And when the end is near, when darkness is in the heart and soul, when the beloved have left us and all the suns of joy have deserted the earth, then the ebony river, swollen with shadows, heavy with dark regrets and remorse, starts its slow, muted life. It is now the element which remembers the dead.

1For most people in the world, Dickens is either associated with Christmastime and the transformation of a cynical miser into a generous uncle or with London as a particular urban space, and its sombre sides and peculiarities: fog and rain, “the taint of prisons” (GE 32: 202), the dark waters of the Thames. The river lazily winding through London carries along with it a foggy, murky, nightly atmosphere where prostitutes are tempted to commit suicide, cadavers are robbed by unscrupulous watermen, convicts are drowned trying to leave England by catching the steamboat heading for Hamburg. Dickens narrated these gothic, melodramatic scenes with a sure hand at atmospheric description and character depiction. However, the function of London’s river as a trope and a topos was not systematically approached in the same way, perhaps. How did the Thames evolve in the Victorian novelist’s mind from Oliver Twist (1837-39) to Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) and how did film adaptations convey these visions of the night-time river? How did the evolution in Dickens’s approach to the Thames change Londoners’ perception of it in the long run? This is what this paper intends to find out. We shall first visit the banks of the Thames where the prostitute redeems herself by saving youth and innocence and exchanging her soul against the orphan’s. But we shall not stay by the riverside for a long time and shall explore the waters to understand Pip’s revival and second baptism, far from the great expectations once promised him. Then we shall see more clearly how the dark waters of the Thames are the locus of a change in identities, a character’s taking charge of his own destiny, heralding a progressive change in Victorian society. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend will be the central texts in this study.

1 – An exchange of souls near the Thames: the boy is a pickpocket and the girl is a prostitute

2The theory of humours formed Gaston Bachelard’s gateway to his essay on water and dreams. Numerous essays and articles link the doctrine of the four material elements with the four organic humours. An excellent example is found in the writings of Leonardus Lessius in his Treatise of Health and Long Life, with the Sure Means of Attaining It (1623):

3

Choleric people dreamed of fires, wars, murders; melancholic people dreamed of burials, sepulchres, spectres, abysses and holes, of all things sad; phlegmatic people dreamed of lakes, rivers, floods, shipwrecks; sanguine people dreamed of flocks of birds, races, banquets, concerts, things without a name. Therefore, the choleric, the melancholic, the phlegmatic and the sanguine will be respectively characterized by fire, earth, water and air.

4Thus the phlegmatic will dream of lakes, rivers, floods, shipwrecks; and an author such as Dickens might probe the phlegmatic side of humanity resorting to the Thames and its dark, muddy waters. To paraphrase Bachelard, we could say that the waters of the Thames “[fill] an essential, psychological function, which is to absorb the shadows, offer a daily grave to all that dies within us each day. Water is an invitation to die, an invitation to a special death which allows us to reach one of the elemental refuges” (Bachelard 68).

5The vicinity of the Thames for some characters in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield seems to illustrate this invitation to die. Indeed the relationship between orphans, prostitutes and lost women finds in the dark waters of London’s river the ideal place for a strange kind of transaction involving psychological or actual death. The cliché about the two possible careers for orphans and other poverty-stricken children of the Victorian era is already to be found in Oliver Twist, the Parish Boy’s Progress (1837-39). The novel has been regarded as a pamphlet against the 1834 New Poor Law and the rules regulating life inside the Workhouse. Within the novel, a sort of collusion between the orphan boy and the prostitute is at work. The narrative relates an orphan’s fall into the underworld of London’s petty thieves and murderers. Oliver is reduced to becoming one member of a gang of young pickpockets working under the rule of Fagin the fence, a receiver of stolen goods. Here we are concerned with a particular episode of the novel which enhances the relationship between Oliver and Nancy, the strongest, purest link in the novel, far away from the Maylies’ sentimentality or the sensationalism which was to be found in every Newgate or Old Bailey novel, popularized by William Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834) or Jack Sheppard (1839).

