[In the following essay, Mundhenk maintains that some of the confusing plot elements in Our Mutual Friend are caused by the author's deliberate attempts to manipulate and deceive his readers and thus to educate them about the limitations of individual perception.]

The narrator of Our Mutual Friend describes Twemlow as a creature “condemned to a passage through the world by such narrow little dimly-lighted ways, and picking up so few specks or spots on the road.”¹ Vexed by the “insoluble question whether he was Veneering's oldest friend, or newest friend” (I, 2), fooled by Fascination Fledgeby into thinking that Riah is the villain who controls his debts, the Knight of the Simple Heart is confused by appearances in the world of the novel. Although Twemlow's crisis of perception and knowledge is both more comic and greater in degree than those of the other characters, everyone in the novel must meander for a while through “dimly-lighted ways” only to be confused by lack of knowledge or misled by a few “specks or spots on the road.” The reader too cannot escape temporary confusion. Like many characters, he is deceived by the appearances of things. Like many characters, he is confronted periodically with his own limited knowledge.

In particular, Dickens's narration of Noddy Boffin's stint as miser forces the reader to be misled and to fall into error about Boffin's real self and intentions. Dickens limits the reader's perception of Boffin during those chapters in which Boffin plays the miser so that the reader is compelled to share Bella Wilfer's belief that Boffin has changed. In fact, Boffin's performance is so persuasive that it has led many critics to question Dickens's intention and judgment. Jack Lindsay argues that “the picture of the perversion through wealth has been too true, too effectively done. In point of fact we feel two Boffins.”² Similarly, A. O. J. Cockshut finds Boffin's confession unconvincing because Boffin's acting was so convincing: “There can be no doubt that in the miserly passages, especially as Boffin listens to the grotesque stories of misers past, a very deep excitement spreads into the writing.”³ Boffin's piece of acting led G. K. Chesterton to suspect that Dickens originally intended Boffin's avarice to be real, but changed his mind at the last minute.⁴ Chesterton's mistaken assumption has been corrected by F. X. Shea's investigation of the holograph manuscript, which proves that Dickens early planned the plot between Rokesmith and Boffin, a plot which included Boffin's posing as miser.⁵ Although Shea has resolved the question of intention, Dickens's manipulation of the Boffin plot remains unsettling to many readers and critics. I suggest that Dickens deliberately makes the Boffin masquerade unsettling for the benefit of the reader, in an attempt to shock the reader with his own misjudgment, thereby to educate him. Dickens does for the reader what Boffin does for Bella. The reader is forced to learn that his perception has been limited and his knowledge partial.

The narration of Boffin's supposed change is handled very differently from that of John Harmon's disguise, the other “pious fraud” in Our Mutual Friend. Unlike the other disguises in the novel, such as Bradley Headstone's donning a Rogue Riderhood costume and Wegg's pretending to be a literary man, Harmon's and Boffin's pretenses are undertaken for the best of reasons: John Harmon wishes to save both Bella and himself from a maliciously arranged marriage, and Noddy Boffin wishes to educate Bella and to save her from her own greed. Yet the narrative is structured so that the reader learns of the truth behind these two disguises in very different ways. The narrator allows the reader to recognize early that Julius Hanford and John Rokesmith are John Harmon, but the reader must wait with Bella for Noddy's revelation. Dickens's choice of contrasting methods of narration indicates that he intended them to have contrasting effects on the reader.

In the Postscript to Our Mutual Friend, Dickens stated his intention to suggest that Harmon is alive and has assumed new identities: “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.” Clearly, his plan was not to tell but to suggest that Rokesmith is Harmon. He wanted the reader to draw the obvious conclusion for himself and perhaps to suppose that the author is attempting to conceal Rokesmith's identity. Dickens's intention is borne out by the novel. The figure of John Harmon, dead or alive, ties together the otherwise unconnected first five chapters and is prominent in the mind of the reader from the outset. Although the narrator does not confirm the identity of Harmon-Rokesmith until the pivotal chapter “A Solo and a Duett,” late in Book II, the earlier clues are too numerous and too important to ignore: the mysterious, agitated manner of Julius Hanford at Hexam's and at the police station; Rokesmith's “constrained” and “troubled” manner at his first meeting with Bella (I, 4); his lack of references; the coincidence of his securing a room at the Wilfer home and employment at Boffin's; his seemingly maniacal avoidance of Mortimer Lightwood. Dickens leads the reader to conclude for himself that Hanford and Rokesmith are Harmon.

