As shown in the above print by John Leech, the rick
burners were impoverished, and rebelled by burning
ricks of hay. (This is explained in greater detail
in the discussion of the Industrial Revolution).
The painting of Dickens by Augustus Egg shows an interest
Dickens shared with others. Dickens was closely in touch
with John Leech, Augustus Egg, Henry Mayhew, etc.
The next contradiction with Mayhew's very careful
reporting of a dredgerman's testimony, is Dickens'
introduction of Gaffer Hexam's daughter Lizzie, who
rows their boat as Gaffer scans the water for likely
items to scavenge (bodies). Lizzie expresses a view
that is in sharp contrast with the epitome of his life
given by the dredgerman in "London Labour and the
London Poor". It is highly unlikely that anyone
living from hand to mouth on the river would hold such
a view, but it is exactly what we would expect Charles
Dickens, with his bourgeois attitude, to impute to
others:
.
"Here! and give me hold of the sculls. I'll take the rest of
the spell."
"No, no, father! No! I can't indeed.
Father!—I cannot sit so near it!"
He was moving towards her to change places, but her
terrified expostulation stopped him and he resumed
his seat.
"What hurt can it do you?"
"None, none. But I cannot bear it."
"It's my belief you hate the sight of the very river."
"I — do not like it, father."
"As if it wasn't your living! As if it wasn't meat and
drink to you!"
At these latter words the girl shivered again, and for
a moment paused in her rowing, seeming to turn deadly
faint. It escaped his attention, for he was glancing
over the sterm at something the boat had in tow.
"How can you be so thankless to your best friend,
Lizzie? The very fire that warmed you when you were
a babby, was picked out on the river alongside the
coal barges. The very basket that you slept in, the
tide washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it
upon to make a cradle of it, I cut out of a piece of
wood that drifted from some ship or another."
Charles Dickens, "Our Mutual Friend", Penguin edition, p. 15
.
Note that in the passage above, the view presented
is that the dredgermen dredged coal from alongside
the coal barges (either from coal spilled in the
water or through theft of coal directly from the
coal barges). Once again, Mayhew's information is
far more precise: "I know a furrow off Lime'us Point,
no wider nor the dredge, and I can go there, and what
others can't git anything but stones and mud, I can
git four or five bushels o'coal. You see, they lay
there, they get in with the set of the tide, and can't
git out so easy like." No mention of theft. It is
quite possible that some dredgers did steal coal, but
it is also evident that some dredgers did not
steal coal.
.
Mayhew also points out that when a dredger gets too
old to dredge he still works for a living, at jobs
such as "scrapin'" (scraping off the old tar from
ships with a scraper). Even in old age, there is no
sign of begging or theft.
.
Dickens reinforces the idea that Gaffer Hexam "stole"
money from the dead man's person in another passage.
Rogue Riderhood accuses Gaffer Hexam:
.
"Since when was you no pardner of mine, Gaffer Hexam Esquire?"
"Since you was accused of robbing a man. Accused of
robbing a live man!" said Gaffer, with great
indignation.
"And what if I had been accused of robbing a dead
man, Gaffer?"
"You COULDN'T do it."
"Couldn't you, Gaffer?"
"No. Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible
for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead
man belong to? 'Tother world. What world does money
belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse's?
Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss
it? Don't try to go confounding the rights and wrongs
of things in that way. But it's worthy of the sneaking
spirit that robs a live man."
Charles Dickens, "Our Mutual Friend", Penguin edition, p. 16
.
The passage above is in direct opposition to Mayhew's
statement that "the dredgers cannot by reasoning or
argument be made to comprehend that there is anything
like dishonesty in emptying the pockets of a dead man."
In fact, "They say that anyone who finds a body does
precisely the same, and that if they did not do so the
police would." Thus, not only do dredgers in general
not feel that emptying the pockets of corpses is
dishonest, but they feel as if they are acting
as lawfully as
the police. In crafting a conversation where one
dredgerman questions another about the morality of
removing money from a corpse's pockets, Dickens inserts
his own comforting bourgeois view of law and honesty in
place of the reality of what law and honesty really mean.