6If young Oliver is invariably good and pure, if he keeps his purity intact by refusing to do what is expected of him when he is admitted into the gang, that is to say, by never yielding to the temptation of theft, it is because the narrator knows that the clause which will allow him to inherit from his father expressly states that he will only do so if he has been able to remain as pure as a new born lamb, in short if he has a clean police record. How is it possible to protect Oliver from the temptation of evil? How to save the workhouse-born orphan? His purity has surprisingly remained intact in the workhouse environment, but the thieving gang might initiate the taint of prison which will constantly plague Pip, the hero of a later novel. The upper-middle classes (Mr. Brownlow or Rose Maylie) are powerless without the help of Nancy, the prostitute (although the word is never used by Dickens). In this otherwise waterproof society, only two characters can travel from one social class to another, from the world of crime to the immaculateness of the upper classes: these are society’s rejects, that is, the orphan and the prostitute. The latter will have to sacrifice herself to save the former, which is mainly her function in Dickens’s novel. Indeed, if she does not give away Monks, the orphan’s stepbrother who is bent on eliminating Oliver from the face of the earth, the young boy will disappear. “What dies within” Oliver to use Bachelard’s expression is the temptation of becoming a thief, a pickpocket. Nancy the prostitute will actually die to save Oliver from temptation.

7The time when this soul exchange is performed is the night; the place, a bank along the Thames under London Bridge, close to the aptly named St Saviour’s Church (now Southwark Cathedral. London Bridge was the one which prostitutes often chose to jump off; see George Cruikshank’s sequence The Drunkard’s Children [1848] and Charles Selby’s London by Night, first produced at the Strand Theatre, January 11^th, 1844). “And as water is the substance which mixes best, the night will penetrate the waters, it will hold the lake in its depths, it will impregnate the pond” (Bachelard 118). The resulting mixture of water and night is apt to create a gothic, uncanny, dangerous atmosphere. The night wraps the Thames and its visitors in a protective cloak to enable the transfer of the souls. Many a lost woman put an end to her life in the Thames, and Nancy threatens to throw herself into its waters. She confides in Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie:

8

“What,” cried the young lady “can be the end of this poor creature’s life!”
“What!” repeated the girl. “Look before you, lady. Look at that dark water. How many times do you read of such as I who spring into the tide, and leave no living thing, to care for, or bewail them. It may be years hence, or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at last.”

9The cliché of the prostitute jumping into the Thames to put an end to her predicament reflects the reader’s expectations speaking through Rose Maylie’s voice: “What can be the end of this poor creature’s life!” which is not even a question but an exclamation. It is further reinforced by Nancy’s answer, narratologically treated as an anonymous girl throughout the passage. In literature, water has very often been associated with the death of young, innocent people, mostly girls committing suicide. “Water is the element of young, beautiful death, surrounded by garlands and flowers and; in the tragedies of life and literature, it is the element of death without pride or vengeance, of masochistic suicide” (Bachelard 98; my translation). Obviously, the French philosopher has Ophelia in mind, and Hamlet himself suggests that she may be a prostitute: “Are you honest?” he asks her in Act III, sc. 1. It had become commonplace in Victorian novels and plays that the cold and dark waters of the Thames should urge the prostitute to commit suicide. In fact, Dickens slightly alters this cliché and the river serves as a foil, an aborted temptation, an avoided possibility, as Nancy will not plunge into the dark waters, but her death is only postponed for a while. By informing Brownlow and saving Oliver, Nancy signs her own death warrant, yet redeems her soul. The Thames serves as a potential Styx, but no one will cross the river. Its sole proximity is enough to convey the image of the passage of souls which will soon take place, for Sikes’s murder of Nancy is inevitable. Even if the Thames is not the place where she encounters her own death (it is however the case in Carol Reed’s Oliver! [1968]. Sikes brutally murders his partner on the banks of the Thames), it is clearly at the moment when she is the closest to it that the process of losing her life is triggered, the moment when souls are exchanged that the ineluctable process of her violent demise is launched. Her confession under London Bridge is so traumatic that she collapses at the end of it, suggesting death:

10

Rose Maylie lingered, but the old gentleman drew her arm through his, and led her, with gentle force, away. As they disappeared, the girl sunk [sic] down nearly at her full length upon one of the stone stairs, and vented the anguish of her heart in bitter tears.

