dickens article on our mutual friend

The Cup and the Lip and the Riddle of Our Mutual FriendAuthor(s): Gregg A. HecimovichSource: ELH, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), pp. 955-977Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030109Accessed: 20/08/2010 09:54

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THE CUP AND THE LIP AND THE RIDDLE OF OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

BY GREGG A. HECIMOVICH

"Life's a riddle: a most infernally hard riddle to guess. ... My own opinion is, that like that celebrated conundrum, 'Why's a man in jail like a man out of jail?' there's no answer to it."

-Montague Tigg Martin Chuzzlewit

The first sentence of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend has been out of print for more than a century. In the two editions of the novel that Dickens personally oversaw-the initial serial publication (1864-65) and the first book edition of 1865-a 1 x 4 inch slip of paper overlaps the opening paragraph.' This slip contains instructions addressed to the reader:

*** The Reader will understand the use of the popular phrase OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, as the title of this book, on arriving at the Ninth Chapter (page 84).

In a novel about surface and substance, disguised identity, linguistic conundrums-indeed, in a novel where the very plot is carried forward through the exchange of slips and scraps of paper-such a "tipped in" slip deserves critical attention. Yet the slip heretofore exists as a sort of "purloined letter," so conspicuously present that it has been missed entirely. Scholarly reprints of the novel, including the most recent Everyman's Library edition (1994), omit the slip, while critical works maintain more than a century of silence on the subject. A careful study of this slip of paper and the first page of the novel, however, reveals Dickens's ambitious attempt to open his work with a riddle that introduces some of the main aspects of his narrative. A reading of Our Mutual Friend, as we shall see, involves a complex working out of the mysteries and idiosyncrasies presented on the first page.

Riddles, conundrums, enigmas, and other word games occupy a unique position in the history of the serial. Popular since the Renais- sance, the publication of word games exploded with the advent of affordable serial magazines in the late eighteenth century. By the time Our Mutual Friend began to appear in 1864, riddles, conundrums, and

ELH 62 (1995) 955-977 c 1995 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 955

enigmas held a prominent place in such periodicals as Bentley's Miscel- lany, The New Monthly Magazine, Punch, and Dickens's own All the Year Round. The serial format provided the perfect forum for these games. Contributors posed riddles to be solved by the next issue, and subscrib- ers competed to be the first to guess the answer. Significantly, the answer to one serial riddle frequently became the source and text for the next. For instance, in Dickens's All the Year Round for 12 September 1863, a contributor published the riddle: "Misery, myself, and my wife." The answer to this riddle, "wo(e)man," in turn, served to inform the riddle for 19 September: "My first two letters are a man, my first three a woman, my first four a brave man, my whole a brave woman." The answer announced the next week, "heroine," became the source for an ensuing issue's riddle, and so forth. Composed by writers as diverse as Tom Hood, Christina Rossetti, and Thomas Macaulay, these self-generating games relied on punning, on literal and/or metaphorical readings of words, diagrams, and pictures in which the answer proved hidden in the text.2

Dickens considered riddles and puns important instruments in his comic repertoire. "Why are the well-skilled lively young men who puzzle [riddles] out condemned to write our burlesques and pantomimes," All the Year Round observes in 1865, "while the unskilled dull dogs are nearly always selected to write our comedies and dramas?"3 Dickens's biography suggests the author's own eclectic interest in riddles. It is no coincidence that riddles and verbal games find their way into many of Dickens's letters. In two letters to W. H. Wills, Dickens's editor for All the Year Round, the novelist hints at his extra-martial affair with the actress Ellen Ternan. In a letter dated 20 September 1857, Dickens refers to his visit to the Doncaster Races, explaining that he has come to Doncaster "along of his Richard Wardour," a character Dickens recently played in an amateur theatrical with Ellen Ternan. "Guess that Riddle Mr. Wills!" he writes.4 In a letter two days later he notes, "I am going to take the little riddle-into the country this morning ... So let the riddle and the riddler go their own wild way, and no harm come of it."5 Riddles appear elsewhere in the letters. The first extant writing we have of Charles Dickens is a childhood acrostic on the name of Maria Beadnell that opens:

My life may chequered be with scenes of misery and pain, And it may be my fate to struggle with adversity in vain ...6

Dickens hides a similar puzzle amid a set of acrostic verses he sent Maria Beadnell to commemorate their first meeting.

956 The Cup and the Lip

And Charles Dickens, who in our Feast plays a part Is a young Summer Cabbage, without any heart; Nor that he's heartless, but because, as folks say, He lost his a twelve month ago, from last May.7

Here a conundrum is played out around the word "heart." The young "Charles Dickens" is aligned to a heartless "Summer Cabbage," ostensi- bly "lost" upon meeting Maria Beadnell. Significantly, "Charles" is lost, disseminated acrostically throughout the last three lines: "Cabbage... heart / . heartless ...." "Charles Dickens" literally becomes a "Cabbage heart which is artless." He is reduced to an amateur versifier, to just another friend of the Beadnell family, another admirer. Dickens "the riddler" created other such "riddles" to be sure. In Great Expecta- tions, "Miss Havisham" functions like "Charles Dickens" in the com- memorative verses. Throughout the novel "Miss Havisham" literally enacts the conundrum her name embodies. "To have" in the novel "is a sham." By representing the emptiness of material possession, Miss Havisham performs the symbolic function of her name: hav-is-sham. Such moments in the letters and novels reveal an essential strategy in Dickens's rhetoric: Comic verbal compositions literally execute their representative tasks. That is, like a riddle hidden from view but present from the beginning, Dickens's verbal games enact their own meanings.8

Riddles, as Andrew Welch has astutely observed, seek to recreate a sort of Edenic relationship between name and thing, signifier and signified. Adam's first job in the Garden was to find names for the creatures of his world, a riddle engaging sight, object, and word. Welch writes, "With clear eyesight and a clear mind and a clear language there is no trouble: Adam at that time had all three, and the names he found for the birds and beasts were, the story continues, the right names. In that world there were none of the obstacles and sidetracks lying between perception and cognition that so trouble and enliven our own struggles with naming."9 Adam in the Garden of Eden becomes the ultimate Riddlee and God the Master of Riddles. But life in the fallen world is "a most infernally hard riddle to guess," as Montegue Tigg observes, and the relationship between naming and being remains uncertain and problematic. To solve a riddle, like Adam in the Garden, one must both "see" and "know"-an elusive condition, since, outside the garden, the signifier is usually sloughed off by its signified. Yet riddles and puns demonstrate-if only for a moment-the lost clarity of Adam's vision. At times language with its coincidental contacts carries memories of this Edenic condition. Wit and witticisms, the guiding principle of riddles, puns, and verbal games, carry an Edenic residue, even in their etymology.