.
Dickens portrays Gaffer Hexam both as a man who
is capable of reading (which seems unlikely), and as
a man who is opposed to formal education. This at least is in line with
what Mayhew wrote in his interview with a dredgerman,
whom he quotes as saying "There's on'y one or
two of us dredgers as knows anything of larnin', and
they're no better off than the rest. Larnin's no good
to a dredger, he hasn't got no time to read".
.
Taking up the bottle with the lamp in it, he
held it near a paper on the wall, with the
police heading, BODY FOUND. The two friends
read the handbill as it stuck against the wall,
and Gaffer read them as he held the light.
"Only papers on the unfortunate man, I see," said
Lightwood, glancing from the description of what
was found, to the finder.
"Only paper."
Here the girl arose with her work in her hand, and
went out the door.
"No money," pursued Mortimer; "but threepence in
one of the skirt-pockets."
Charles Dickens, "Our Mutual Friend", Penguin edition, p. 31
.
"One of the gentlemen, the one who didn't speak
while I was there, looked hard at me. And I was
afraid he might know what my face meant. But
there! Don't mind me, Charley! I was all in a
tremble of another sort when you owned to your
father you could write a little."
"Ah! But I made believe I wrote so badly, that it
was odds if any one could read it. And when I wrote
slowest and smeared out with my finger most, father
was best pleased, as he stood looking over me."
Charles Dickens, "Our Mutual Friend", Penguin edition, p. 36
.
Upon what sources did Dickens draw, in the creation of
the character of Gaffer Hexam? Although there is no direct
evidence that Dickens was familiar with the work of Henry
Mayhew, it is difficult to believe that Dickens was unaware
of it.
.
... Mayhew's interviews with London street folk were well
enough known for Dickens to have been aware of them whether
he knew Mayhew or not. Mayhew first told well-off readers of
the shifts by which the poor of London stayed alive from one
day to the next in the Morning Chronicle in 1849-1850.
The work appeared in a bewildering variety of amended,
augmented, edited, and reorganized editions during the next
dozen years and more. ... [T]he final version of the work was
printed in 1864 and again in 1865. Dickens was writing
Our Mutual Friend in 1864 and 1865; it would be strange
if he did not know something at least about material so
relevant to his interests ...11
.
.
Three interests of Dickens are relevant here: his affection
for the Thames, his fascination with the work of the police,
and a longstanding interest in drowning.12
.
Harlan Nelson has studied the relationship between
Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor"
and Charles Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend", and
has noticed other striking coincidences, as follows:
.
[T]he relationship with
London Labour and the London Poor becomes
still more plausible on the discovery of two other
passages in Mayhew. One contains touches suggesting
Gaffer Hexam, the dredgerman (river scavenger) in
Our Mutual Friend, touches that include
distinct verbal reminisces and parallel details.
The other is an extensive section on London dustmen
and the garbage they collected, matter that
(considering the use made of dust and the dust trade
in Our Mutual Friend, certainly would have
caught Dickens's eye, if indeed it was not what drew
his attention to the book in the first
place.13
But there is yet another circumstance that argues for
the relationship I have suggested between
London Labour and the London Poor and
Our Mutual Friend. In a work running to
nearly six hundred closely printed pages, the
passage about the dredgermen occurs only four pages
after the one dealing with the old
woman14, and
only nine pages before the section on dust begins;
so that not only does a methodical reader, but a
browser, or a skimmer, or a novelist looking for
material, would be likely to run across all of them.
It was while browsing, in fact, that I discovered
these passages myself.15
Conclusion
In conclusion: it does appear that Dickens has at least
borrowed ideas about dredgermen from the research that
Henry Mayhew published several years before Dickens
published "Our Mutual Friend", but not quite.
