far too angry, he's far too passionate, and actually Dickens uh shows him at several points having what is probably an epileptic fit. Uh so I think that uh he has uh um certain medical issues, but on top of that, he's got uh anger management issues. And I think that one feeds into the other. So when he gets very angry and he gets very passionate, he begins to shake um to the point where he drops to the floor. And that uh is an indication of menace for Dickens in terms of this character, Bradley Headstone. And Bradley Headstone eventually follows Eugene and Lizzie upriver. Lizzie has been hiding upriver from the likes of Bradley Headstone. Eugene pursues her, finds her, and then when Eugene is walking along the riverbank, he's accosted by Bradley and beat over the head with this idea of murdering him.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

He stopped upon the margin to look down at the reflected night. In an instant, with a dreadful crash, the reflected night turned crooked. Flames shot jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars came bursting from the sky. Was he struck by lightning? He turned under the blows that were blinding him and mashing his life, and closed with a murderer.

SPEAKER_02 25:19

Eugene is rescued by Lizzie Hexham, who, of course, is an expert boatwoman, because she has had this background of being the daughter of a river scavenger and has accompanied her father on many of his outings, so she manages to save him.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

She ran the boat ashore, went into the water, released him from the line, and by main strength lifted him in her arms and laid him in the bottom of the boat. He had fearful wounds upon him, and she bound them up with her dress torn into strips.

SPEAKER_02 25:51

And thereafter, uh after his recuperation, there is a private marriage that takes place between Lizzie and Eugene, and Bradley is left out in the cold. But Bradley eventually comes to a tragic end,

rev rev

SPEAKER_02 26:07

not a tragic end, I suppose a rightful end, um, through another character whom we haven't talked about, who is Rogue Riderhood.

SPEAKER_01 26:14

Now he's a character, Leon, I don't believe has any division in himself. He is so 100% awful, isn't he, as a as a person. There's no there's no conscience pricking at him ever. He never has to talk to himself about whether or not. I mean, I what I do find interesting though on Rogue Riderhood and also with Bradley Headstone is that the injury that they're sort of fantasizing about inflicting on others visits themselves. So Bradley Headstone injures his hand at least twice in his bleeding. He starts having nosebleeds. Um Rogue Riderhood on the lock falls asleep, and as he wakes, he's almost cross with himself for waking himself up. Which is so strange, isn't it? As a complexity.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

Yes, yes. So um Rogue Riderhood is associated with the river, and in that guise, he uh knows Gaffer Hexam, the father of Lizzie, and the two of them are both river scavengers. But whereas Gaffer is shown to have sympathy for particularly his daughter, and there are some tender moments between them. The the family regret his death deeply. Um Lizzie imagines her father calling to her at several points in the novel after after he has died. But Rogue Riderhood is somebody who is very bitter, somebody who is also driven by avarice, and he gets himself into trouble with Bradley Headstone because he comes to know secrets about Bradley Headstone, and he comes to know uh about um Bradley Headstone's pursuit of Lizzie, and he eventually installs himself as a deputy lockkeeper upriver on the Thames, somewhere near about Henley. And towards the end of the novel, they quarrel, they both fall into the lock and are drowned, and that's the end of them. So it is a novel in which the good triumph and the bad guys get their just rewards. In that way, it still subscribes to a kind of melodramatic scheme that was very common in this period where good triumphs over evil. But how you get to that end is very complicated and something that takes, well, in the edition that I'm going to publish this year, it's over 800 pages. So it is something that takes time to develop and of course takes time for Dickens to write. So the novel was published in 20 monthly parts, as uh published as 19, because the last one was a double number. And so it takes a year and a half to get to the final resolution.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

A character that I was really struck by and moved by, who I found both noble and exasperating, is Betty Higdon. What are your thoughts on Betty?

SPEAKER_02 29:07

So Betty Higdon uh is an elderly woman who has a great grandchild called Johnny, whom she is looking after. So she occupies a kind of minding establishment where she's taking in children to accompany her own flesh and blood Johnny and keep him company. And this is how she earns a bit of money. So she lives in Brentford in Essex. And when the Boffins are searching for a surrogate child to bring up as a kind of substitute for John Harmon, the young John Harmon, whom they have lost, they go and they seek the aid of Frank Milvie, who is the local curate. And Milvey manages to bring them to the home of Betty Higdon, and they espy little Johnny, who is a pathetic little creature, whom the Boffins then take in and raise him as if he were a kind of surrogate, uh John Harmon. And Betty is hesitant at first because all the rest of her family have died, and this is her only living relation. And she obviously wants the best for him, but she's hesitant because it's like her last link with her previous life and with her family. Now, Johnny unfortunately perishes because he has an illness that it's impossible to cure, even though he's taken in the end to a very benevolent children's hospital that is, I think, modeled on one that Dickens actually knew in the East End of London. Um, he writes about this in his journalism. But Betty continues as a character in the novel whom the Boffins are looking after and are providing with a bit of sustenance. But Betty's greatest fear is that she will go into the workhouse. But as you say, she doesn't quite help herself because she's always keen to strike out on her own. She is obviously working way past her retirement age, and she always wants to keep going and not depend upon anybody else because she sees that kind of dependence as a precursor to ending up in the workhouse.