Gregg Hecimovich 957

The Greek verb ocox means both "I know" and "to see." As a cognate with Latin videre, ot6a implies a completed action, the present perfect, an action that has been done thoroughly and whose effects continue into the present. "I know" collapses into the same thing as "I have seen." The cognate enters Old English as (ic) wait from the infinative witan, the ancestor of Pope's word "wit."'o Perhaps this is that "something" in Dickens that Northrop Frye identifies as "elemental, yet unconnected with either realist clarity or philosophical profundity"; that something that "insists, absurdly and yet irresistibly, that what is must never take final precedence over what ought to be.""

Dickens takes up an Edenic tradition of riddling on the first page of his serialized Our Mutual Friend. As serial riddles, conundrums, and enigmas force the reader to wait for subsequent issues to discover answers, so the opening mysteries and riddles of Dickens's novel depend on later serial numbers to be resolved. To begin reading Our Mutual Friend, the reader must lift the slip of paper that rests just below the title of the first book, "The Cup and The Lip," and the title of the first chapter, "On the Look-Out" (see Figure 1). Beneath, the reader comes across the opening sentence: "In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in."'2 Immediately the reader is struck by the qualified manner of the description: one clause works toward providing the reader specific information--"In these times of ours"-while the next vitiates it: "though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise." In Dickens's opening paragraph, then, no exact time exists. The heroine and a companion are introduced only as "two figures," the place only as "somewhere" between Southwark Bridge and London Bridge. In the information Dickens reveals, there remains something he dissembles or holds back, an idea that takes on a double significance since the paragraph is "hidden" underneath a slip of paper directing the reader elsewhere to find "meaning" in the serial novel.

In the next paragraph, the beginning of which also lies beneath the slip of paper, a narrative pattern emerges. The narrator withholds information and limits perspective:

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the


OUR MUTUAL FRIEND. In Four Books.

BOOK THE FIRST. - THE CUP AND THE LIP.

CHAPTER I.

ON THE LOOK-OUT.

*** The Reader will understand the use of the popular phrase OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, as the title of this book, on arriving at the Ninth Chapter (page 84).

Jed hair

ntly like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls

very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no

inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for

delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight headway against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as she watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.

Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that that they often did; and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man showed, with no

covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow -

Fig. 1. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. London: Chapman and Hall, May 1864-November 1865; and Our Mutual Friend. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, February and November 1865. Page 1.


rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river- carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. (MF, 43)

Imitating the two figures attempting to determine what lies beneath the surface, the reader extrapolates and reifies details secreted in a catalogue of negation: For what do the man and daughter search? Something. What is the occupation of the man? He is not a fisherman, nor is he a waterman. He is not a lighterman, nor a river carrier. What is the age of the girl? Is she nineteen? Or twenty? The passage forces the reader into the role of a riddlee, trying to find meaning in the accretion of clues. Dickens's riddlee, in the process of answering a single question, uncovers a network of interrogatives.

Traditionally, to fix the correct context of a riddle, a reader must cast about for further clues. Such a position reproduces the reader's situation on the first page of Our Mutual Friend. The first riddle, the slip of paper, asks the reader to search for clues leading to the promised disclosure of "meaning" in the third serial number, "the Ninth Chapter (page 84)." To explore this riddle, however, the reader must first scrutinize the opening page to guess the position and place of the "two figures," to discern exactly what they search for on the river. Dickens redirects the reader's attention to "two figures ... obviously ... doing something they often did, and seeking what they often sought" (MF, 44). As the "two figures" search for the meaning "allied to the bottom of the river, rather than the surface" (MF, 43), so the reader examines Dickens's language for a subtext or latent meaning. The reader's position in both cases, then, adds significance to the chapter title, "On the Look-Out." If the two introduced "figures" are "On the Look-Out," so is the reader. Placed in the position of the riddlee from the outset, the reader becomes involved in a game of discerning identities and motives.

Like the self-generating games of the Victorian serial, riddles engen- der other riddles on the first page of Dickens's work. The first two riddles at the opening of the novel now initiate a third. Significantly, the chapter title, "On the Look-Out," rests just above the slip of paper and the text of the first paragraph, over-looking, as it were, the site of the first two riddles (see Figure 1). The chapter title literallyjoins a network of puns,


riddles, and enigmas. "On the Look-Out," the opening "two figures" peer beneath a surface to discover a "muffled human form" (MF, 44). Similarly "on the look-out," Dickens's reader peers beneath a surface- the opening slip of paper-to uncover a text about a mysterious body. Like the "two figures," the reader literally peels back one mystery to expose another. The "two figures" re-present the reader's physical movement of the slip of paper to treat the text beneath. As such, any inquiry about the "two figures" suggests more significant issues of identity and relationship between reader and text. How long will the reader entertain the riddle? How long will the reader indulge Dickens's mystery?

On 1 April 1865, the same day the twelfth number of Our Mutual Friend was released, an article titled "Poetry and Pantomime" appeared in Dickens's All the Year Round. The article describes the relationship between riddles, puns, verbal games, and the art of comedy-a relationship on which Dickens's own serial riddles depended. All the Year Round cites examples of the artful puns and riddles that comprise the best of recent pantomime performances, published in penny pamphlets. Suc- cessful pantomimes, the article asserts, produce riddles that engage audience participation, involving both "good" and "bad" puns (PP, 233). In this way, the pantomime enacts the highest qualities of comedy. "A good pun," the article continues, "perfect in all its parts, has much the same effect as a witticism. The listener quietly admires its point and ingenuity." Dickens's serial aligns the most skillful of these verbal puzzles with the challenging linguistic compositions of pre-eminent Victorian poets. "We must be careful how we accuse a poet of being obscure," the article cautions, "Our shallow understanding may not be able to sound the depths of his profundity. Many passages in Browning are a puzzle to ordinary understandings" (PP, 231). A "bad pun," on the otherhand, "one of the outrageous sort, has the effect of a stroke of humour." All the Year Round illustrates this by noting "a melting allusion to all Greece running down as grease does when it's hot" in one pantomime, "recall[ing] the fond conundrum of our youth. Why is the wick of a candle like? &c." A successful comedy, according to All the Year Round's formula, incorpo- rates both "bad" and "good" puns; it combines "amusement with instruction" (PP, 233). A theory of punning emerges by the end of the essay that resembles Samuel Johnson's view of "metaphysical wit."'3 For Dickens's All the Year Round, the slippery coincidences of language produce humor, as well as "profound" poetry. The sound and depths of homonyms prove both the key to understanding and the source of a


disjunctive comedy. As in Johnson's definition of "metaphysical wit," "good" and "bad" puns shock the reader; they force the reader to see and know something for the first time.

