Reflection on the Character of Bradley Headstone, after a First Reading of Our Mutual Friend -- by Alex Ranieri

In which other Dickens novel are we presented with a figure so odious, so frightening, and yet so readily touching our sympathy, as Bradley Headstone? When he proposes marriage to Lizzie Hexam, her reaction is like ours. While she fears and detests his violent nature, she also pities him—not out of any misguided sentiment that she is responsible for his pain—but because she sees with us clearly the prison walls around Headstone’s psyche, to which he himself is blind. He is a prisoner in a world of the mind where every actor is determined on a single-minded course to humiliate and to ruin him. He does not, cannot believe his rival, Eugene Wrayburn, when the latter honestly tells him, ‘I don’t think about you’. The Eugene Wrayburn who lives in Headstone’s mind is always thinking about him, is always contriving ways in which to belittle, frustrate, and ruin him. This being who, despite every intention of his life so far, undergoes suffering and creates suffering with every step, never strays into the maudlin or the picturesque. We detect too readily in this extreme example the echo of our own capacity for building out of our minds invisible prisons, from which to look out and see in every face some ugly feeling or intention towards ourselves—perhaps because it is more flattering to think so, than to realize the more lonely truth, the which truth Headstone never can bring himself to realize—that we aren’t thought about.