11The verb “sunk” inevitably alludes to drowning and even though the image of a girl drowning is used only figuratively, the cliché is nevertheless resorted to and death is announced as the words “stone” and “tears” conjure up Nancy’s future tragic end. Noah Claypole, following Fagin’s instructions, has tailed Nancy and reports her conversation with Brownlow and Rose. Fagin then reports what Noah Claypole has just told him to Bill Sikes, the pimp (although Dickens never uses this word), but in doing so, he alters the content of the initial report and implies that Nancy has given the whole gang away to the police. Bill Sikes, deceived by Fagin’s venomous words, murders Nancy. The murder launches the whole sequence of manhunt and death (Sikes and his dog Bull’s Eye) and arrests (Monks and Fagin). It seems therefore not irrelevant to regard Nancy the prostitute as the saviour of Oliver as well as all the young thieves in the novel. Trying to escape from the police through the rooftops, Sikes accidentally hangs himself; Bull’s Eye, his dog, which he meant to drown after murdering Nancy for fear it might assist the police in catching him, throws itself in the air to join him and crashes on the ground, a few feet below.

12In Oliver Twist, the Thames is just a metaphor of death and of the passage of souls. No implementation of its powers actually takes place. Bull’s Eye refuses to be drowned but will end up, hurling itself into the air. Both “characters” choose the air to die, not the water element, suggesting that air and water are indeed two dissimilar ways of dying. By “choosing” the former, the murderer stays unredeemed while the prostitute suggests the possibility of drowning herself and saving the young boy while she is standing by the river and thus redeems the woman’s soul. The Thames conjures up the possibility of death without making it effective. Thus the Victorian commonplace of a prostitute’s suicidal drowning is slightly deflected and altered in Dickens’s early novel, and the metaphor suggested by Bachelard of “something dying within us” in the water is illustrated here through Nancy’s delayed demise.

2 – The Thames and beyond: the water trope in David Copperfield

13In David Copperfield, the water element is used in a more complex way: the river is still linked to the prostitute, but the sea and the shoreline are introduced to make the liquid network more intricate. The sea seeps into the overall fabric of the novel as the salt water flows back into the Thames. The raging sea causes the death of a character with Byronic features, namely Steerforth. In Victorian logic, after much compunction, he pays his ethical transgression with his life. Seducing Little Em’ly who is promised to Ham the sailor, preventing the union between Dan Peggotty’s two fondly loved adopted children, is most detrimental to Steerforth’s moral and eventually physical integrity. His body is laid on the beach in the pose he took while going to sleep before the eyes of his dear friend Copperfield. He finds peace of body and soul after going through the torments of both, like his honourable rival Ham. However, the sea is not only the place but also the metaphor of death in David Copperfield. Old Barkis will not pass away until the tide is out: “He’s a going out with the tide,” says Mr Peggotty (DC 30: 377). The man dies with the tide, goes back to Mother Nature with the movement of the waves, as if the tide carried his body with its ebbing movement, as if the preposition “with” meant both simultaneousness and physical escort.

14The equivalent of Oliver Twist, the defenceless child who must be saved, is here Little Em’ly. Between the young lost girl and the prostitute Martha Endell a relationship is sketched off stage, as it were. Martha, a young lost woman of Yarmouth must leave the harbour where she was born and Little Em’ly, before her own mishap, hands her a small purse so that she may settle down in London (ch. 22), city of lost women and prostitutes. Martha [1] confides in David and Dan Peggotty while pondering over suicide by drowning herself in the Thames at Millbank Pond, the area’s industrial wasteland which stands as a backdrop for her attempted suicide, reprising Nancy’s temptation and Meggy Veck’s own attempt in Trotty’s dream vision in “The Chimes” (1844):