It is precisely this world of naming and being that Dickens's Our Mutual Friend interrogates and, to a degree, wishes to reinstate. A world where, like a riddle, "dissimilar images" and "occult resemblances" are discovered "in things apparently unalike."l14 Significantly, "minor characters" like the Analytical Chemist, Mr. Wegg, Mr. Venus, and Jenny Wren serve as important riddlers and riddlees in Our Mutual Friend, analyzing and articulating both "bad" and "good" puns. It is almost as if in 1865, between Dickens's journalism and his fiction, Dickens is surreptitiously working out an aesthetic of riddles. By providing the reader, the Analytical Chemist, and Mr. Wegg as exempla of "analysis" and Mr. Venus and Jenny Wren as exempla of "articulation," Dickens encourages the reader to analyze and articulate the semantic, perspectival, and plotting riddles he initiates on the first page of Our Mutual Friend. Through the example of his minor characters, Dickens directs his readers to seek, with the chief characters, order and structure out of the apparent disjunctive "rubbish" in the novel, to analyze and articulate what ails a fallen London.'5

In the "Death in Teapot" series published in Household Words in 1850, an essay titled "Chemical Contradictions" complains: "Your analytical chemist sadly annihilates, with his scientific machinations, all

poetry."''16 As an analyzer of the incongruities of his society, Dickens appears to do exactly this to his text. He practices Analytical Chemistry on the titles of the novel's four books. One of Dickens's sources for the novel, we know, was a series of articles titled "The Age of Veneer," which appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1851.'" These articles lament the growing fragmentation, division of labor, and intellectual superfluity of Victorian England, all themes that Dickens picks up in Our Mutual Friend. One such article announces that "A few great fundamental maxims have been long since sent off to the saw-mills: they are sliced, planed, and varnished, with an incredible rapidity; and in a space of time which would barely serve a thinking mind to collect a few of the materials for thought . . . you have a splendid superficies of public opinion."'" In his novel of the "Age of Veneer," Dickens titles his four books according to "sawed off' and "veneered" maxims. He fractures the proverb, "There is many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip" to arrive at his title for Book the First: "The Cup and the Lip."'9 Book the Second takes the fragment "Birds of a Feather," from the rhyming proverb, "Birds of a feather / flock together." The unrhymed proverb, "It's a long lane that


has no turning," is divided between the titles of Book the Third and Book the Fourth, "A Long Lane" and "A Turning," respectively. Just as the novelist chops up the continuity of narrative and description as an Analytical Chemist, he also dismembers, or at least splits, the rhyme into the discrete titles of his novel's four books. Dickens "the riddler" initiates his puzzle in the very form of his work.

Like an analytical chemist, Mr. Wegg proves to be another riddler, propagating fractured poetry. In fact, in the dismembered Wegg, Dickens plays on a fragmented rhyme between name and absent object-Silas Wegg is missing a leg. Wegg exists in the novel as truncated rhyme personified; he transfers the same principle of apparent disjunction operating in the titles to the novel's four books. Not surprisingly, this embodied conundrum appears fond of riddles, particularly the sub- category of the riddle ballad. Like the Analytical Chemist, Wegg holds affinities with Dickens. His riddles are "ruined" by the same semantic

play that Dickens uses at the opening of the novel. Wegg, like Dickens, practices interruptions of narrative sequence and redundant phrasings to conceal hidden meanings. For instance, performing for Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, Wegg sings:

I'll tell thee how the maiden wept, Mrs. Boffin When her true love was slain ma'am, And how her broken spirit slept, Mrs. Boffin And never woke again ma'am. I'll tell thee (if agreeable to Mr. Boffin) how

the steed drew nigh, And left his lord afar; And if my tale (which I hope Mr. Boffin might

excuse) should make you sigh, I'll strike the light guitar.

(MF, 230)

Here, embedded within Wegg's prolix interruptions, appear elements of the Harmon plot, dissembled, disguised, not to be taken seriously from a riddler with one leg. In a humorous if ironic moment, Wegg sings of a "slain man," John Harmon, and his "weeping" "true lover," Bella Wilfer. Of course, as the novel bears out, John Harmon is not really slain, nor is Bella "weeping," unless she no longer is assured of her "true love's" inherited fortune. Wegg's riddle, then, like the Analytical Chemist's "cynical pellets of distilled meaning," provides a subtext that hints at the inaccuracies of the plot's dissembled appearance.20 One-legged and club- footed characters play central roles in a number of Western riddles. One


need only think of Oedipus. It should not surprise readers, then, that Wegg remains the chief threat to the "happy" resolution of Boffin's "pious fraud" (MF, 840-49). Although he never appears to have the skill to articulate them, Mr. Wegg turns up riddles everywhere in the text. With his wooden leg, he literally rummages through the "dust heap" in the novel, unearthing an important codicil to old Harmon's will. Codicil in hand, Wegg begins his game of extorting money from Mr. Boffin, only to be "checkmated" by the "Friendly Move" (MF, 849-62).

If the Analytical Chemist and Mr. Wegg prove to be among the chief riddlers in the text-analyzing and dismembering syntax, description, chapter titles, and poetry-then Mr. Venus, the taxidermist, and Miss Jenny Wren, the Dolls Dressmaker, become the riddlees, reclaiming and synthesizing fragments from the structured "dust heap." The reader, confronted on the first page with a giant jigsaw puzzle of discrete fragments, finds himself, like the character of Mr. Venus, attempting to give structure to the "human warious" of the fractured syntax, narrative perspective, and plot. The reader is placed in this position without realizing it. To read a novel is to articulate and give "voice" to the words on the page. Like Mr. Venus, for whom "everything found in the dust ... [is] brought" (MF, 129), the riddlee, in poking through Dickens's structured "dust heap," necessarily encounters the fragments strewn before him.

