[In the following essay, Sherer examines Our Mutual Friend as a prime example of Dickens's ability to create humor while treating serious themes.]

Dickens' enigmatic Our Mutual Friend, the last complete novel he wrote, is an ideal place to examine his mature genius for creating humor. The laughter of the novel is abundant and varied and is related in complex ways to what is unique in Dickens' art. Most characteristic of the work itself is its comprehensiveness. Its innumerable scenes and characters generate a web of themes in which all is ultimately related. At the same time, the structural insularity of its parts provides a variety of situations well suited to manifest a wide tonal range of laughter. A brief look at overall structure shows how this is so.

Two independently developed spheres of intrigue are structurally connected, appropriately, only by the roles of certain mutual friends. The larger segment concerns John Harmon, the Boffins, the Hexams, the Riderhoods, and only slightly more peripherally, the Wilfers, Wegg and Venus, Eugene and Mortimer, Bradley Headstone, Jenny Wren, and others. The second part is dominated by the Podsnaps, the Veneerings and their company, the Lammles, Fledgeby, and other lesser characters. The novel is compartmentalized not only by this structure, but also by abrupt shifts between chapters. As Hillis Miller observes, “The basic structural technique of the novel is the complete transformation of tone and milieu from chapter to chapter.”¹ Within this structure Dickens' laughter ranges from the mock battles of Mrs. Wilfer and her irrespressible Lavinia to the diabolical tormenting of Bradley Headstone.

Dickens' late humor is never completely without the depth of feeling and seriousness of theme that distinguish it from the comic. Nevertheless much of the novel's laughter approaches near enough the briskness and innocence of the comic so that the term may be validly applied, especially when the analysis of the laughable demands terms like “comic mechanism,” named after the comic but applicable to other material as well.

Close to the heart of much of what is unique in Dickens' laughter is a recurring set of elements broadly definable as decadent. T. S. Eliot refers to “the terribly serious, even savage humor, the humor which spent its last breath in the decadent genius of Dickens.”² The decadence of Dickens' writing is unlike that of most writers in whom we are used to finding it, probably because decadence tends to inspire poor writers, and Dickens is, as Eliot says, a genius. The decadent writer characteristically writes with little energy, or seems to trap the reader's energy in a sinister way instead of organizing and freeing it, as truly great writing does. In contrast, Dickens writes with enormous energy. The sense in which his writing can be called decadent depends mostly on the way energy is organized in it. The energy of his writing seems to be engaged in a centrifugal flight outward from the human soul and rationality to the grosser functions, then to the limbs of the body, and finally to inanimate matter. This phenomenon has given rise to many critical observations that are by now clichés: that Dickens' characters are like puppets or cardboard figures; that his characters channel great energy through limited, physical means of expression; or that, in Dickens' works, characters seem like things, and things seem human. In short, this diffusion of energy, over which one senses Dickens had only a limited amount of control, approximates the more obvious insidious quality which we spot in a minor decadent. Dickens' diffusing structures of energy, while they operate at a much higher artistic level, share the regressive, ultimately annihilating nature of decadence. This quality of his writing is greatly amplified by the variety of cunning ways in which he induces an almost psychosomatic involvement on the part of the sympathetic reader—a subject which has fascinated many critics.³

Mainly for these reasons we find in Dickens a uniquely palpable sense of the sentimental. His sentimentality is basically an indulgence of the movement toward annihilation in a context of tonal assurance that the real or threatened suffering of the “sentimental victim” is fully felt and paid for by someone who witnesses it, and the reader is always one such witness. Our response to the danger of the Dickensian sentimental victim is the opposite of that of a genuinely tragic victim. In one we obtain a perverse pleasure accompanied by something like a draining of our own energy; in the other our unpleasant emotional exhaustion is accompanied by an inner gain of equilibrium. It is not surprising that when Dickens releases his jugular hold on our sentiment in order to mock sentimentality, we laugh especially loudly.

