dickens’s thames, and also the medway and the thames ... · web viewno fewer than seven...
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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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
(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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
“[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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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
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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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
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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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
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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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
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Mary L. Shannon. Victorian Sustainability essay. Septemberanuary 2016
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
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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
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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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