To shape and form something ordered and harmonious out of the "human warious" of fragments, Mr. Venus uses his imagination as well as his science. "There's animation! On a twig, making up his mind to hop!" he exclaims to a customer picking up a stuffed canary. "Take care of him; he's a lovely specimen" (MF, 125). Consistently, Mr. Venus envisions his fragments becoming beautiful and completed forms. When Wegg asks after the owner of "the bones of a leg and foot, beautifully pure, and put together with exquisite neatness," Mr. Venus replies, "It belongs to that French gentleman." The "French gentleman" to whom Mr. Venus refers is described in the narrative as "ribs only, standing on a shelf' (MF, 125). Articulated fragments-dismembered bodies-in the shop of Mr. Venus always take on an imaginative life. The skeletal hands on a "little shelf near [Mr. Venus's] knees" have "very much the appearance of wanting to lay hold of him" (MF, 124). The Hindu, African, and British babies do "somersaults" inside their bottles, while the glass-eyed dogs and ducks blink and "start out of their positions" (MF, 122-23). As a riddlee- exemplar-an Articulator of Bones-Mr. Venus privileges the primacy of imagination in the assembly of fragments.21

In describing Mr. Venus as an "Articulator of Bones," Dickens coins


the noun form of the word "articulate." In creating the word "articulator," he consciously fuses both meanings of the word "articulate"-"to join or attach" as well as "to give utterance to."22 The riddlee's job as an "Articulator of Bones," then, involves "joining or attaching" the fragments of the text, and so "giving utterance to" and coming to terms with a sense of order. Articulating bones in this sense informs the synthesizing project of riddles.

Like Mr. Venus, Jenny Wren provides another "articulating" perspective for the riddlee. She makes dolls out of scraps of tinsel, bits of

stuffing, strings of beads, velvet, silk, and ribbon. Like Mr. Venus, she reclaims discarded fragments. As Riah tells Fledgeby, "Our waste goes into the best of company, sir, on her rosy-cheeked little customers. They wear it in their hair, and on their ball-dresses, and even (so she tells me) are presented at Court with it" (MF, 333). Beyond her "doll's dressmak-

ing," Jenny Wren, as a riddlee, proves the novel's unacknowledged poet. If Mr. Venus shows unusual dexterity and imagination in reclaiming fragments, Jenny Wren shows the same in reclaiming language. She takes her greatest hardships and turns them into riddles:

Who comes here? A Grenadier? What does he want? A pot of beer.

(MF, 284)

Unlike Dickens, or even Mr. Wegg, after riddling her audience Jenny Wren quickly provides the referent to her riddle: she "stabs" one of her knitting needles in the direction of her drunken father, Mr. Dolls (MF, 285).

Poetic reclamation, like material reclamation on the part of Mr. Venus, depends on imagination. Born with a "bad back" and "queer legs," Jenny Wren becomes the object of the other children's abuse. Yet while she is being mocked, she imagines flowers and birds. She sees

"long bright slanting rows" of kinder children who can take her up and make her light. As she tells Lizzie and Wrayburn, "I dare say my birds

sing better than other birds, and my flowers smell better than other flowers" (MF, 290). Her ability to create "harmony" and solve riddles in the ruined world around her can be seen in her unconscious rhyming. When Fledgeby asks her what it is like to be dead, she describes her imaginative trips to the other world with this reply: "'Oh, so tranquil!' cried the little creature, smiling. 'Oh, so peaceful and thankful!"' (MF, 290). Perhaps without realizing it, Jenny Wren manifests a sort of hidden


poetry: "tranquil," "peaceful," and "thankful." Though Wegg mutilates rhyme, and Dickens-the Analytical Chemist---chops up the proverbs to make the book titles, Jenny Wren still survives to be the sole poet of the novel. Garrett Stewart concludes that Our Mutual Friend is about the "decline and fall of poetry."23 But as Jenny Wren's presence poignantly attests, poetry is not absent in Our Mutual Friend, but wanting to be found.

As a riddlee-exemplar, Jenny Wren underscores the tangible effects that "articulating" hidden rhymes exact on the plot. Eugene Wrayburn moves throughout Our Mutual Friend constantly "bored." His only pleasures in the novel come from visiting Lizzie Hexam and taunting Bradley Headstone. He exists in the novel as an incomplete riddle or rhyme. Wrayburn describes the enigma to his friend Mortimer Lightwood:

"You know that when I became enough of a man to find myself an embodied conundrum, I bored myself to the last degree by trying to find out what I meant. You know that at length I gave it up, and declined to guess any more. Then how can I possibly give you the answer that I have not discovered? The old nursery form runs, 'Riddle-me-riddle-me-ree, p'raps you can't tell me what this may be?' My reply runs, 'No. Upon my life, I can't."' (MF, 339)

Only after Wrayburn has seriously been injured by Bradley Headstone's attack, after he is "found drowned" (MF, 790), does his riddle of self approach closure. On his sick bed he asks Jenny Wren to attend him. She provides the hidden word that answers the riddle of his identity: "wife" (MF, 811). As Elli Kongos Maranda observes: "Where myths prove the fitness of... the authority of social and cultural rules, or the fitness of native conceptual classifications, riddles make a point of playing with conceptual borderlines and crossing them for the pleasure of showing that things are not quite as stable as they appear."24 By offering his hand in marriage to Lizzie Hexam, despite the social chasm between them, Wrayburn assumes a purpose: he finds the impetus he needs to struggle back from his near-fatal injuries. The Dolls Dressmaker reclaims Wrayburn from being "found drowned" to being "drowned-found," and propels Lizzie toward marriage (MF, 812). Through the examples of "articulators" like Jenny Wren and Mr. Venus, Dickens encourages the riddlee to use his imagination, to give form and shape to the fragments of Our Mutual Friend's narrative dust heap. Only then can the reader, mimicking the action of certain characters, create something "harmonious" and beautiful out of the fractured waste land. Only then does the reader become


privy to the hidden poetry of riddles: wife-life, thankful-tranquil, and the inverted "drowned-found."

The disjunctive, riddle-like structure of Our Mutual Friend-ana-

lyzed and articulated by Dickens's characters--extends further to Dickens's manipulation of plots. The novel's major plot lines, even after they finally become discernible, are constantly truncated, interrupted by seemingly unrelated chapters on the Veneerings, Podsnaps, and Lammles. New

characters-Fledgby, Riah, Jenny Wren-appear just when the reader has begun to assemble the novel's major threads. Even Dickens's style appears inconsistent. For Stephen Gill, the novel's "differing styles do not fuse but simply lie side by side, so that, in reading, one has to become used to the feeling that one is switching from one universe to another, from one imaginative level to quite a different one." Gill concludes that "the problem with Our Mutual Friend is that the plots ... increasingly diverge."''25 What Gill fails to see is that this manipulation of plot reasserts the work's riddle form.26