These unpleasantries are, admittedly, anything but humorous. But it is their radically serious nature which provides their essential relationship to the laughable. Freud defines humor specifically in terms of its ability to make acceptable to the ego energy aroused by serious emotions. “Thus,” says Freud, “some artists have worked wonders in gaining humor at the expense of fear and disgust.”⁴ Similarly Bergson, despite his constant assertions that “laughter has no greater foe than emotion,” bases his theory of comic mechanism on the same type of fear which is central to Dickens' sensibility: the fear arising from the intuitive realization that what is rigid, inelastic, or mechanical is inimical to the “tension and elasticity” fundamental to human life-response.⁵ Emerson, in his brief essay “The Comic,” adds a significant contribution to these later and more ostensibly sophisticated theories relating the serious to the laughable. “We have no deeper interest than our own integrity, and that we should be made aware by joke or by stroke of any lie we entertain.”⁶ In this, Emerson in a sense goes beyond both Freud's and Bergson's statements by revealing our fears about our own integrity, or identity, as central in our response of laughter. The essential structure which evokes our laughter in a wide range of literary material is the sudden realization that our own identity possesses the necessary “tension and elasticity” lacked by the comic character, or conversely, that the character does possess tension and elasticity and that we may feel safe in identifying with him. All in a moment the adequacy of our own life-response is confirmed as superior, underlying fears about specious identity (and ultimately, annihilation) are allayed and made acceptable to the ego, and we laugh.

Much of the laughter of Our Mutual Friend works in this way. Identity is in fact one of the main themes of the novel, and the reader's identity often seems threatened by the empathetic seductiveness of Dickens' writing. Moreover, Dickens presents us with an elaborate hierarchy of characters at whom we laugh because we realize their specious identities or because they alternate between real and specious identities; in other cases we laugh because threats to those with whom we identify are revealed as inconsequential.

Indisputably at the top of this hierarchy is Podsnap. He is portrayed precisely in terms of his tenacious hold on his own identity. Podsnap seldom fails to be funny. Our laughter at him is conditioned by our sense of his enormity—the fearful extent to which his hideous identity imposes itself on an entire culture. As such, the humor of Podsnap is closely associated with the central structure of diffusing energy in the novel. The encompassing piles of ordure and the dirt blowing through London's streets are a compelling physical analogue of Podsnap and his all-consuming credo. Just as the dirt reaches out to embrace all of London, Podsnap's power reaches out to pervert all unstable identity and freed energy to his cause of unabashed materialism. Podsnap's credo is certainly among the foremost of Dickens' virtuoso set-pieces:

Elsewhere, the world got up at eight, shaved close at a quarter-past, breakfasted at nine, went to the City at ten, came home at half-past five, and dined at seven. Mr. Podsnap's notions of the Arts in their integrity might have been stated thus. Literature; large print, respectively descriptive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter-past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Painting and sculpture; models and portraits of professors of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter-past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Music; a respectable performance without variations on stringed and wind instruments, sedately expressive of getting up at eight, shaving close at a quarter-past, breakfasting at nine, going to the City at ten, coming home at half-past five, and dining at seven. Nothing else to be permitted to those same vagrants of the Arts, on pain of excommunication. Nothing else To Be—anywhere!

(Ch. 11)⁷

Here humor is intensified not only by our fearful resentment of Podsnap, but by great precision of verbal form. It is interesting to note how much of the humor is deleted if, for example, we simply take out all the “close's” and add “o'clock's” to the hours named. This destroys the essential lilt of the passage's rhythm, and the loss of “close” deprives it of a surprising amount of its imagistic force. This loss might be explained by noting that “shaving close” approaches nearest to concreteness among the images of Podsnap's refrain, and it is to an extent metaphorical of the linguistic structure of the whole passage. Podsnap's language and life are “shaved close” of all that is decently human. The implied image of wet lather, repulsive face, and ruthless blade significantly informs our response. It is meaningful that, among all the notable rogues of Our Mutual Friend, Podsnap is the only one at whom Dickens allows us no last laugh.