15

“Oh, the river!” she cried passionately. “Oh, the river!”
“Hush, hush!” said I. “Calm yourself.”
But she still repeated the same words, continually exclaiming. “Oh, the river!” over and over again.
“I know it’s like me!” she exclaimed. “I know that I belong to it. I know that it’s the natural company of such as I am! It comes from country places, where there was once no harm in it—and it creeps through the dismal streets, defiled and miserable—and it goes away, like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled—and I feel that I must go with it!”
I have never known what despair was, except in the tone of those words.
“I can’t keep away from it. I can’t forget it. It haunts me day and night. It’s the only thing in all the world that I am for, or that’s fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river!”

16The incantatory anaphora “Oh, the river!” and the addition of the adjective “dreadful” at the end of this passage; the repetition of the words “I know” and the same idea repeated afterwards: “it’s like me,” “I belong to it,” “it’s the natural company of such as I am!” and the final rephrasing of the identical attraction and identification between Martha and the river all lead the reader to share David’s feelings that “I have never known what despair was, except in the tone of these words.” It is as if the woman were the substance of the river. The mere thought of death in that polluted stream contaminates old Dan Peggotty: “He shook as if he would have fallen; and his hand—I touched it with my own, for his appearance alarmed me—was deadly cold” (DC 47: 573).

17Martha however renounces suicide in order to save Em’ly from prostitution towards which she was slowly but surely drifting. It is therefore by moving away from the Thames, this potential suicidal locus that Martha saves Little Em’ly, guiding David to the poor unfortunate girl who had come to conceal her shame in the anonymous metropolis. Martha who saves the fallen woman will not die, unlike Nancy, the prostitute who saved the pickpocket, as if her death redeemed all the infanticides which fallen women and prostitutes committed (Higginbotham and Krueger). Martha, on the other hand, will be exiled to Australia, like the young girl she saved, accompanied by Mr. Peggotty and all those who have failed in London in one way or another, such as Mr. Micawber.

18Crossing the oceans to settle in the Antipodes is the future Dickens holds in store for his pariahs, from the unscrupulous Jingle in The Pickwick Papers to Magwitch in Great Expectations or even John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend. Crossing the seas and oceans is one way of redeeming oneself. The sea in David Copperfield stands for actual death, literally (Ham and Steerforth) or metaphorically (Barkis), or simply the death of an old life and the beginning of a new one (Martha and Little Em’ly, the Micawbers and the Peggottys). For the men involved in this voyage, the redemption is mainly financial while for the women it is essentially moral. David Copperfield therefore offers a sort of redemption in life which Oliver Twist only offered in death, even though the voyage to Australia was probably appreciated very differently for the Victorian people involved. Indeed, Australia was obviously the place where the Victorian governments sent convicts and prostitutes, or poor destitute women who became prostitutes. Redemption for Dickens, perdition for the Victorians: the gap starts here between Dickens and his contemporaries. It will widen in later years.

19In 1850 Dickens used Australia as a land of redemption for prostitutes. Between the writing of Oliver Twist and that of David Copperfield, Dickens, with the fortune of his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts, opened Urania Cottage in November 1847, a transitory home for lost women, “Dickens’s most sustained philanthropic involvement,” according to Norris Pope (Pope 577). In a 23 April 1853 Household Words article, entitled “Home for Homeless Women,” advertising Urania Cottage, he wrote: “… there could be little or no hope in this country for those who enter Urania Cottage; therefore the Home only receives those who distinctly accept this condition: That they came there to be ultimately sent abroad.” Fred Kaplan in his biography of Dickens reminds the reader that “He was familiar with the histories and personalities of every one of them, as if he had been given another chance to save Nancy from Bill Sikes” (Kaplan 228). Giving another chance to prostitutes was achieved both in his novels and in his life. Using the Thames as an aborted temptation to commit suicide will ultimately lead to a transformation of death and its finality into a place to dive in so as to be reborn.

