Voorjaar 2009 no.66
23
The Dutch Dickensian Volume XXIX
Little Emily running along the timbers over
the deep waters.
The incident is so impressed on y remem
brance, that if I were a draftsman I could
draw it form here, I dare say, accurately as it
was that day, and Little Em'ly springing for
ward to her destruction (as it appealed to
me), with a look that I have never forgotten,
directed far out at sea. (34)
David the artist and human being remembers
that powerful spot of time because of what
happened to Emily but also because at that
time he had a premonition that something
awful would happen to Emily. His imagination
perceives something that the artist's imagina
tion perceives beyond time.
We see this capacity to perceive reality
beyond the confines of time and space in
Esther Summerson as well. Immediately
before encountering Jo and contracting his
disease as a result, Esther Summerson looks
toward London where
there was pale dead light both beautiful and
awful, and into it long sullen lines of cloud
waved up, like a sea stricken immovable as it
was heaving. Toward London a lurid glare
overhung the whole dark waste; and the con
trast between these two lights was as
solemn as might be.
I had no thought, that nightof what was
soon to happen to me. But I have always
remembered since, thatI had for a moment
an indefinable impression of myself since,
thatI had for a moment an indefinable
impression of myself as being something dif
ferent from what I then was. (450)
This spot of time, like David's when he sees
Em'ly walking along the timbers over the deep
waters, demonstrates Esther's imaginative
capacity to apprehend reality beyond the con
fines of time and space. She intuits the change
that will come about, and the intuition itself
both marks her as an artist and allows her to
become an artist.
Jenny Wren shares this ability to get beyond
the limitations of her temporal and spatial
reality. On the garden at the top of the roof,
where she can "come up and be dead" to the
things of this world, Jenny not only rises
above the sordid reality of London but is able
to feel tranquil and "so peaceful and so thank
ful!... And such a chain has fallen from you,
and such a strange good happiness comes
upon you!"(299). This same quality allows
Jenny to smell non-existent flowers and hear
non-existent birds sing and be visited by chil
dren in white dresses bringing comfort to her
pain. Like Dickens, Jenny puts her imagina
tive capacity to work: an artist, she makes
dolls' dresses. But again like Dickens, she
must work to find her material: "I have to
scud about town at all hours. If it was only sit
ting at my bench, cutting out and sewing, at
would be comparatively easy work; but it's the
trying-on by the great ladies that takes it out
of me"(404). Jenny's artistic sensibility may
have evolved as a result of her suffering, as
Lizzie suggests when Jenny tells her and
Eugene about smelling the imaginary flowers:
"Pleasant fancies to have, Jenny dear!' said
her friend: with a glance towards Eugene as if
she would have asked him whether they were
given the child in compensation for her loss-
es"(252).
The imaginative capacity to get beyond oneself
is no only necessary to art, it is necessary to
love in Our Mutual Friend, John Harmon can
not know if Bella will love him as John
Harmon, as the person she has been willed
away to, so long as he represents himself as
John Harmon. And so, in the process of
attempting to find her out by presenting him
self as Julius Handford, he, like Eugene later,
is bludgeoned nearly to death and left to
drown. And in his struggle, he loses his sense
of himself"But it was not I. There was no
such thing as I, within my knowledge." (393).
He loses all sense of space: "As to this hour I
cannot understand that side of the river where
I recovered the shore, being the opposite side
to that on which I was ensnared, I shall never
understand it now" (394). The drug that he
was given works on Harmon in a way that
pain seems to work for Jenny, to a different
and. Harmon's becoming Rokesmith, and
realising Bella's love as Rokesmith, is a literal
demonstration of what seems in this to be a
universal truth: genuine love is not realisable
