A SPECULATIVE RESURRECTION: DEATH, MONEY, AND THE VAMPIRIC ECONOMY OF OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

Extract

Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? ‘Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it?

— Gaffer Hexam, Our Mutual Friend

WHILE FISHING CORPSES out of the fast-flowing Thames, itself a symbol of death,¹ in order to probe their pockets, Gaffer Hexam makes sharp reference to a long-standing distinction regarding the limits of earthly possession. Some of Dickens’s readers would have been quite ready to connect Gaffer’s remarks to Bunyan’s story of Christian’s exodus from the commerce and bustle of the earthly city and his crossing of the river of death that flows before the gates of the celestial city. Others might have considered the riverman’s musings as somehow referring to St. Paul’s saying that “the end of those things [wealth] is death” (qtd. in Welsh 59).² In the presentation of Gaffer’s ghastly career, however, Dickens points out a dislocation from these earlier views: the riverman desecrates the “muffled human form” he finds just as he truncates (if not turns inside-out) what was once the afterlife’s principal judgment of the use of riches in this lower world (44; bk. 1, ch. 1). According to the text, Gaffer, in sharply dividing spiritual transactions from material ones, and the soul from his or her former possessions, only further mires himself in the “slime and ooze” of the commercial river (43; bk. 1, ch. 1), enabling decay to encroach more aggressively on life.