Like Podsnap (and almost all the characters of the second group), Mr. and Mrs. Veneering are nearly always funny. Unlike Podsnap, the Veneerings' hold on aristocratic identity is tenuous. Beneath his veneer of aristocratic prowess, Veneering is pathetically innocent. Our laughter at him is likewise innocent, a blend of much scorn and some sympathy. Veneering moves in distracted confusion between prowess and innocence. His comedy reaches its height in Chapter 20, “A Piece of Work,” one of the three most purely comic chapters of the book and a showpiece of comic structuring. Early in the chapter, Dickens enlists our partial sympathy for Veneering by dramatizing the devastating intimidation he undergoes in getting Podsnap to “rally round” (Ch. 20). Here Veneering's unreality and Podsnap's monstrous solidity are directly contrasted. Veneering is further undercut by the cynicism of Lady Tippins, who in a sense plays Black Queen to Podsnap's Black King. In her “going about” she repeatedly stresses the farcicality of Veneering's campaign. Our own scorn of Veneering is effectively channelled through Tippins' diatribe: “‘And who is the dearest friend I have in the world? A man of the name of Veneering. Not omitting his wife, and I positively declare I forgot their baby, who is the other. And we are carrying on this little farce to keep up appearances, and isn't it refreshing! Then, my precious child, the fun of it is that nobody knows who these Veneerings are. … Curious to see 'em, my dear? Say you'll know 'em. Come and dine with 'em. They shan't bore you’” (Ch. 20). The humor of this passage is modified by a technique not noticeable within the quotation—Dickens' sudden shift to a combination of third-person narrative and dramatic monologue. This creates one of the weird distancing effects that, among other things, often gives his writing the hallucinatory quality of a dream. The immediacy of dramatic monologue superimposed over the distancing effect of third-person narration puts us in the place of the dreamer who is at once in and apart from his dream. We become caught up in the same half-pleasant, half-fearful confusion of identity which Veneering is made to undergo. Dickens uses a similar device in Veneering's conversation with Podsnap. Podsnap's responses are quoted directly, Veneering's indirectly. The effect is a similar superimposing of reality and hallucinatory dream. Our dreamlike identification with Veneering is set against the abiding realization that he is in fact a pretentious rascal well worthy of censure. This colors our laughter at him so that it is emotionally akin to the bemused chuckle with which we recall some mildly threatening dream of a previous night.

The chapter has two comic climaxes—Veneering's trip to accept the representation of Pocket Breeches and the final victory banquet at Veneering's home. His trip is wonderfully funny because it is so anticlimactic. Veneering arrives at the sleepy hamlet of Pocket Breeches after the furious helter-skelter of “going about” in London. Accompanying him are powerful Podsnap and innocent Twemlow, whose presence undercuts his pretensions from two directions at once. Veneering mounts to the window of the town hall “with some onions and bootlaces under it” and speaks “to the listening earth.” Dickens adds an exquisite crowning touch: “In the moment of his taking his hat off, Podsnap, as per agreement with Mrs. Veneering, telegrams to that wife and mother, ‘He's up.’” Veneering is further pilloried in the description of his inane speech. It is important to the chapter's comic structure that his entanglements in the “No Thoroughfares of speech” carry over the other ironic spatial metaphors of “rallying round” and “going about.” The sense of vigor and bustle in the previous metaphors effectively magnify Veneering's hopeless, isolated bravado. Podsnap and Twemlow stand out front, yelling “h-e-a-r h-e-a-r!” whenever Veneering “can't by any means back himself out of some very unlucky No Thoroughfare” (Ch. 20).

The second and lesser climax, the Veneerings' victory dinner, is an effective bit of parodied sentimentality. Comic tension in the scene is enhanced by the scarcely checked revulsion of Podsnap and the Analytical at Mrs. Veneering's account of the baby's restlessness on the night of the election. The vivid image of Veneering dragging out his over-wrought wife “backwards, with her feet impressively scraping the carpet” ends the chapter in an appropriately spatial way. The image of feet scraping the carpet here typifies another of Dickens' favorite techniques: amplifying ludicrous bodily movements by setting them against concrete visual backdrops. The generally obtrusive presence of setting in Dickens' writing gives almost all his scenes a sense of stagelike confinement, lending actions and even dialogue a muscular grotesqueness effective in reinforcing a wide range of emotions, including laughter.