Dickens replaced much of the facts found by Mayhew
with Dickens' own bourgeois imagination about law,
morality, and education: ideas with which Dickens was
more comfortable.
.
1
"Nineteenth-Century Fiction", Vol. 24, No. 3,
Dec. 1969, pp. 345-349, ""Dickens and Mayhew:
A Further Note", by H. P. Sucksmith.
.
2
"Dickens certainly knew of Mayhew as a writer as
early as 1838 for while editing "Bentley's
Miscellany" He had published a piece of
comic fiction entitled 'Mr. Peter Punctilio,/
The Gentleman in Black'" by Henry Mayhew.
Ibid., p. 346.
.
3
"Mr. and Mrs. Charles Dickens Entertain at Home",
by Helen Cox, Pergamon Press, 1970, pp. 130, 150, 158, 170.
.
4
"The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s
and 1850s", by Sheila M. Smith,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, Great Britain,
1980, p. 166.
.
5
"[Mayhew] stops talking and lets the child speak, with
the authentic voice ... . Listening to her, we
realize what Dickens and Collins meant by their phrase
'strikes to the soul like reality'. From her words we
get the same kind of direct impact of her life as we
get from [a] remarkable photograph ... and as we do
not get from, say, Dickens's Sissy Jupe." Ibid., p. 167.
.
6
"The Victorian Novelist: Social Problems
and Social Change", Edited by Kate Flint,
Croom Helm, New York, N. Y., 1987, pp. 226-229.
.
7
A "waterman" is licensed to carry passengers.
A "lighter" carries goods or baggage, only. A
"dredgerman's" boat is equipped with grappling
hooks, and ropes and typically carries scavenged
coal, bones, rope, metal or any other object
with value, including dead bodies.
.
8
"London Labour and the London Poor",
by Henry Mathew, London, 1861-1862,
II, pp. 149-150.
.
9
Mayhew's dredgers pick up many things besides
bodies—finding a body, which means a fixed fee
("inquest money") and perhaps a reward, is occasionally
and outside the routine of their regular business.
Dickens's Hexam seems to have little interest in anything
else. "Dickens's OUR MUTUAL FRIEND and Henry Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor", by Harland S.
Nelson, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 20, #3, Dec. 1965,
p.221.
.
10
Dickens correctly invokes the desired gothic mood, at the cost of
inaccuracy. See "BIRDS OF PREY: A STUDY OF OUR MUTUAL FRIEND",
by R. D. McMaster, The Dalhousie Review, vol. 40, 1960, p. 373.
.
11
"Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Henry Mayhew's London Labour
and the London Poor", by Harland S. Nelson, Nineteenth Century
Fiction Vol. 20 (3), December 1965, p. 213.
.
12
"[Dickens] had a preoccupation with the river, and
drowning, that came near being an obsession: not
to speak of its role in his fiction, it appears
in a number of his periodic articles. In one of these,
"Down with the Tide" (Household Words, February 5,
1853...), the subject is handled more lightly than usual,
even whimsically. But that article interests me just here
for another reason, too. It is one of a series Dickens did
on the police, whose work fascinated him and whose
expertise drew his admiration. In this one Dickens reports
on a river patrol he took with the Thames Police. We get
an interview with the toll collector at Waterloo Bridge,
full of macabre drollness (the man's cheerful precision
about the habits of prospective suicides), and an account
of the various sorts of scavengers that the police keep an
eye on and among these, Dickens gives some space to dredgermen.
But there is not a word about their work of recovering
bodies, or about their peculiar perquisites—omissions
doubly odd if Dickens knew about these matters, considering
his persistent interest in drownings, and the prominence of
suicide by drowning in this particular piece.
.
"But having written about dredgermen himself Dickens would
probably notice them the more readily later in the writings
of others; and their macabre salvage activity, as reported
by Mayhew, would certainly recommend them to his
attention." [Ibid., p. 219]