20In fact, if the water element is only represented by the Thames in Oliver Twist, it is used in a broader sense in David Copperfield (Naugrette 155-65, 159). The tempestuous sea causes Steerforth’s and Ham’s deaths; the voyage across the oceans enables Australian redemption; the banks of the Thames are once again the site of the temptation of suicide; the beach and its shoreline are the loci where disappearance and reappearance are inscribed. In George Cukor’s film adaptation (1935), which suppresses Martha and Little Em’ly’s possible prostitution, David writes the name of his beloved DORA on the sand, but as expected, any inscription in the sand is destined to be washed away. The disappearance of the name announces that of the character, eroded by a life whose materiality was too demanding. The fleetingness of the inscription in this semi-solid element stands for the transitory nature of Dora’s good health and her future death.

21Conversely, the shoreline is also the locus of reappearance. Indeed, on a beach in Naples where Byronic Steerforth has imprisoned her, Little Em’ly the fallen woman reappears. This dangerous game with waters was proleptically stated in one of the early chapters of the novel, where David meets Little Em’ly for the first time and she runs along some timber overhanging the sea:

22

She started from my side, and ran along a jagged timber which protruded from the place we stood upon, and overhung the deep water at some height, without the least defence. The incident is so impressed on my remembrance, that if I were a draughtsman I could draw its form here, I daresay, accurately as it was that day, and little Em’ly springing forward to her destruction (as it appeared to me), with a look that I have never forgotten, directed far out to sea. The light, bold, fluttering little figure turned and came back safe to me, and I soon laughed at my fears, and at the cry I had uttered.

23The proximity of the sea is a temptation (in jest) for the child to do away with her life, as the proximity of the Thames seems to be a much more serious temptation for Martha to commit suicide. Finally, the liminal space of the shoreline is also the place where little David, after several days’ difficult walk in the rain, discovers the white cliffs of Dover as well as the place where Aunt Betsey will adopt him and take care of him. If the shoreline is a liminal space between earth and sea, David’s aunt is a liminal character, a phallic woman, a father-cum-mother substitute. In Dover, Aunt Betsey re-christens him Trot announcing the christening which the Thames will foster in future narratives.

24The shoreline is also, in Delbert Mann’s film adaptation (1970), the place where the mature David starts writing his autobiography and the whole script has structured its narration around constant comings and goings between past events and present writing. David’s walks on the beach enable him to meditate and start reminiscing, literally picturing the passage when he is on the Yarmouth beach during the great storm: “something within me, faintly answering to the storm without, tossed up the depths of my memory, and made a tumult in them” (DC 55: 665). The persistence of the Thames locus dissolves itself into the grander view of the sea and the open space of the beach. Vanishing and re-appearing, changing identities and being reborn, such is the role of the shoreline in David Copperfield, such will be the part of the Thames in Dickens’s later narratives.

3 – The Thames and its great expectations of rebirth

25This hesitation between life and death intensifies in the later novels, especially in Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. In Dickens’s second and last autodiegetic novel, the limit between the Thames and the earth is the place of escape, of the identity stasis, of death and rebirth, or transformation. The expression “universal struggle” to be found on the first page of the first chapter in Great Expectations is of course an allusion to Darwin’s “Struggle for Existence,” the title of chapter 3 of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and David Paroissien asserts that “Dickens declared himself an evolutionist as early as December 1848” (Paroissien 27; two anonymous reviews of the Origin appeared in All the Year Round before Great Expectations began on 1 December 1960. See “Species,” 2 June 1860, and “Natural Selection,” 7 July 1860. A third, “Transmutation of Species,” published concurrently with chapters 23 and 24 of the novel publicized further the content and implications of Darwin’s work” [Paroissien 26]). For Magwitch, the convict of Great Expectations, to escape from the hulks through the marshes of Kent is to escape into a hybrid milieu between water and earth. The swamps are stagnant water. This stagnation seeps into Magwitch who, after a few chapters, will be arrested once again, after encountering his young benefactor Pip. This stagnation also runs into Pip who will be ordered never to change names, to keep the name which he chose to call himself forever.