On the other hand, whereas Dickens was at great pains to suggest Harmon's identity, he was at great pains to conceal from the reader that Boffin is only playing the miser. The final notes for the novel indicate that Boffin's “pious fraud” was meant to deceive the reader as well as Bella. The reader's perception of Boffin's avarice is to be tied carefully to Bella's point of view; in the plans for Book III, chapter 4, Dickens writes:

Work up to Bella's account of the change in Mr. Boffin—broken to the reader through her—

Mercenary Bella, Money, Money, money Lay the ground very carefully all through

Dickens's … [emphasis] suggests his care in limiting the reader's knowledge to what Bella knows. Similarly, the notes for chapter 5 indicate Dickens's plan to keep both Bella and the reader unaware:

Mr Boffin and Rokesmith and Mrs Boffin, having, unknown to reader, arranged their plan, now strike in with it

She always touched and hurt by even the pretended change in her husband. Can't bear Bella to see him so.

Work in The Misers—to bring out his pretended love of money

Lay the ground for Mrs Lammle

Bella at war with herself⁶

Keep Bella watching, and never suspecting

Adhering to these plans, Dickens first indicates the change in Boffin in a conversation between Bella and Mr. Wilfer at the end of Book III, chapter 4: “But Mr. Boffin is being spoilt by prosperity, and is changing every day.” Because the reader has not seen Boffin for some six chapters, Bella's sudden revelation is plausible. Then, in chapter 5, Bella's suspicions are dramatized for the reader. In the opening scene, Bella and the reader witness Boffin setting Rokesmith's salary, announcing that he intends to “buy him out and out,” and proposing that Bella and the Boffins join together “to hold our own now, against everybody (for everybody's hand is stretched out to be dipped into our pockets), and we have got to recollect that money makes money, as well as makes everything else.” Although Bella's perception of Boffin's behavior is verified by the narrator's mention of Mrs. Boffin's unease, the scene is dominated by Bella's point of view. Bella's consciousness frames the scene. The chapter opens with Bella's entering Mr. Boffin's room in the midst of a discussion between Boffin and Rokesmith: “On that very night of her return from the Happy Return, something chanced which Bella closely followed with her eyes and ears. … Mr. and Mrs. Boffin were reported sitting in this room [Boffin's], when Bella got back. Entering it, she found the Secretary there too.” The scene closes with Bella's private reaction to what she has just witnessed: “What he said was very sensible, I am sure, and very true, I am sure. It is only what I often say to myself. Don't I like it then? No, I don't like it, and, though he is my liberal benefactor, I disparage him for it.” Spatially and temporally, the scene is presented from Bella's point of view. The reader, like Bella, has no access to the conversation that took place before Bella's arrival.⁷

Although the conversation itself is presented dramatically by an external narrator, the scene is punctuated by brief descriptions of Bella's observing and reacting to Boffin's display of greed. Bella barely speaks, and yet the narrator emphasizes her presence as an observer. At Rokesmith's exit, “Bella's eyes followed him to the door, lighted on Mr. Boffin complacently thrown back in his easy-chair, and drooped over her book.” While Boffin lectures, Bella “ventured for a moment to look stealthily towards him under her eyelashes, and she saw a dark cloud of suspicion, covetousness, and conceit, overshadowing the once open face.” Of the four characters in the room, Bella is the only one whose thoughts are described or implied by the narrator: she “felt that Mrs. Boffin was not comfortable”; she is a “deceiving Bella … to look at him with that pensively abstracted air, as if her mind were full of her book, and she had not heard a single word” (III, 5). The reader's perception of the scene thus is closely allied with Bella's. Both Bella and the reader suffer the same lack of knowledge, and both are deceived by Boffin's performance. Granted, the reader is ironically distanced from Bella in that he, more than Bella, recognizes its aptness and perhaps its potential lesson for the mercenary Bella. Nevertheless, Dickens manipulates point of view in order to place Bella and the reader in similar states of unknowing.

Dickens uses the same technique in the other scenes in which Noddy performs for Bella. At the end of this chapter Boffin lectures Rokesmith for spending too much money. Again, Bella's consciousness—her studious watching of Boffin—frames the scene, and throughout the scene her presence as an observer is emphasized. When Boffin's treatment of his secretary later forces Bella to defend Rokesmith and to leave the Boffin home, the climactic scene is framed by Bella's perspective. Within the scene itself, the narrator departs from his objective reporting of externals only when he discloses Bella's state of mind; for instance, Bella “involuntarily” raises her eyes, and she begins “to understand what she had done” (III, 15). The account of Boffin's visits to bookstores in search of biographies of misers is limited even more explicitly to Bella's perceptions (III, 5). In this case, the narration is dominated by the limited, third-person point of view.

