Great escapes

It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing.

It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. So how did Dickens’s Victorian readers survive a whole month before the next instalment was published and they could at last discover the fate of Eugene Wrayburn? Or the truth about John Rokesmith? Mike Walker’s latest adaptation into 20 compressed episodes is a masterpiece of dramatic tension, casting Lilian and Matt’s wailing on The Archers into the bottomless pit of dud soap storylines.

Dickens knew exactly how to blend lurid tragedy with deadly realism, so that we never quite know which way the story will go. Is the beautiful but poor ‘river girl’ Lizzie Hexam going to be a tragic victim of London’s cruel juxtapositions? Will the wilful Bella Wilfer have her comeuppance? (Over in Ambridge I used to love Lilian’s brassy refusal to conform to the conventions of village life, but who cares now that she’s been remodelled into a vapid version of her former self?)

Dickens invented the soap opera, although not the serialised novel, which could be said to be the brainchild of Charlotte Lennox, who created a magazine in 1760 as a novel way of selling her latest book to a bigger audience. So far no one has surpassed his genius for soap’s key elements: plot, character and location. London and its river are just as much fully fleshed characters in Our Mutual Friend as Lizzie and Bella. You’d think it might be difficult to recreate this on radio, without the aid of visual imagery.