Luke Thurston: Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval

• Catherine Belsey

Just over halfway through Our Mutual Friend the inert body of Rogue Riderhood is rescued from the Thames and conveyed to a nearby tavern, where a doctor and four of the hostelry’s regular customers work to resuscitate him. In an instance of free indirect narration, Dickens’s text puzzles over the criminal’s current location. Where is he now? And is he returning to life or not? The incident protracts for inspection an interval of ultimate undecidability we must all eventually undergo, however momentarily. As they watch for indications of life in this interlude of uncertainty, the four drinkers weep. Their response is visceral, called up by a fellow organism poised between life and death. Neither the living scoundrel not the dead one would have drawn their tears, the text notes, but Riderhood is for this moment no longer the contemptible individual of the rest of the narrative. Instead, he has become for the duration a being without personality or identity, caught between those two states.