26Magwitch’s arrest in chapter 5 is the prelude to a long eclipse “down under.” If Micawber no longer waits for something to turn up but travels to Australia to make a fortune, Magwitch is transported to Australia, crosses the oceans to redeem himself and make Pip’s fortune from a distance. Pip, now a young man of great expectations mistakes the identity of his benefactor and believes Miss Havisham is his benefactress. When Magwitch returns, he unveils the truth and claims Pip as “his” gentleman, but his return to England is illegal and the benefactor faces death. Once the hero has acknowledged his financial and symbolical debt, he feels he must aid and abet Magwitch in escaping from England so that he may stay alive. The endeavour is doomed to fail, since Compeyson his sworn enemy keeps watch, denounces him and helps upturn Charon’s boat heading for the Hamburg steamer, causing Magwitch’s death (“casualties on the Thames in the nineteenth-century were high: Timbs reports that some 500 persons were drowned each year” [Paroissien 394]). For the convict, death is situated in the Thames estuary, another liminal place, between the river and the sea. From the “shivering marshes,” the setting of his advent, to the Thames estuary, the setting of his fall, Magwitch’s career is set between two liminal spaces where he appears and disappears.

27However, Magwitch does not die at the bottom of the Thames like his enemy Compeyson; he is transported to the prison infirmary where “his” gentleman informs him that his daughter Estella is alive and that he loves her (chapter 56). The circle is complete: Magwitch who used to tell his life story in the form of a ditty: “in jail, out of jail,” ends his course where he started it: in jail. The Thames swallows the bodies of those who die unredeemed such as Compeyson. It rejects those like Nancy, Martha, and Magwitch who could be redeemed by their deliberate drowning. As it was the case for Nancy, the convict’s death redeems a soul, by enabling Pip to leave the stasis in which the narrative had forced him to remain.

28Pip’s rebirth will be performed after a passing away in various metaphorical ways: attempts at murdering him, death by proxy, symbolical deaths. During the death by fire of Miss Havisham in chapter 48, Pip does not know if he is guilty of stifling her while trying to save her from the fire or if the recluse dies from her wounds. Pip feels guilty about the death of this moribund mother figure, as he felt guilty about the gradual demise of his sister-in-law and probably about his own mother. During the lime-kiln chapter (53) where Pip is on the verge of disappearing altogether in quicklime, Orlick accuses him of being the real murderer of Mrs Joe. Orlick relishes with satanic mirth the joy of dissolving matter into nothingness. Pip’s passing out is due to the fear of disappearing utterly and is a substitute for passing away. However neither of these two scenes related to death which re-ignite this pervasive feeling of guilt in Great Expectations, is conducive to Pip’s revival. Death and rebirth are to be found in the waters of the Thames in chapter 54. The symbolic father’s death is necessary to allow for Pip’s rebirth, through the reinstatement of Joe as his real father figure, even if adoption is the legal name for the process. This rebirth follows a symbolic death for Pip: a long illness, a long coma symbolized in the novel by this hesitation as to the figure of the man watching over him during his illness:

29

[T]here was a constant tendency in all these people—who, when I was very ill, would, present all kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face, and would be much dilated in size—above all, I say, I knew that there was an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later to settle down into the likeness of Joe.

30In his film adaptation (1946), David Lean represents this loss of consciousness by a sudden fade out followed by a very long fade in where Joe’s face slowly appears in the shot. The new-born baby does not see very clearly at birth and acquires the sense of sight gradually. This fade in seems to symbolize Pip’s rebirth under Joe’s good auspices. Only the Thames could allow the hero’s regeneration.