SPEAKER_01 31:18

In a strange way, she feels to me a little bit like an elderly little Nell, that something of the old curiosity shop comes back with that pilgrimage that ends in her death like that. Yes. And with Dickens looking back, a character that I think at one point is described as an artful dodge or even dodger is Raya, this Jewish character. So again, Dickens revisits this Jewish paternal figure in a much different way in this novel. He's fascinating, isn't he?

SPEAKER_02 31:46

So Dickens uh was, I think then and now, uh accused of being an anti-Semite. My feeling is that he never was. And even in the creation of a character like Fagin, Dickens was reflecting a reality at the time of dealers in stolen goods, fences, we would call them. Uh uh there was a very famous one called Ike Solomon's, on whom uh Fagin was partly based, who was arrested, tried, and then sent to Australia under the transportation scheme that existed in the early 19th century. So there was a kind of historical precedent that Dickens was relying on for the development of the character of Fagin. The other thing you have to remember is that this was a kind of currency about speaking about Jewish people at the time where there was a kind of casual, uh, shall we say, distaste, or there was a casual currency about how one spoke about Jewish people. So in the early 19th century, Jews didn't sit in parliament, they didn't have the same kind of protection in terms of uh their way of life, their status in society as the rest of the Christian citizens of the UK. But Dickens came to regret his initial portrayal of Fagin. And in later editions of Oliver Twist, you can see a change in the text where rather than referring to the Jew, and I think that um Jewish people, and I'm Jewish myself, feel that there is a kind of um derogatoriness in the use of the term Jew, and you know, its equivalent in various other languages like Jude in German or Zit in Polish. Um my parents were Holocaust survivors as well, so I'm very well aware of all that they suffered in terms of anti-Semitism. So Dickens rethought the character of Fagin, and instead of using the Jew, as he does very often, as a shorthand, he replaced it with the name Fagan. And that was a conscious decision in order to try to soften the initial impression that was made about accusations of anti-Semitism. He was also, at the time of Our Mutual Friend, he was involved in correspondence with a woman called Mrs. Eliza Davis. And she believed that the portrayal of Fagin was too harsh. And while Our Mutual Friend was coming out, there are letters that exist between Mrs. Davis and Dickens in which she gives him pointers about uh the character of Raya, how he dresses, how he would act. And so Raya is described as uh wearing a gabardine coat. He's described as um kissing the hand of um fascination fledgeby, his employer. And Mrs. Davis says, Oh, that this is not this is not a custom of British Jews, it's a Polish custom. Um, so and she also talks about the language that Dickens uses in Raya's speech and tries to correct him on various points, particularly to do with the naming of God and this kind of thing. So Dickens creates Raya as a kind of apologia for Fagan, I think. Raya is a very sympathetic character. He's somebody who has great sympathy for Jenny Wren, and they develop an interesting friendship where Jenny calls Raya grandmother in terms of uh, you know, fairy tales and how there is this benevolent figure in Little Red Riding Hood, which is a fairy tale that is mentioned a number of times in the text. And so she calls Raya grandmother, and they develop a friendship, and it shows Raya to be somebody who is abused by his employer, but he has a good heart. And he's rewarded in that he eventually comes good, but he manages to protect Jenny and also Lizzie Hexum. He protects Lizzie Hexum from some of the worst excesses of the people that she comes across in the in the novel. So he's he's a protector. He he allows them to play on his rooftop. And there's a wonderful illustration where you've got Jenny and Lizzie on the rooftop of Pubsy and Co. where where Raya works, and they are looking at some books and taking a bit of fresh air. Dickens. In this particular case, in the case of Raya, I think that he was uh swayed because he didn't want to be accused of being an anti-Semite. And the approach that was made to him by Mrs. Davis was not one of harsh criticism, but one as if to say, Jewish people are just like everybody else. So can you rethink some of your earlier thoughts about Fagan and uh now about about Raya? And of course it turned out well. And I think that the Dickens did have that reprieve as a result of creating the character of Raya.

SPEAKER_01 36:47

Yes, and I think in his writing, I mean looking at the mystery of Edwin Drud, I think he becomes more interested in race and people of different backgrounds, doesn't he? And he writes if he'd lived another decade or so, who knows the the protagonist that we could have ended up with. Um but with Raya, it also seems to me that he places Judaism in the in the novel as the heritage as as the seed of Christianity. There are moments where where he talks about Raya sitting on the steps where his ancestors may have been in dungeons before, and Raya himself walks around with a staff, doesn't he?

