ANOTHER MAN 121inability to strive for his own advancement, and the opportunity of self-
redemption through love. In this last great novel, however, Dickens allowed
himself to uncover a great deal more about the story. Headstone is a version
of Dickens (minus the genius, of course): he has a low past that he prefers to
have forgotten, he works under strict self-discipline to maintain his respect-
ability, and he has achieved a certain success which he is trying to pass on to
his young pupil-teacher Charley Hexam. Meeting Lizzie (his Ellen Ternan)
undoes Headstone in a way that is all the more painful because he is fully
aware of how completely his life has escaped his grip. Unlike Wardour or
Carton, Headstone is given no miraculous self-sacrificial change of heart,
only a gradual degradation into death.
Eugene Wrayburn’s case is humanized through his loving partnership
with Mortimer Lightwood, his schoolmate, fellow-barrister, roommate, and
confidant. As the two set up house together in a bachelor cottage, Eugene
wishes they were keeping a lighthouse together far from the inanity of social
forms. The in-joke reference to Wilkie Collins’s The Lighthouse suggests
that the intimate, playful, wry wit that sweetens their dialogues may be a
more innocent version of the Dickens-Collins friendship. Once Wrayburn
becomes obsessed with Headstone, Lightwood becomes the required third
man, voicing concerns of conscience and sanity that go unheard in the tussle
of fascinated rivalry.
The contest between the rivals Wrayburn and Headstone is charged with
hostility from the moment of meeting; Dickens manages to keep the alternat-
ing current crackling in their scenes together. When they meet, they regard
each other with cruel looks; Eugene’s is cruel “in its cold disdain of him, as a
creature of no worth”; Bradley’s “had a raging jealousy and fiery wrath in it.”
The scene evolves as Dickens’s greatest staring contest: “those two, no matter
who spoke, or whom was addressed, looked at each other. There was some
secret, sure perception between them, which set them against one another
in all ways” (OMF 2.6). The greatness of the dialogue lies in its fairness to
the worst aspects of both participants. It reads as an intensely uncomfort-
able humiliation of a lower-middle-class man by an upper-class man; it also
reads as an offensive intrusion of paranoid and self-humiliating suspicion on
Headstone’s part. There is little to choose between them; each releases the
other’s hidden resources of aggression. The “sure” knowledge between them
is of sexual rivalry and class antagonism, wedded firmly together.
Over and over Schoolmaster Headstone plays into Lawyer Wrayburn’s
hands by delivering lines that Wrayburn mocks, twists, and returns, like a
series of poisoned darts. Wrayburn manages to penetrate Headstone’s motives,
negate Headstone’s identity, and reveal nothing himself. He can do so only