Dickens anticipated that the plotting of his story would be misunder- stood. In a tale about conundrums and questions of identity, divergence of plots is desirable. As Dickens admits in his "Postscript in Lieu of a Preface," confusion inheres in the design. Specifically addressing the identity of John Rokesmith and the Harmon plot, Dickens writes: "When I devised this story, I foresaw the likelihood that a class of readers and commentators would suppose that I was at great pains to conceal exactly what I was at great pains to suggest: namely, that Mr. John Harmon was not slain, and that Mr. John Rokesmith was he" (MF, 893). While disclosing his intent to expose Harmon's identity, Dickens admits that his serialized design took equal pains to conceal Boffin's pretended miserli- ness, or the novel's "pious fraud": "To keep for a long time unsuspected, yet always working itself out, another purpose originating in that leading incident, and turning it to a pleasant and useful account at last, was at once the most interesting and the most difficult part of my design" (MF, 893). Unlike Dickens's handling of the Harmon plot, the plotting of Boffin's disguise is planned and executed so that the reader-like Bella, Wegg, and Venus-is deceived. By allowing the reader to solve the Harmon mystery, Dickens lulls his riddlee into complacency. The "pious fraud" then proceeds unsuspected. Dickens further ensures this decep- tion by manipulating point of view. In book 3, chapter 14, Boffin continues to play the miser even after the other characters have left the stage. In the same scene, the narrator describes Boffin with pejorative terms such as "cunning" and "suspicious" (MF, 650). Both rhetorical


moves, the manipulation of plot lines and the point of view, in turn augment the reader's faith in Boffin's avaricious change. So Dickens provides his riddlee with the secret behind one plot line only to obscure the secret behind another. The plot, too, becomes a riddle, in which revelations conceal a "hidden agenda.""27

Dickens was not the first novelist to take up such "gaming." In his discussion of Jane Austen's use of riddles in Sense and Sensibility, Alistair M. Duckworth notes: "there is evidence that Jane Austen quite consciously structured her novel according to a 'system' of word games in order to reveal more dangerous threats to the social community than childish triviality."28 Dickens, likewise, structures a riddle-game to chal- lenge his society's conventions. By concealing Boffin's private theatrical production, Dickens forces the riddlee to form his own opinion of Boffin's corruption and assemble its place in the novel. Does the reader side with Bella's decision to give up a promised fortune because money has corrupted Mr. Boffin? Is it necessarily true that money corrupts everyone? As this plot-riddle unfolds, a pun emerges around the name "Harmon." Will the legacy of old Harmon's corrupting money "Harm- on"-as indeed it appears to be doing in the case of Boffin? Or can a mutual love between the "penniless" Rokesmith and Bella result in "Harmony"? If Dickens manipulates syntax and point of view to prod his reader into being "On the Look-Out" at the opening of the novel, he also conceals the Boffin plot to trick his reader into participating in the novel's "pious fraud." In determining the answers to these riddles, the "pious fraud" tests both Bella's and the reader's views on money, love, and responsibility.

Dickens, then, constructed Our Mutual Friend as a riddle, drawing his reader into the narrative through revelations and deceptions in syntax, narrative perspective, and plot. Previous discussions of the novel's form, however, fail to acknowledge a "gaming" design in Our Mutual Friend. Instead, formal studies tend to emphasize the novel's disjunctive structure. The young Henry James, in a review appearing in The Nation, asserts that Our Mutual Friend lacks "self-consciousness," and "philoso- phy": "Rarely have we seen a novel so intensely written," James writes. "[It] is dug out as with a spade and pick-axe." For James, Dickens's effort in the novel is forced: "[The novel] is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but permanent exhaustion."29 Robert Garis, writing a century later, detects a loss of "inventiveness and creative vitality" in Dickens's later writings. Garis concludes that with Our Mutual Friend "Dickens's enormous energy was at last beginning to fail."30


The sickness infecting the structure of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend is not that of its author, however, but that of Victorian society itself.31 By consciously constructing a narrative "dust heap" to mirror the "dust

heap" of his time, Dickens as riddler mercilessly chops up the continuity of narrative, description, and plot, forcing his reader to despair finding order amidst a disjointed world that appears little more than an unstable heap of fragments.32 Dickens appears intent on analyzing his fallen society in Our Mutual Friend, on dissecting it, and exposing its pathology to the reader. London is spread out on a table like an etherized patient, "with a deadly kind of repose on it, more as though it had taken laudanum than fallen into a natural rest" (MF, 264), or as a kind of

ghostly sick man: "Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated

lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a

sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither" (MF, 479). Just as riddles are a transcultural

phenomenon common to wakes, so Dickens performs riddles poised over the body of an "inanimate" and "deadly" reposed London." In dissecting Victorian London, Dickens explores a society that has become unaware of its own state of decomposition; he challenges his listeners, tricking them into participating in the restructuring and vitalization of this anatomized waste land.

Not surprisingly, the resolution of the plot centers on an exchange between the "Analytical" Mr. Wegg and the "Articulate" Mr. Venus, Dickens's attendant riddlers. At one of Boffin's literary evenings, while

Wegg's "belaboured bark" is "beset by polysyllables" and "a perfect archipelago of hard words," Mr. Venus takes advantage of his dilemma "to pass a scrap of paper into Boffin's hand, and lay his own finger on his own lip" (MF, 639). Such action enables Mr. Venus to expose Mr. Wegg's designs on Boffin's fortune. The "Checkmate to the Friendly Move" commences. Not only does the exchange between Mr. Venus and Mr. Boffin begin to resolve "the game of the plot," but also the exchange provides the reader with insight into the unsolved riddles and word games presented on the first page. Now the apprenticed riddlee-whose skills in "analyzing" and "articulating" riddles have been sharpened- should note in the incident a subtle reference to the slip of paper overlapping the first paragraph, and the title on the same page, "The Cup and The Lip." Mr. Venus passes "a scrap of paper," and lays "his own finger on his own lip." The apprenticed riddlee, "On the Look-Out," marks avatars of the opening slip emerging everywhere in the text. Like the "articulated" fragments in Mr. Venus's shop, slips of paper begin to take on a special life:


That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows, gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legion of iron rails. (MF, 191)

Punning on the term "slip" elsewhere, Dickens transforms the literal into the figurative, and the figurative into the literal. The several meanings of "slips," or "slip," prove crucial. Frequently, Dickens invokes multiple uses of the word "slip" in the same scene. "Slip-knots" (MF, 222, 223), giving someone "the slip" (MF, 224, 759, 771), and "slip" function- ing as a verb (MF, 204, 223, 361, 593, 705, 871) further obscure Dickens's riddle of the missing proverb. Gaffer Hexam, for example, "bends right over the stern, and in one of these heavy squalls, or in the cross-swell of two steamers, or in not being quite prepared, or through all or most or some, gets a lurch, overbalances and goes head-foremost overboard." Although described as a capable of swimmer, "he tangles his arms, pulls strong on the slip-knot [of his neckerchief] and runs it home" (MF, 223). John Harmon, Bradley Headstone, Rogue Riderhood, and Eugene Wrayburn all make similar descents into the river, involving multiple slips. Such slips act as hidden poetry to the elliptical title "The Cup and The Lip." They, too, engage the pun.