4 – The Thames: friend to both the dead and the living

31The web connecting the Thames to sacrifice, death and rebirth is even more patently obvious in Dickens’s last finished novel Our Mutual Friend. In Great Expectations, the Thames acted as a grave for Compeyson and the cause of Magwitch’s death and of Pip’s rebirth. In Our Mutual Friend, the river is replete with corpses which Gaffer Hexam robs of their valuables. The main plotline plays on problems linked with usurped identities. Old Harmon dies while leaving his fortune to his son John who went to the West Indies. The will bequeaths this fortune to the son under the express condition that he marries a young woman named Bella Wilfer. However, the son does not accept that anyone should force any choice of a wife on him. He temporarily renounces “having” in favour of “being” (Sadrin 1985). He thinks of a stratagem which will allow him to find true love, even if he may lose his fortune in the process. He counters the father’s projects and lives his life by changing identities. Pip had already started this self-naming; John Harmon will take it to another limit, and by jumping into the water, he jumps into the unknown of his own identity. Bachelard gives us the following insight:

32

In fact, more than any other physical event, the jump into the sea revives the echoes of a dangerous, hostile initiation. It is the only accurate, reasonable image that one may experience of the jump into the unknown; there is no other real jump that can be a jump into “the unknown.” The jump into the unknown is the jump into the water.

33John Harmon performs such a jump into the unknown when he changes identities by diving into the water. This identity swapping founded on physical resemblance had already been used by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay; however, that jump was final, as the former was guillotined to save the latter. Here, the character changes his identity with a certain Michael Radfoot who, unfortunately for him, is murdered. Thus John Harmon officially disappears, losing every hope of ever coming into his own inheritance. However, this is the way for him to approach Bella Wilfer incognito and to check if the damsel has the qualities required by his own taste and judgment. Like an actor in search of a character (Sadrin 1992, 139), the young man goes under another assumed name, John Rokesmith and offers his services as a secretary to the late John Harmon’s servant Noddy Boffin who, after the misanthrope’s death and his son’s official disappearance, has inherited his fortune and has therefore deemed it fair to adopt the young woman, wishing to spare her the disappointment of the disappearance of John Harmon and of any possibility of marrying him and his fortune.

34Identity swapping takes place at night: the first scene of the BBC adaptation by Julian Farino (1998) is a sequence where Gaffer Hexam robs defunct Michael Radfoot who will be identified as John Harmon by the police. Unfortunately, when one has officially disappeared, it becomes suddenly difficult to reappear and claim one’s true identity in Victorian times. The Thames has become that uncertain place where some dead ones come back to life while others do not come back at all. Rogue Riderhood is vomited up by the river and revives by vomiting the water he has swallowed; John Harmon, wrongly identified as being dead, also comes back to life under the name of Michael Radfoot and subsequently changes to John Rokesmith; Eugene Wrayburn is assaulted by his rival Bradley Headstone who leaves him for dead and Lizzie uses her boating skills to rescue him. In fact, as Jennifer Hayward and many others remarked, “John Harmon, Eugene Wrayburn and Rogue Riderhood all miraculously survive drowning and the first two are ‘reborn’ with new and improved personalities” (Hayward 48). Nothing however is systematic and the dead do not always come back to life as the three following fates clearly show: Jenny Wren’s father, whom she calls “naughty boy,” as if he were her son, Michael Radfoot who changed identities with John Harmon, Gaffer Hexam, who lives off robbing corpses; all of them die in their turn in the waters of the Thames.

35If water is the element which calls Nancy or Martha, it turns into something more complex in the later novels: Great Expectations establishes a difference between the stagnant waters of the Kent marshes and the estuary of deliverance, while Our Mutual Friend constructs a complex image where the water element not only holds the corpses in a state of decomposition but also the driftwood which was used by Hexam to heat his house and build a cradle for his daughter. In the disgusting waters of the Thames, one nonetheless finds treasures, to build a cradle or an identity.

36

“How can you be so thankless to your best friend, Lizzie? The very fire that warmed you when you were a baby, was picked out of 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.”

