I can't say that I ever noticed the absence of Black people or intellectual white women in the works of Charles Dickens--not that I'm a scholar of 19th century England's most famously popular writer --but sly Zadie Smith centers them (as well as Dickens himself) in The Fraud, her ironic homage to the Victorian novel. Not only that, she anchors them in a trial as gripping as OJ Simpson's, in which charges of impersonation power her seriously entertaining examination of post-modern identity through many characters besides the plaintiff.
Smith tips her hand early, as soon as she introduces Mrs. Touchet, a penniless but respectable cousin of a prolific author more successful than Dickens at the time. William Ainsworth's only good book Jack Sheppard sold more copies than Oliver Twist because he wrote what he knew, which resulted in a critical backlash. Mrs. Touchet falls for Frances, Ainsworth's wife while he's off researching one of his boring, multi-volume tomes. Smith describes their initial clandestine encounter--the kind of love that dares not speak its name--with a bravura floral metaphor.
One thing permitted and made possible the other, even if the logic was shrouded, too mysterious to penetrate. Like a finger. Like two penetrating fingers. Like two fingers penetrating a flower. In complete, candle-less darkness. As if the fingers and the flower were not separate but one, and so incapable of sinning the one against the other. Two fingers entering a bloom not unlike the wild ones in the hedgerow – layered like those, with the same overlapping folds – yet miraculously warm and wet, pulsing, made of flesh. Like a tongue. Like the bud of a mouth. Like another bud, apparently made for a tongue, lower down.
Smith also deliberately avoids calling Mrs. Touchet a dominatrix when she and Ainsworth find themselves attracted to one another (we contain multitudes). Sparks fly in all direction and embers burn long, too, as the novel's twist ending attests!
Theirs was a fellowship in time, and this, in the view of Mrs Touchet, was among the closest relations possible in this fallen world. Bookended by two infinities of nothing, she and William had shared almost identical expanses of being. They had known each other such a long time. She still saw his young face. He still saw hers, thank God.
The Fraud somewhat confusingly toggles between two time periods, Mrs. Touchet's tragic youth as a widowed, abolitionist firebrand and her dotage as an appalled spectator at the Tichborne civil and criminal trials. It's there she meets an extraordinarily dignified (at least to white eyes) character witness, a former Jamaican slave whose backstory packs some flesh and blood onto Mrs. Touchet's cause and Smith's theme. Andrew Bogle asks himself
Who was this well-fed fraud, with a home and a hearth, and a small mirror above that hearth, and two brown boys, and his own evening paper in his lap?
Answer: exactly the man his white masters expect him to be without any interest at all in who he really was and is, a man whose only impediment to success has been the color of his skin in a white world, whether free or not. Not exactly unlike where Mrs. Touchet finds herself.
In short, punchy chapters meant to mimic serialization, Smith relentlessly reminds contemporary readers of the feminine perspective gap among Victorians because the foci of their bestsellers remained telescopically male and economic. To wit:
The humiliations of girlhood.
The separating of the beautiful from the plain and the ugly.
The terror of maidenhood.
The trials of marriage or childbirth – or their absence.
The loss of that same beauty around which the whole system appears to revolve.
The change of life.
What strange lives women lead!
* * * * *
She [Frances] who had worn no masks and was therefore almost impossible to understand.
* * * * *
But it is the perverse business of mirrors never to inform women of their beauty in the present moment, preferring instead to operate on a system of cruel delay.
* * * * *
When young she had not found kindness attractive: she had overlooked it. Goodness, yes, magnetism, certainly, but kindness had not registered. Now that she was old, kindness seemed to her to be the only thing that really mattered.
I'll leave it to the Victorian academics to complete the proper exegesis of The Fraud, but know this: Mrs. Touchet is as unforgettable a character as any created by Dickens, whom it just so happens she reviles, not entirely for the reason you might expect. And for this American reader, one who was blown away by Hew Locke's "The Procession," there's the added enlightenment of learning how England's off-shore racism was no less warping than that found in the cotton and rice fields of the American South, even though it came to a much earlier end.