The punning presence of "slips" in the novel reinforces the physical presence of the slip of paper on the first page. By punning, Dickens, as riddler, suggests the importance of the conspicuous slip he has inserted. His purpose becomes apparent. The opening slip of paper, which instructs the reader where to look for "meaning" in Our Mutual Friend, proves the key to the three chief riddles initiated on the first page: the riddles of plot, syntax, and perspective. Keenly aware of the importance of slips of paper, the riddlee recounts other "slips" and their function as

leading incidents in the story, moving the plot. During Mortimer's narrative of the Harmon story, the Analytical Chemist delivers a slip of

paper, announcing that Harmon has been drowned. The Analytical Chemist also passes along the slip of paper disclosing Lizzie's address to Wrayburn, just when the Lizzie-Wrayburn-Headstone plot needs to be advanced. At crucial points, the Analytical Chemist, like Dickens on the first page of the novel, passes out slips of paper, clues that take the story in a new direction, and yet the Chemist remains strangely taciturn. When John Harmon puts to his lips a cup proffered by George Radfoot and Rogue Riderhood, the Analytical Chemist makes no statement concerning the contents of "a small folded paper" that has been


deposited into the cup (MF, 425). In many ways, this slip of paper becomes the origin of the novel's plot. Whatever the slip's contents (the Analytical is not saying), it causes Harmon to lose consciousness and

nearly to be drowned by Radfoot, to become, in fact, the "live-dead" man around which the novel's plot revolves. In each incident in which these slips of paper are passed, each involving "cups" and/or "lips," the text returns to the missing "slip" in the proverb fragment, "The Cup and The Lip," found on the first page. Through deliberate confusion, Dickens explores the distinctions and relations his readers rely on for con- ceptualization.

Retracing Dickens's slips, the reader commences unraveling the riddle of Dickens's plot. "On arriving at the Ninth Chapter (page 84)," as the opening slip of paper suggests, the riddlee finds Mr. Boffin referring to John Rokesmith as "Our Mutual Friend" three times (MF, 157). At this point Dickens has not revealed Rokesmith's identity as Harmon, and the incident only leaves the reader more puzzled. Why does Mr. Boffin insist on applying the words "Our Mutual Friend" to the questionable John Rokesmith? What is the relationship between these two "friends," the form of the novel, and the explicit instructions that point the reader to look here for "meaning"? "Page 84," like the opening slip of paper, only directs the reader to a deeper level in the text to resolve another of the novel's ruses; it does not, in fact, enable the reader to understand the use or significance of the phrase comprising the novel's title. Twenty-two chapters later, when Dickens reveals Rokesmith's identity, the question of Boffin's and Rokesmith/Harmon's complicity early in the novel still remains. The slip of paper and "page 84," rather than supplying the reader with the answer to Harmon's identity, supply the only clue to the Boffin plot. On returning to "page 84," the riddlee should think it odd that Rokesmith/Harmon and Boffin have an early agreement, a seemingly instantaneous contract of friendship (MF, 157). Indeed, this contract, in the end, becomes the basis for Boffin's "pious fraud." As the riddle of the plot and the opening slip of paper bear out, the significance of the title, "Our Mutual Friend," centers around the friendship between Boffin and Rokesmith/Harmon-not as it illustrates the resolution of the Harmon plot, but as it conceals the "pious fraud" that Dickens initiates to test both Bella and the reader.

Observing that the opening slip informs the novel's hidden plot- riddle, Dickens's reader now detects the slip's importance in the hidden riddles of broken syntax and perspective.34 Following the example of Mr. Venus, the riddlee may now re-assemble the broken pieces of the first page. Freed from the limited perspective into which Dickens has tricked


him throughout the novel, and taking a Venus-like imaginative view, the reader "articulates" the riddle of the truncated proverb. The whole and complete proverb, "There is many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip," lies hidden and wanting among the dismembered syntax of the page. Instead of lying "'twixt" "The Cup and The Lip," the slip of paper lies temporally and spatially above it, between the title page of the novel and the first page of chapter one, between the riddlee and the proverb about the missing slip.

In remembering the physical scraps of the first page and replacing the slip 'twixt the cup and the lip, the reader writes his own poetry into the novel's riddles. For Dickens, the mystery to which he could only point a finger lay in the reader. Through poetry, imagination, and re-evaluation, Dickens's tale enlists the participation of it's own Mutual Friend. Thus the opening slip of paper represents a hidden "materialization" of the incomplete rhyme that asks the reader to go beneath the surface of the novel to complete it. By re-instating the opening "slip" between "The Cup and The Lip," the reader as an "Articulator of Bones" successfully re-members and reclaims the origin of the self-generating riddles set in motion on the first page of the novel; the reader symbolically transcends his own tumble into the text. At once a riddle/detective, a doll's dressmaker, a taxidermist, an articulator of bones, an analytical chemist, and a poet, the reader concocts his own cure for what ails the broken and fallen world of "these times of ours" (MF, 43).

In Our Mutual Friend, "though the gods do dispose" and "many things fall out betwixt the cup and the lip," the reader negotiates uncertainties of surface and substance to achieve, with the novel's chief characters, composure and ennobling harmony-to transcend the "slip- page" of a fallen world.35 By providing solutions that emphasize the triumph of life-the tale's harmonious and comic ending-Dickens's riddles force its listeners to reconsider or refine their epistemological methods. A slip is not only an important fall in Our Mutual Friend, nor is it only a container of vital information that propels the narrative; it is the gap between the contents of the cup and the lip of the reader giving voice to the words on the page. The slip is the space or rupture where the author permanently remains, forever an artifact, waiting to have his discourse further articulated, the poetry and riddles of his text mined. Indeed, the reader, in working through the novel, sifts through its

complicated "lines" in order to "articulate" the first page, where the meaning of "OUR MUTUAL FRIEND" is missing, anticipated, and brought up from the depths, all at once.36

Vanderbilt University


NOTES 1 See Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Chapman and Hall, May 1864-November

1865), and Our Mutual Friend, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, February and November 1865).