Fledgeby is much like Veneering in that he is funny because of a dual identity. He is both a capricious, powerful financial manipulator and an ingenuous coward. But whereas Veneering's two identities create comedy by their simultaneous functioning, Fledgeby's tend to operate alternately. He plays his role of innocent coward throughout his first appearance in Chapter 21, “Cupid Prompted.” This produces the complete dismay of Lammle, who is apparently acquainted with Fledgeby only in his other role at this point. The laughter of this whole chapter is bountiful and enormously poignant. Like the previous one, it has a carefully manipulated structure, beginning with a strategic marshaling of our sympathies and proceeding to a series of distinct comic climaxes. In this chapter evil lies closer to the surface. The victims are not faceless country people, but Georgiana Podsnap, for whom Dickens creates in us a definite sympathy. The beginning of the chapter describes Mrs. Lammle's revelation to Georgiana that her suitor is at hand:

“Oh, no, don't! Please don't!” cried Miss Podsnap, putting her fingers in her ears. “I'd rather not.”

Mrs. Lammle laughed in her gayest manner and, removing her Georgiana's hands and playfully holding them in her own at arm's length, sometimes near together and sometimes wide apart, went on:

“You must know, you dearly beloved little goose. …”

(Ch. 21)

Dickens fuses humor with brutality skillfully in this image. The shrewdly interjected “sometimes near together and sometimes wide apart” amplifies both emotions at once.

A key encounter with Mrs. Lammle also sets up some sympathy for Fledgeby:

“Warm weather, Mrs. Lammle,” said Fascination Fledgeby. Mrs. Lammle thought it scarcely as warm as it had been yesterday.

“Perhaps not,” said Fascination Fledgeby, with great quickness of repartee, “but I expect it will be devilish warm tomorrow.”

He threw off another little scintillation. “Been out today, Mrs. Lammle?”

Mrs. Lammle answered, for a short drive.

“Some people,” said Fascination Fledgeby, “are accustomed to take long drives, but it generally appears to me that if they make 'em too long, they overdo it.”

Being in such a feather, he might have surpassed himself in his next sally, had not Miss Podsnap been announced.

(Ch. 21)

In the following scenes, the physical violence of Mr. Lammle's nature is held in check only by his desperate need to maintain decorum in his Cupid's work. Much of our laughter at Fledgeby is applause at his thwarting the Lammles' wicked designs. It is effectively ironic that Fledgeby causes their discomfort by the same means Mrs. Lammle used to make him seem foolish moments earlier. He refuses to talk to Georgiana, and the Lammles are forced into defensive maneuvers in trying to maintain a semblance of conviviality. Our laughter at Fledgeby is conditioned by our sense of his “comic resilience”—our awareness that, within the terms of Dickensian justice, he will come to no severe harm. Fledgeby's role as coward has a fundamental innocence which renders the sins of his other role venial. Thus we can enjoy his evil-doing and relish the gathering storm of Lammle's wrath with a certain abandon. The flippant pranks of Eugene Wrayburn are superficially similar to Fledgeby's, but in fact they are of a vastly more serious nature, as the punishment of the two men suggests.

It can be seen that the characters of the second group account for much of what is overtly funny in Our Mutual Friend. Within the main character group, two sets of characters generate laughter of a similar kind: the Wilfers and the Wegg-Venus-Boffin triad.

The Wilfers are funny primarily in terms of the threatened and self-assertive types of identity we have already seen. Mrs. Wilfer has one important thing in common with Podsnap—the desire to impose her identity on everyone around her. She embodies in a literal way the annihilating quality of self-assertive identity. At one point Lavinia feels obliged to rescue George Sampson “from being annihilated” (Ch. 55). Pa Wilfer stands in constant danger of being annihilated. Lavinia stands in absolutely no danger of being annihilated, and her abstracted title of “Irrepressible” connotes that fact.