Although the reader's knowledge of the change in Boffin is determined for the most part by Bella's knowledge—the reader sees what Bella sees—the narrator allows the reader to witness Boffin's performances in another context, Boffin's scenes with Wegg and Venus. In Book III, chapter 6, Boffin brings his volumes on misers to the Bower for a reading. Although the scene is narrated objectively by an external narrator, the reader sees Boffin exactly as Wegg and Venus see him. Before Boffin arrives, the friendly movers discuss their plot against him. Subsequently, the reader's perception of Boffin's miserly obsession is influenced by his knowledge of Wegg's plot, just as Wegg and Venus have in mind their friendly move as they watch Boffin. Like the reader, Wegg and Venus are clearly observers, suspiciously eyeing Boffin. Furthermore, in describing their watchfulness, the narrator implies their reactions:

Mr. Wegg and Mr. Venus looked at one another wonderingly: and Mr. Wegg, in fitting on his spectacles, opened his eyes wide over their rims, and tapped the side of his nose: as an admonition to Venus to keep himself generally wide awake.

And again:

Venus complying with the invitation while it was yet being given, Silas pegged at him with his wooden leg to call his particular attention to Mr. Boffin standing musing before the fire, in the space between the two settles.

By aligning the reader's observations with those of Wegg and Venus, Dickens clearly intends that this scene substantiate the reader's earlier acceptance (with Bella) of Boffin's avarice. In the plans for this chapter, Dickens directed himself to “relieve by making Wegg as comic as possible.”⁸ There would be no need for comic relief if the reader were not expected to take Boffin's behavior seriously and to regard Boffin as another in the long list of characters dehumanized by greed. Furthermore, the care which Dickens takes in describing Boffin's library suggests his intention to convince the reader that Boffin is indeed a miser. As Stanley Friedman argues, the “feigned bibliomania seems intended to enhance the credibility of Boffin's behavior in these scenes, by serving as an added symptom and also, perhaps, as a supposed contributory cause.”⁹

Until Boffin's pretense is revealed, Dickens continues to limit the reader's perception of Boffin to the perceptions of the gulled characters in one of three ways: by narrating a scene from the implied point of view of the gull, as in Wegg's and Venus's observation of Boffin's touring the Mounds (III, 6); by externally and objectively narrating a scene but limiting the facts to those perceived by one or more of the gulled characters, as in Boffin's visit to Venus's shop (III, 14) and Wegg's coming to terms with Boffin (IV, 3); or by punctuating an otherwise externally narrated scene with the point of view of the gulled characters, as in Boffin's meeting with the Lammles (IV, 2).

Only once does Dickens depart from this technique to offer the reader a glimpse of Boffin performing without witnesses. Near the end of Book III, chapter 14, as Boffin leaves Venus, the narrator allows the reader to witness the inner Boffin, seemingly engrossed in his miser's role and performing for no audience at all:

“Now, I wonder,” he meditated as he went along, nursing his stick, “whether it can be, that Venus is setting himself to get the better of Wegg? Whether it can be, that he means, when I have bought Wegg out, to have me all to himself and to pick me clean to the bones?”

It was a cunning and suspicious idea, quite in the way of his school of Misers, and he looked very cunning and suspicious as he went jogging through the streets. More than once or twice, more than twice or thrice, say half-a-dozen times, he took his stick from the arm on which he nursed it, and hit a straight sharp rap at the air with its head. Possibly the wooden countenance of Mr. Silas Wegg was incorporeally before him at those moments, for he hit with intense satisfaction.

E. Salter Davies has pointed out the problem created by this passage: “Was Boffin the sort of man who would keep up his miserly pretence when there was no one to observe him?” Davies' defense of the passage, that Boffin “showed considerable ability as an actor in his long-drawn-out struggle with Silas Wegg,”¹⁰ is plausible but somehow doesn't satisfy. If we bear in mind Dickens's careful manipulation of the reader throughout the Boffin plot, Boffin's performance in this passage seems intended to deceive the reader and the reader alone.¹¹ The passage is deliberately ambiguous. The narrator's use of the seemingly pejorative words “cunning” and “suspicious” leads the reader to conclude that Boffin is totally avaricious and self-absorbed. While it is possible that the conditional nature of Boffin's speech and the suppositional nature of the narrator's description (“looked very cunning” and “Possibly”) indicate that the scene may not be a performance at all but the real Boffin's reaction to what he has just witnessed, Dickens nevertheless forces the reader to arrive at the wrong conclusion. Having absorbed the reactions of Bella, Wegg, and Venus, the reader now interprets this passage as a confirmation of Boffin's depravity.