SPEAKER_02 37:18

He's kind of like a Moses-like Absolutely, Moses or Abraham yes, no, very much uh a Hebrew scripture.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

Raya went into the fog and was lost to the eyes of Saint Mary Axe. But the eyes of this history can follow him westward, by Corn Hill, Cheapside, Fleet Street and the Strand, to Piccadilly and the Albany. Thither he went at his grave and measured pace, staff in hand, skirt at heel, and more than one head, turning to look back at his venerable figure already lost in the mist, supposed it to be some ordinary figure indistinctly seen, which fancy and the fog had worked into that passing likeness.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

And unlike Fagin, he is a genuine protector and hero to those people that he he gathers. And that leads us to the last character that I feel that we have to talk about is uh Jenny Wren, who I'm just enchanted by. Um and it links the three of them, doesn't it? Lizzie, Ryer, and Jenny.

SPEAKER_02 38:19

It does. And actually, if you look at uh Marcus Stone's illustrations, and there was some conversation between Dickens and his ill his young illustrator Marcus Stone, for whom this was his first full-length novel that he was illustrating. So Dickens's friend Frank Stone had died, and Marcus was just starting off on his artistic career, and Dickens wanted to give him a bit of a lift, and so he employed him to do the illustrations of Our Mutual Friend, which are quite different from the illustrations of previous novels. And so most of the other ones were illustrated by artists who were interested in caricature. So I think of George Kirkshank, for example, in the early part of Dickens' career, or Fizz, Havlow Knight Brown, who illustrated many of the novels from Pickwick onwards, and how in their depiction of characters there are eccentricities that emerge in the illustrations. There's also quite a lot of um symbolism. Now, the illustrations of Marcus Stone were rather different because taste had changed, and so you get much more realistic illustrations. And Stone was particularly interested in relationships and how you convey relationships in the novel. And so you can see in that illustration of Jenny and uh Lizzie on the rooftop, how first of all, how beautiful Jenny is with long hair, and you know, her her disability is not made a feature of any of the uh illustrations, and just how comfortable she is in the company of Lizzie. So so that's quite interesting.

SPEAKER_00 39:59

Lizzie Hexham and Jenny Wren, for whom, perhaps with some old instinct of his race, the gentle Jew had spread a carpet, seated on it, against no more romantic object than a blackened chimney stack, over which some bumble creeper had been trained. They both poured over one book, both with attentive faces. A few boxes of humble flowers and evergreens completed the garden.

SPEAKER_02 40:29

But as the novel progresses, she's a kind of double-sided character because she's got this bright outlook towards characters like Lizzie and Raya. But she has this father who is a drunkard and who uh is very embarrassing to her, and she scolds him and she acts as a kind of mother figure, and she calls him her child and treats him like a child because there's no other way to deal with this alcoholic father. And maybe there's a lesson in there for you know other families and how they might deal with their uh their alcoholic relatives, but she doesn't lack sympathy in that regard. But she's trying to do for her father something that will save his life. Now, Jenny Wren's proper name is Fanny Cleaver, and it's not a name that is used in the novel at all, but the father, rather than being called Mr. Cleaver, is called Mr. Dolls because Jenny Wren's occupation is that of a doll's dressmaker. And she follows uh uh around um high society women, and she uses them as models for the dolls that she is making and the clothing that these dolls will wear. So it's an interesting comment about how somebody from a modest background and somebody who is on the kind of lower rungs of the social ladder looks up to and draws some inspiration and in a way steals something away from these upper class figures who are dressed beautifully and uh whom she's trying to uh use as models for her doll's dresses. So she's as I say, she's a sympathetic figure, she's somebody who befriends Lizzie and protects her from the likes of Bradley Headstone and from the likes of Fascination Fledgeby. She's not afraid to stand up to anybody and somebody who's clearly young.

SPEAKER_01 42:21

12, 13, isn't she? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:23

Absolutely. She's had to stand up to her father. She's had to stand up and earn a living for herself and her irresponsible father. She's somebody who has grown up before her time and has been forced to become a kind of adult and take on adult responsibilities, even though she is a child.

unknown 42:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 42:43

I'm looking at the image that you described with the garden on the roof and everything. It's and she says something so interesting, doesn't she? She goes into these very long, elaborate descriptions of what it's like to be above the rooftops.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

We are thankful to come here for rest, sir, said Jenny. You see, you don't know what the rest of this place is to us, does he, Lizzie? It's the quiet and the air. The quiet repeated Fledgeby, with a contemptuous turn of his head towards the city's roar. Ah, said Jenny. But it's so high. And you see the clouds rushing on above the narrow streets, not minding them. And you see the golden arrows pointing at the mountains in the sky, from which the wind comes.

SPEAKER_01 43:35

Very nice to talk to you. You're very welcome. Bye bye now.