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Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an
autumn evening was closing in.
The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged
grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen
or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognisable as his daughter.
The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man with
the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his
waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and
he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no
paint, no inscription, no appliance between a rusty boat-hook and a
coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman: his boat was too crazy
and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a
lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for,
but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze.
The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and
his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as
the boat made slight headway against, or drove stern foremost before
it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head.
She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But in the
intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.
Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by
reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden
state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing
something that they often did, and were seeking what they often
sought. Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted
head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder,
with the loose knot of a looser kerchief lying low on his bare breast
in a wilderness of beard and whisker, with such dress as he wore
seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat, still there
was business-like usage in his steady gaze. So with every lithe action
of the girl, with every turn of her wrist, perhaps most of all with her
look of dread or horror; they were things of usage.
In Bleak House Dickens claims that he has "purposely dwelt upon the romantic side
of familiar things" ("Preface to the First Edition"): one might be inclined to interpret this
as saying that he makes poetry out what is ugly and what he hates. The openings of both
of these novels, just quoted, make us all love what is hateful, a moral emptiness filled
with mucky fog and a river polluted with corpses, and in the midst a social and
communicative emptiness which is symbolically and literally death ("Our Mutual Friend" is
indeed, I think, a vacuum or death). The excitement in Dickens's prose poetry comes from
his own emotional and conceptual ambivalence, which touches an ambivalence of our own.
Love and hate, the lovable and the hateful do not just co-exist, or exist side-by-side or
even in opposition, but they exist at the same moment in the same object in the same place.
The poetic and the disturbingly familiar, the Romantic and the unRomantic and the anti-
Romantic possess equal space, equal emotional consideration, equal imaginative compulsion
at the same time. Dickens joins both the poles we started off with, unites both traditions,
with several others besides. November murk and corpses fished out of the Thames both
disgust and excite Dickens and the reader, whether spoken out at the beginning of Bleak
House or carefully towed along beneath the surface as in the first chapter of Our Mutual
Friend, in the writing, in the reading, in the creation and in the recreation. Dickens is