In the three chapters grouped around Mrs. Wilfer, Dickens evokes laughter by carefully apportioning comic resilience. George Sampson has a kind of resilience because we care little about him, and we know he will survive. He is a mere figment, passively elastic, a pinball caroming around the woman-haunted house of Wilfers. But Pa Wilfer is a fully human character, and Dickens carefully develops our sympathy for him. He has only tenuous comic resilience. The strongly sentimental strain in his character suggests a tragic potential. It is significant that the sentimental in Pa Wilfer is closely bound up with his domesticity, his earnest concern to provide his family with necessities. Throughout Dickens' works, fully realized domestic security is the magnetic center of sentimental emotion. The final securing of spouse, income, and furnished dwelling is the magical bulwark against the fears that pervade the world of his novels. In this way Mrs. Wilfer's annihilating assaults on Pa create the kind of palpable threat that can provide great force for comic retribution. Lavinia is just the one to provide such retribution. Her highly creative savagery directly confronts her mother's, producing brilliant comedy.

Bella's relationship with Pa, another source of frequent laughter, develops these structures of identity in an interesting way. Bella's identity shares the dual, archetypal nature for which Jenny Wren in part becomes a symbol: woman as ambiguous giver and taker of man's life.⁸ Throughout the novel we see Bella rescuing Pa from Mrs. Wilfer and other predators. But at the same time, Bella is her mother's daughter, and she constantly senses in herself a latent savagery that threatens to unleash itself against Pa. Hence Pa and Bella carry on constant rituals in which Bella's destructiveness is exorcised in comic terms:

Arrived at Mr. Boffin's door, she set him with his back against it, tenderly took him by the ears as convenient handles for her purpose, and kissed him until he knocked muffled double-knocks at the door with the back of his head.

(Ch. 26)

Or more explicitly:

“Did I hurt you much, poor little Pa?” asked Bella, laughing (notwithstanding her repentence), with fantastic pleasure in the picture, “when I beat you with my bonnet?”

“No, my child, wouldn't have hurt a fly.”

(Ch. 54)

The description of Bella as a newlywed is one of the comic high points of the novel. Here all the sentimental emotion attached to Dickens' hallowed domestic ideal is channeled through the tension between savagery and love in Bella's new identity as housewife. In this way the full force of sentimental emotion, its grossness purged away by purifying tension and the absence of any victim, can be brought to bear on such comic vignettes as Bella's exasperation with her cookbook.

In the machinations of Wegg, Venus, and Boffin, questions of identity are much less involved as a source of comic tension, and the laughter that these worthies create is (with some notable exceptions) of a correspondingly less anxious kind. Boffin's dual identity is admittedly important, but it functions more as a device of plot than as a formula of our emotional response. In terms of character, the structure of comedy here is that of “the robber robbed”—the Jonsonian situation of reprehensible knaves heaping just deserts on each other. The stuffed frogs dueling in Venus' window are a marvelous icon of this whole subplot. Within the subplot, the tonal range of laughter has representative spatial poles, varying from the macabre of Venus' shop to the lighter scenes of Boffin's Bower.

The dreamlike quality of Dickens' writing is much at work in the shop scenes. As in a dream, there is a “leveling” of tonal affect: the significant and the insignificent seem to impress themselves with equal force on our awareness.⁹ The perennially dark shop, seen only through small rings of candlelight, approximates the unpleasant lack of visual control in dreams. Coupled with this is the sensation that the whole place is about to come grotesquely alive, and there is an ambiguous fear of bodily dismemberment. In all, Dickens creates a genuine sense of fright which cannot fail to magnify any bit of comic release that develops in the shop. Chiefly for these reasons, incidents like Venus' mistake in giving the delivery boy two human teeth in change (Ch. 7) and Boffin's hiding behind the alligator (Ch. 47) are very funny.

One example of the comic in Boffin's Bower is particularly illustrative of Dickens' use of rhetoric and the minutiae of situation to evoke laughter. Wegg has just finished administering his first reading from The Fall of the Roman Empire to the Boffins: “With the death of this personage, Mr. Wegg terminated his first reading, long before which consummation several total eclipses of Mrs. Boffin's candle behind her black velvet disk would have been very alarming, but for being regularly accompanied by a potent smell of burnt pens when her feathers took fire, which acted as a restorative and woke her” (Ch. 5).