2 Tom Hood (1835-74), son of poet and editor Thomas Hood, edited the popular, Fun

Magazine, and wrote and illustrated conundrums for volumes such as Excursions into Puzzledom. Christina Rosetti composed enigmas, and the emminent historian and poet Thomas Macaulay published literary riddles widely.

3 "Poetry and Pantomime," All the Year Round 1 (April 1865): 231; hereafter cited

parenthetically in text as PP. Dickens contributed articles on the pantomime to each of the general magazines he edited from the 1830s through the 1860s. See "The Pantomime of Life," Bentley's Miscellany 1 (1837): 291-97; "A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree," Household Words (17 January 1852): 385-87; and "A Sermon in the Britannia Theatre," All the Year Round 2 (1860): 416-21. For a complete discussion of the pantomime and Dickens see Edwin M. Eigner, The Dickens Pantomime (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989).

4 Letter to W. H. Willis, quoted in Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 796.

5 Letter to W. H. Willis, quoted in Ackroyd (note 4), 796. These letters concerning Ellen Ternan have been suppressed and are not to be found in any existing collection of Dickens's letters including the Nonesuch Letters. The letters will appear in the Pilgrim Edition of the letters when the series is completed.

6 A. De Suzannet, "Maria Beadnell's Album," The Dickensian 31 (1935): 162. 7 Michael Slater, "David to Dora: A New Dickens Letter," The Dickensian 68 (1972):

165. 8 An indepth study of riddling in the novels must await exploration elsewhere. It will

have to suffice for now simply to suggest that the networks of puns and riddles presented here for Our Mutual Friend appear elsewhere in Dickens's oeuvre. They are present in the riddle of "gentleman" in Great Expectations, in the verbal puzzle of Wellerisms in Pickwick Papers, in the Tigg-like conundrum of 'Why's a man in jail like a man out of jail?' interrogated in Little Dorrit.

9 Andrew Welsh, Roots of Lyric: Primative Poetry and Modern Poetics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), 25.

10 Welsh (note 9), 25. 11

Northrop Frye, "Dickens and the Comedy of Humours," in Experience in the Novel: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), 81.

12 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 43. All quotations from this text will be given in parentheses following the citation and cited MF.

13 Samuel Johnson, "Life of Cowley," in Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1906), 1:13-16.

14 Johnson (note 13), 14.

15 Until recently the character of the Analytical Chemist has received little critical attention. Nancy Aycock Metz, in "The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend" (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34 [1979]: 59-72), touches on the Analytical Chemist's importance. She concedes that because he appears in few scenes, it "is easy to pass over him as just another whimsical flourish in a novel rich with imaginative


embellishments of all kinds" (66). Metz detects in the Analytical Chemist a "morose presence" present even in scenes over which he does not officially preside (66). She traces the history of his character to a series of articles appearing in Dickens's Household Words in 1850, noting that contemporaries of Dickens would have been familiar with him: "the

Analytical Chemist's profession was becoming increasingly visible as a succession of controversial revelations warned consumers of the hidden dangers of 'Death in Teapot,' 'Death in the Bread-Basket,' and 'Death in Sugar Plums"' (66). She sees in the Analytical Chemist a version of the intrusive narrator, whose "silent annotations reduce [the Veneering-Podsnap group's] utterances ... to cynical pellets of distilled meaning." Metz concludes that the Analytical Chemist's "grim taciturnity becomes an implicit commen-

tary on the verbal excesses and artificial rhetoric of his employers," that he "illustrates

metaphorically the process he is called upon to perform" (66). Although Metz's observa- tions prove valuable, she does not comment on the Analytical Chemist's wider implica- tions in terms of the novel's form. That is, she neglects the ways in which Dickens, the text's primary riddler, resembles the Analytical Chemist.

16 [Thomas Stone], "Chemical Contradictions," Household Words 14 (September 1850): 592.

17 Owen Knowles, "Veneering and the Age of Veneer: A Source and Background for Our Mutual Friend" (The Dickensian 81 [1985]: 88-96). Knowles traces possible sources for the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Veneering.

18 Fraser's Magazine 42 (1850): 441-42. Quoted in Knowles (note 17), 91. 19 The proverb can be traced back to both Greek and Latin traditions. It appears in

Erasmus's Adages. Erasmus observes, "It is a warning to us that nothing we hope for is so certain, and nothing so close, that it cannot be suddenly upset by some turn of chance. So little is it safe to trust in things to come, that we are scarcely certain of what we hold in our hands." The proverb first appears in print in England in Robert Green's Perimedes the Blacksmith (London: 1588). Contextualized, the English translation of the proverb reads, "Though men determine, the Gods doo dispose, and many things fall out between the cup and the lip." For the origin of the proverb see Desiderius D. Erasmus, Adages, in The Collected Works of Erasmus Series, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, ed. and annotated by R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), 383-86.

20 Metz (note 15), 66. 21 In his essay "Mr. Venus Observed: The Plot Change in Our Mutual Friend" (Papers

on Language and Literature 4 [1968]: 170-81), F. X. Shea notes the remarkable burst of

inspiration that the creation of the taxidermist provided for Dickens. The manuscript reveals that Dickens "wrote more" and with "fewer deletions" as soon as Mr. Venus arrives on the scene (172). Shea, however, regards Mr. Venus's inspirational creation as a "deflection" on the plot and a sign of its weakness. He sees Mr. Venus as a loose thread

interfering with the progression of larger issues in the novel, increasing the importance of the Wegg plot and taking away from what would have been the more convincing Lammle threat (176). Rather than serving as an unfortunate "deflection" of the plot, however, I

argue that Mr. Venus "reflects" the processes the reader is called on to perform. 22 The Compact Edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ.

Press, 1979), 1:473. 23 Garrett Stewart, Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.

Press, 1974), 202. 24 Elli Kongas Maranda, "Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction," Journal of American

Folklore 89 (1976): 131. 25 Stephen Gill, Introduction, Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (note 12), 16-17.


