Momento Mori Charles Dickens and the Ninth of June

A note on how the Staplehurst railway accident on June 9 in 1864 relates to Charles Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend and the closing phase of the author’s life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staplehurst_rail_crash#/media/File:Staplehurst_rail_crash.jpg

The novel Our Mutual Friend, the last novel Dickens was to complete, written in installments in 1864 and 1865, marks the culmination of the author’s novelistic artistry in more than one way. It deserves esteem as a mature credo-like statement of Dickens’ philosophy of life that took account of human mortality and the flaws of Victorian society in many of its most callous and hypocritical aspects. It contains one of the author’s most poignant and touching passages in the record of the last day in the life of a destitute woman as she seeks dignity and freedom from the impositions of all that the workhouse system evoked in her mind. To escape the incarceration she so dreaded she is forced to surrender her last shilling and pence to an unscrupulous official and in this deprivation of money from a dying person we may trace the reverberation of a leitmotif established at the very beginning of the novel with the macabre image of a man engaged in the process of dredging the river Thames in order to recover corpses of the drowned and from these any money to be found in the pockets of the clothes that covered them. The waterman engaged in so gruesome a task as that outlined above had two companions with him on his boat. One was a former partner, a man of low character and an arch schemer to boot, whose attempt at blackmail results in his own violent death beside the river Thames as described in a chapter placed near the end of the novel. The other, his daughter, marries a young lawyer despite the imparity of their respective social stations and the fact that the bridegroom is fighting for his life after a brutal assault by a rival suitor. At this juncture I may introduce the motif of a train journey, one occasioned by the necessity of attending the wedding of the waterman’s daughter and the lawyer now feared to be approaching the door of death.

Then, the train rattled among the house-tops, and among the ragged sides of houses torn down to make way for it, and over the swarming streets, and under the fruitful earth, until it shot across the river: bursting over the quiet surface like a bomb-shell, and gone again as if it had exploded in the rush of smoke and steam and glare. A little more, and again it roared across the river, a great rocket: spurning the watery turnings and doublings with ineffable contempt, and going straight to its end, as Father Time goes to his. To whom it is no matter what living waters run high or low, reflect the heavenly lights and darknesses, produce their little growth of weeds and flowers, turn here, turn there, are noisy or still, are troubled or at rest, for their course has one sure termination, though their sources and devices are many.

Then, a carriage ride succeeded, near the solemn river, stealing away by night, as all things steal away, by night and by day, so quietly yielding to the attraction of the loadstone rock of Eternity; and the nearer they drew to the chamber where Eugene lay, the more they feared that they might find his wanderings done. At last they saw its dim light shining out, and it gave them hope: though Lightwood faltered as he thought: 'If he were gone, she would still be sitting by him.'

Our Mutual Friend, Book 4, Chapter 11,

EFFECT IS GIVEN TO THE DOLLS' DRESSMAKER'S DISCOVERY

On reading this passage we note a striking contrast between the idyll of the tranquil English countryside and an evocation of brute force in a train’s power to forge ahead, underscored by terms that normally find their place in the military sphere, such being ‘bomb-shell,’ ‘rocket,’ ‘shot’ and ‘bursting.’ Relentless progress, a callous disregard for the train’s bucolic and Edenic surroundings, a gratuitous disruption of urban cohesion are all recalled in this brief description, making the train an explicit symbol of time in the aspect of Chronos the destroyer bringing all things to their inevitable conclusion, death in short. A ponderous philosophical note reverberates in ‘the loadstone rock of eternity.’ The lugubrious mood of the description is further enhanced, as the passage cited above explicitly states, by being set during the night and the context of the narrative itself that foresees a deathbed wedding.

The reference to the ‘solemn river’ found in this passage combines two contextual planes of so great a scope that one envelops the entire novel while the other opens the vista of Dickens’ own life and ultimate destiny. For reasons already intimated the image of the sluggish river Thames assumes the nature of the river Styx in Greek mythology and even, on a positive note, absorbs a sacramental quality in keeping with orthodox teachings on baptism and the Resurrection. The protagonist dies in the eyes of the world when presumed to have drowned in the Thames but returns to life under a new identity, henceforward free to win the heart of the beloved by virtue of his own labours of love instead of having to rely on the allurements of wealth that would be his by right of his former identity. All this brings us to reflect on Dickens’ own near-death experience that occurred on the ninth of June 1864.

Dickens was on the last leg of his return journey from Paris in the company of lady generally thought to be his mistress. The train was traversing a stretch of the line where repair work was in progress, at Staplehurst in Kent. As a result of human error the train could not brake in time to avoid a grievous accident involving ten deaths and many injuries as carriages either fell directly into the muddy sludge of a riverbed or, as in the case of the carriage in which Dickens was situated, hung precariously suspended from the raised section of the line. Dickens not only survived but also played a heroic role in aiding and comforting the less fortunate victims of the accident. Oddly enough, he returned to his carriage in order to retrieve a part of the script of Our Mutual Friend. For all that, this traumatic experience shook Dickens to his timbers. He was never quite the same man afterwards. He avoided travelling by train if at all possible.

I suppose the passage cited above discloses his negative feelings about trains, never very positive to begin with, even before the Staplehurst crash. His lack of composure invaded his outlook on life more generally but can even his premonition of his own death explain the following?

Six years after the accident to the day, also on a Thursday, Charles Dickens, aged only 58, died at his Gads Hill residence near Rochester Kent on June the ninth 1870.

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