Dickens appropriately picks on the feathers of Mrs. Boffin's “fashionable” hat as a symbol of the Boffins' foolish pretensions to gentility, which are being undercut in the passage. In part, comic structure here is similar to that of Mrs. Veneering's feet scraping on the carpet: the absurdity of bodily motion is intensified when set against a concrete visual backdrop. Moreover, Dickens' techniques are greatly enhanced by his sense of rhythm and timing. It is entirely characteristic of his method to present the ludicrous image of Mrs. Boffin as a kind of flashback. In one quietly delivered sentence we are made to realize an action that has been repeated with incredible regularity of space and time over a period of hours. Thus the several images of Mrs. Boffin repeatedly dozing and waking in front of the candle flash through our minds like a series of quick-cut shots from a Chaplin movie. Comedy is amplified by the tension between credulity and disbelief: we know it could not possibly happen that way, but it happens so fast we scarcely have time to disbelieve it.

Similar devices of comic rhythm occur frequently in Dickens' syntax. His constant misuse of “which” as a combination of pronoun and adjective, his strained use of participles (both exemplified in the passage above), and his superfluous commas are three of the devices that give whole passages a violent bucking rhythm of flashback and forward motion.

Overtly dark laughter is also frequent in Our Mutual Friend, and its presence inevitably colors the lighter moments. Not surprisingly, much of this dark laughter centers on Eugene Wrayburn. In Eugene's cruelty to Charley Hexam, Mr. Dolls, and Bradley Headstone, Dickens makes us laugh in spite of ourselves. In an important conversation between Eugene and his friend Mortimer, the nature of this laughter is directly related to the theme of diffusing energy:

“Precisely my view of the case, Eugene. But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about, and I'll show you energy.”

“And so will I,” said Eugene.

And it is likely enough that ten thousand other young men within the limits of the London Post-Office town-delivery made the same hopeful remark in the course of the same evening.

(Ch. 3)

Just as energy flows outward from soul to surroundings in Dickens' world, so on a larger scale the energy of culture as a whole in Our Mutual Friend flows outward into individual characters. This exemplifies a typical pattern of decadent culture. Havelock Ellis, paraphrasing Nietzsche, explains that “we are apt to overlook the fact that the energy which in more primitive times marked the operations of the community as a whole has now simply been transferred to individuals themselves, and this aggrandizement of the individual really produces an even greater amount of energy.”¹⁰ Eugene becomes symbolic of the massive, restless energy of a generation of Victorians. The destructiveness of this energy is made clear in the character-doubling of Eugene and Headstone during the chase scenes. They are doubled in their roles as suitors of Lizzie Hexam and as complementary symbols of decadent energy gone awry. Eugene's creative energy seemingly can find release only in tormenting others, and Headstone's dark, Blakean passion for Lizzie has turned inward to become a kind of self-torture. Dickens contrasts love and destructiveness skillfully in this pairing. It is precisely the energy that should effect sexual union and regeneration that, in the persons of Eugene and Headstone, has turned toward death. Never does Eugene experience such satisfying glee as when, leading Headstone on a false trail through London after Lizzie, he doubles back and nonchalantly passes the agonized schoolteacher, who supposes himself following unseen. In Eugene's amusement and the image of Headstone's seemingly bodiless head moving through London we have a paradigm of the laughter of Our Mutual Friend, as it moves between poles of love and death.

Comedy and the laughter of despair interpenetrate not only by being placed side by side, but by means of a whole range of nuances in which both are fused. One can open the book almost at random and find, even in the most serious passages, an excessive nervous energy manifested in incipiently humorous rhetorical flourish, circumlocution, and convoluted syntax. In countless turns of phrase and suddent bursts of insight, Dickens reveals “with a relish suggestive of the finest oysters” (Ch. 10) that he knows the depths of our minds where the impermissible festers. Around every second corner of his laughter we seem to risk coming face to face with what is scatological, embarrassing, or personally obscene. By means of either repression or taste Dickens never lets these things materialize. Yet, even in something like his facial caricatures we sometimes feel that human souls are being mangled, and that the musty evil of Venus' bottled babies is near at hand. Here again he provides an appropriate symbol of his own art. The animal howls of Sloppy express the pure visceral horror underlying the laughter of the book.