26 Just as Dickens's narrative presentation appears incomplete, left up to the riddlee to

manufacture meaning, his syntax also demands the reader's active participation. Through- out Our Mutual Friend, Dickens practices elaborate syntactical arrangements that interpolate the reader and hinder his or her progress. As John Kucich notes in "Dickens's Fantastic Rhetoric: The Semantics of Reality and Unreality in Our Mutual Friend" (Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 14 [1985]: 167-89), Dickens employs a number of highly stylized syntactical arrangements in the novel. Initiated on the first page, Dickens's syntactical arrangements include "transforming the figurative into the literal"; "heightening the discontinuity of description"; and "estranging character and scene through external perspective." Dickens also problematizes syntax by introducing passages rich in redundant phrasing and elaborately extended metaphors. For instance, description by negation and redundant phrasing can be seen in the sentence: "No net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman ... no cushion, no paint, no inscription ... and [he] could not be a waterman" (MF, 43). An instance, among many, of Dickens's narrative interruptions occurs in the first sentence: "In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise" (MF, 43). Elsewhere, Dickens's syntax exhibits discontinuous description. On the first page, unrelated details accrete around commas: "The man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out" (MF, 43). For Kucich such "violations of realistic narrative conventions" produce a rhetorical "non-economy" of unreal "linguistic energy" (170). I argue that Dickens's semantic trickery suggests the structure of riddles. In each case, whether discontinuous description, redundant phrase, or interrupted narrative sequence, Dickens's syntax elides, or at least obscures, the referent to which it points. As folklorists Robert Georges and Alan Dundes observe in their study of the structure of riddles, "A riddle ... contains one or more descriptive elements, a pair of which may be in opposition; the referent of the elements is to be guessed" ("Toward a Structural Definition of the Riddle,"Journal of American Folklore 76 [1963]: 116). Both the referent to the slip of paper opening the novel and the elusive description of the first page remain known only to the author, who, like any riddler, teases and entices his audience into guessing his meaning. By limiting perspective and exploiting a fractured syntax, Dickens forces his riddlee to re-construct the sign. Even at the syntactical level, then, the first page informs a giant riddle.

27 It has become a critical commonplace to see in Dickens the beginning of the "modern mystery novel." T. S. Eliot proved one of the first modern critics to assert Dickens's relation to a genre that emerged toward the end of his career ("Wilkie Collins and Dickens," in Selected Essays [London: Faber, 1957]), and Alma Elizabeth Murch has written convincingly on Dickens's innovative techniques and their subsequent incorpora- tion into a genre we now identify as "mystery." (See Alma Elizabeth Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel [London: Peter Owen, Ltd., 1958].) Yet, in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens overturns the very rules and techniques that critics have identified in Bleak House and Edwin Drood. In Tsvetan Todorov's The Poetics of Prose (trans. Richard Howard [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977]), he claims that the classical mystery contains two stories, the story of the crime and the story of its investigation. The first, that of the crime, is "in fact the story of an absence; its most accurate characteristic is that it cannot be immediately present in the book" (44). The second for Todorov remains a story of no importance in itself, rather, the "second story" "serves only as a mediator between the reader and the story of the crime" (46). In the detective story, then, the second story, or the plot, serves to "hide" the "crime." According to such a formulation, the detective-who is also the reader-is inactive and invulnerable, while


the criminal remains active but vulnerable because of his unconsciousness of the presence of the book. In Our Mutual Friend-as in riddles-the allotment of roles is switched. In riddles the reader becomes active and vulnerable, the riddler (in this case the criminal), inactive and invulnerable. The riddle is aired, the answer hidden; the reader must find it. Rather it is precisely the anticipation of a "mystery story" that Dickens uses as a smoke screen to present his network of riddles in Our Mutual Friend.

28 Duckworth, "'Spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards': games in Jane Austen's life and fiction," in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. John Halperin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), 294.

29 Henry James, The Art of Fiction and Other Essays (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,

1948), 49. 30 Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 226. 31 For both James and Garis, the narrative appears flawed, somehow insufficient, or

incomplete in and of itself. As Garis puts it, "meanings are only hinted at, if the sad truth is not that they must be quite independently-and therefore illegitimately-manufac- tured by the reader himself' (note 30), 231. Critics of the novel's structure such as James and Garis fail the work not in calling attention to its "ruined" state, but by ignoring the narrative games Dickens engages in within the "ruin." In criticizing Dickens and his imaginative faculties, these critics notably echo Rogue Riderhood's first words amid the riddles of the opening scene: ""What ails you?"' Riderhood asks of the "two figures." "'I see nothing afloat"' (MF, 44). But something is afloat in Dickens's novel: the opening slip of paper. In failing to be "On the Look-Out," critics such as James and Garis overlook the novel's riddles, the synthesizing agents of the novel's hidden order.

32 See U. C. Knoepflmacher, "Our Mutual Friend: Fantasy as Affirmation," Laughter and Despair: Readings in Ten Novels of the Victorian Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 131-67. In his excellent study, Knoepflmacher treats fragmentation in the novel and its metaphorical relationship to the image of the garbage mounds.

3 See F. A. de Caro, "Riddles and Proverbs," Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction (Logan: Utah State Univ. Press, 1986), 175-97. De Caro writes, "The riddle 'joins,' through metaphor, two disparate, even contradictory entitites. ... At death rituals people find themselves in a situation emphasizing different categories, the world of the living and that of the dead. A wake is a vigil held over the body of a dead person prior to burial, which in some societies includes feasting, entertainment, and other forms of socializing. The ritual itself often seems to be an attempt to symbolically transport the deceased's soul from one world to the other. (It may be believed that the wake ensures that the dead person will stay in the land of the dead and not return to haunt the living.) Those involved in the ritual are in a sense standing on a borderline where two opposites meet. In a sense they are joining these opposites together. Hence riddles seem appro- priate. ... The very essence of the riddle seems to mirror the situation and to symbolically express the process taking place" (181). For more on the relation between riddles and wakes see: Ilhan Basgoz, "Functions of Turkish Riddles," Journal of the Folklore Institute 2 (1965): 132-47; Thomas Rhys Williams, "The Form and Function of Tambunana Dunsun Riddles," Journal of American Folklore 76 (1963): 102-3; John Blacking, "The Social Value of Venda Riddles," African Studies 20 (1961): 5-7; and Thomas A. Burns, "Riddling: Occasion to Act," Journal of American Folklore 89 (1976): 102-3.

34 In a novel in which chapter and book titles play an important role, Dickens's title to his postscript redirects attention to the presence of the opening slip of paper. That is, on the very pages Dickens claims to reveal the whole "riddle" of his design-the obscuring of the Boffin plot by the Harmon plot-he enacts his last trick. He titles his afterward, "A


Postscript in Lieu of a Preface," neglecting the prefatory slip of paper. Like the punning on "slip" at crucial moments in the novel, the postscript title also returns the apprenticed reader to the first page of the novel, and the proverb fragment, "The Cup and The Lip."

35 Green (note 19). 36

My thanks to John Halperin, Robert Kirkpatrick, and Jay Clayton for reading and

responding to the many drafts of this essay. Their invaluable suggestions and encourage- ment strengthened and sharpened the original conception of this study.


dickens article on our mutual friend

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