37The river thus becomes a place of redemption for John Harmon and Lizzie Hexam. Unlike the rest of Farino’s film where each scene by the river is set at night or in the pouring rain and where the bodies, still alive or dead, are rejected onto the banks, the end of the film takes place during the daytime and by fair weather. On a clear water, a boat moves forward along the river, a boat in which middle-class Eugene Wrayburn no longer feels ashamed of evoking Lizzie, the daughter of the robber of corpses and of considering her as his fiancée. John Harmon is rowing. He is Charon, transporting the souls in mutation. The meaning is not just individual, but general, as sociological mutations are on the march, as Darwin and Marx initiated them. The very last scene confirms Eugene’s newly acquired viewpoint since Mr. Twemlow, whose opinion counts in high society, poses as Eugene’s advocate defending the choice he made of marrying Lizzie. The son of Harmon the rag-picker has also a right to be happy, far away from the situation he has picked for himself at the outset of the novel. The Thames has done its duty and has allowed self-righteous Victorian society to accept the existence within its circles of a certain Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of a robber of corpses or the existence of a John Harmon, the son of a rag-picker who made a fortune thanks to a heap of dirt and detritus. British society now accepts the troubled sources of its wealth, while it was not really the case for Magwitch who had to die because the way he acquired his wealth was not accepted, not to mention Nancy who had to vanish to save the future of the upper classes. The human species accepts the aquatic origins of its birth regardless of any divine principle, as Darwin suggested.

38Water is the source of everything, and Darwin gave his own evidence to this fact. If during the pre-Darwinian period, the waters of the Thames serve as a passage of souls by Charon, Nancy saving Oliver, Martha saving Little Em’ly, as from 1860, one year after the publication of On the Origin of Species, water is the locus where new men and women are born, those who will modify Victorian society, as if it were a metaphor of biological modification on the scale of humanity. Just as Gillian Beer notices similarities in Dickens’s and Darwin’s “apparently unruly superfluidity of material gradually and retrospectively revealing itself as order,” she also notes that “evolutionism has been so imaginatively powerful precisely because all its indications do not point one way” (Beer 6). Harmony reveals itself in the end, as in Micawber’s words, “the diversified panorama of human existence” (DC 49: 597). Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations gives Pip the nickname of “Handel” because the young blacksmith reminds him of a musical piece by the eighteenth-century composer, called “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” This harmony which Herbert detects in Pip will be fully realized in John Harmon. The harmony of this society which is starting to open up, whereas it still considered itself watertight a few years before, is illustrated by John Harmon and Lizzie Hexam’s upward mobility. The driftwood which Lizzie’s father used to build a cradle for her is like the basket on the Nile, like the promise of a new Moses in Victorian society. John Harmon emerges out of the muddy waters of the Thames transformed. In the same way as King Arthur leaves on a ship to die and start a new cycle of life, in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, Bachelard reminds us that

39

Long before the living entrusted their lives to the waters, hadn’t they put the coffin to the sea, the coffin to the stream? The coffin, in this mythological hypothesis, would not be the last boat. It would be the first boat. Death would not be the last voyage. It would be the first voyage. It will be the real first voyage for a few dreamers.

40Bazalgette’s first work on the embankments followed by the recent rehabilitation of the banks and the docks of the Thames has finally brought about the regeneration of the Thames initiated by Dickens and his novels. After confining this place to murky dealings and temptations of suicide for prostitutes, it was to become a pleasant locus for taking a walk. Persistent Dickens brought about this imaginative transformation of the Thames, as he helped put an end in his articles and novels to cholera while the Members of Parliament procrastinated. In the 1850s, the river was a real sewer, and in 1858 the “Great Stink” had one origin: the Thames (Daunton). By persistently reading Dickens’s works, British society finally understood the images of revival which were suggested in his novels and rehabilitated the banks of the river that brought them such wealth in the nineteenth century. London’s wealth originated in the colonies and the British who were indebted to them felt a need to veil more obnoxious business practices overseas and “down under.” To neglect the banks of the River Thames was a way of ignoring the dubious dealings which formed their wealth (Briggs; Hobsbawm). Dickens’s view of a river to the edge of which he was persistently drawn and about which he wrote may have been instrumental in encouraging closer social and technological scrutiny of its function in British society. Bachelard’s notion of water as the means of a temporary death fits in with Dickens’s wish to give a new vision of the Thames as a redeeming stream full of promises, a view in sharp contrast with his contemporaries who saw it as a polluted certainty of death and a sewer-like place filled with the refuse of the city.