Psychoanalytic critics have provided one possible explanation for the scatalogical, regressive undertones of much of Dickens' writing. In his preoccupations with dirt and fog, spastic language, loss of bodily control, and breakdown between the living and nonliving they see symptoms of a regression of psychic energy back toward the mental condition of the infant obsessed with its own excretion. There is much to be said for this point of view. Aside from classical psychoanalysis, however, we can look to Dickens' generally worsening state of mind in his last years as a cause of the pessimistic, schizoid, vaguely sexual undertones of his humor. It is well known that he was involved in a traumatic train accident around the time of his writing of Our Mutual Friend and that he had become obsessed with acting out the murder scene from Oliver Twist before popular audiences. In this novel there is more than a suggestion that his pessimism and obsessiveness have not only crept into his art, but have in part become directed against it. It can be no coincidence that all three artist figures in this novel have highly ambiguous creative-destructive natures. Jenny Wren, an obvious parallel to the novelist, creates a whole world of lifelike dolls, dressed for all occasions. But Jenny, as already mentioned, also has a destructive side to her personality. Similarly, Mr. Venus creates lifelike stuffed figures, but he is a man of very unhealthy temperament, and his mistake of using human teeth for change is a tempting analogue of Dickens' lucrative trade in dissected fictional characters. Silas Wegg is also ambiguous in being both a creator of ballads and a treacherous impostor. One scene is particularly suggestive of Wegg's character as a parody of Dickens' own role as artist. In Boffin's Bower, Wegg is reading biographies of famous misers to Boffin: “On the way to this crisis Mr. Wegg's wooden leg had gradually elevated itself more and more, and he had nudged Mr. Venus with his opposite elbow deeper and deeper, until at length the preservation of his balance became incompatible with the two actions, and he now dropped over sideways upon that gentleman, squeezing him against the settle's edge. Nor did either of the two, for some few seconds, make any effort to recover himself; both remaining in a kind of pecuniary swoon” (Ch. 39).

Here comedy provides a thin veil over darkly suggestive sexual innuendo. A moment later, Wegg pulls himself and Venus up in a “masterly manner.” The scene combines thematic threads of the artist-as-deceiver, schizoid character duality, and an onanistic displacement of sexual love by cash nexus. If Dickens does identify in some way with Wegg and Venus, and it seems he inevitably must, this scene is testimony to his growing awareness that his own art is not a product of the high and altruistic social motives he had long prized, but rather a somewhat perverse self-indulgence, originating in mental crisis and directed at financial gain. The sexual metaphor is expressive of both his realization of the deep creative-destructive wellsprings of his art and his suspicion that his work is in a sense mere wasted energy, a deception successful in titillating the minds of an unenlightened public. His suggestion of onanism as a parody of art is thus meaningful in explaining the gratuitousness, the obsessive repetition, the frequent sense of ecstatic preciousness and spent energy, and the somewhat bitter involutedness of laughter of Our Mutual Friend.

Notes

1. Joseph Hillis Miller, Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), p. 284.

2. “Christopher Marlowe,” Selected Essays (New York, 1932), p. 105.

3. Hillis Miller stresses the extent to which Dickens' novels create a total milieu in which the reader becomes deeply immersed. In Dickens: The Dreamer's Stance (Ithaca, N. Y., 1965) Taylor Stoehr analyzes the frequent hallucinatory, dream-like quality of Dickens' fiction by revealing in it extensive patterns which Freud has shown to be characteristic of the “dream work” or dream-making process of the unconscious. My paper draws on Stoehr's analysis in dealing with Lady Tippins' monologue and Venus' shop.

4. Sigmund Freud, “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, tr. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938), p. 801.

5. See Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (New York, 1956), p. 72.

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Comic,” Theories of Comedy, ed. Paul Lauter (New York, 1964), p. 380.

7. All references to Our Mutual Friend correspond to The Works of Charles Dickens, Standard Library Edition, ed. Edwin Percy Whipple and others (New York, 1894), vols XXV-XXVI.

8. By turning Riah into a “godmother” she helps to save him; by turning her father into a child she hastens his destruction. Jenny's ambiguity is also reflected by such things as her voodoo-witch gestures with her needle.

9. See Stoehr, pp. 88 ff., for the relationship of this “leveling” effect to Freudian dream theory.

10. Introduction to J. K. Huysman's Against the Grain, tr. John Howard (New York, 1922), p. x.