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. Boffin's pretense serves more than the “double purpose” that Arnold Kettle suggests: “Bella is tested and changed by her experiences … and at the same time the possibilities of corruption inherent in the Boffin-situation are triumphantly revealed.”¹² The possibilities of corruption would not be so triumphantly revealed if the reader were not forced to believe in the possibility of Boffin's greed. Another purpose, suggested by Masao Miyoshi, is that Boffin's “role-playing” can be seen as his “way of obviating an unpleasant new self that could very well have emerged from his sudden condition of wealth.”¹³ Both theories are substantiated by the text. From the beginning, Boffin is uneasy with and suspicious of his newly acquired riches. After a session in which he is advised by Lightwood of his inheritance and teased by Wrayburn, Boffin emerges convinced that money is “a great lot to take care of.” Shortly thereafter, confronted by a job-seeking Rokesmith, Boffin wonders “How much? … It must be coming to money” (I, 8). Well before the pretense, Boffin is dismayed by the “dismal swamp” of sycophants attracted by his money: “He could not but feel that, like an eminently aristocratic family cheese, it was much too large for his wants, and bred an infinite amount of parasites; but he was content to regard this drawback on his property as a sort of perpetual Legacy Duty” (II, 8).

Dickens's careful narration of Boffin's life as miser has still another purpose and another effect: the reader's education. Boffin fulfills the docetic function of the satirist, as Sylvia Manning notes, by “doing in life, with himself as material, what the satirist at least claims to do in art: presenting the ugly, without disguise and possibly even exaggerated in its ugliness, so that we will be able to recognize it for what it is.”¹⁴ The reader's lesson differs from Bella's. While she learns of the dehumanizing effects of greed and materialism and of the truth of her own nature, the reader learns of the error of easy judgments. Whereas Bella recognizes that she has misjudged her own nature, the reader finds that he too readily has judged the character of Noddy Boffin. Dickens manipulates the reader into misapprehending the essential Boffin on the basis of external, superficial behavior and limited perceptions of the gulled characters. Like Bella, the reader faces an awakening (primarily an aesthetic and cognitive one, whereas Bella's awakening is moral): the awareness of his limited vision.¹⁵ As John M. Robson argues in his rhetorical analysis of the first number of the novel, “At the very least, Dickens may be seen as attempting, like a rhetor, to change his audience's attitudes and behavior.”¹⁶ Realizing his error, the reader also recognizes his exaggerated pride in his ability to perceive and to judge.

The juxtaposition of the soon-transparent Harmon disguise with the Boffin disguise further complicates both the reader's error in judgment and his lesson. By allowing the reader to guess early and correctly that Rokesmith is Harmon, Dickens inflates the reader's confidence in his powers of detection and judgment. Had Dickens's narrator simply told the reader of Harmon's identity, the reader would not be so convinced of his own ability to discover the truth behind appearances. There is a certain gamesmanship in Dickens's handling of this narration, as indicated in the Postscript's comment that some readers “would suppose that I was at great pains to conceal exactly what I was at great pains to suggest.” Having recognized Harmon, the reader assumes that he knows what Dickens's narrator is about: the narrator has offered more clues to Harmon's identity to the reader than to the other characters and probably will continue to allow the reader more knowledge than the individual characters. The narrator, it seems, shares more of his omniscience with the reader than with any character, except perhaps Harmon.¹⁷ The narrator, however, manipulates Boffin's disguise so that the reader knows less than some characters (Harmon, Mrs. Boffin, Mr. Boffin) and only as much as the gulled characters (Bella, Wegg, Venus). Thus, when Boffin reveals his disguise, the reader's inflated belief in his role as detective and in his powers to perceive and to judge is deflated.

By learning of his limited powers of perceiving and knowing, the reader becomes engaged actively in the thematic concerns of the novel. The world of Our Mutual Friend is one of surfaces and veneers which often belie essences. Each character searches for knowledge or truth in an environment of fog and dimmed light: “It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. 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” (III, 1). Like Mr. Venus's shop of “objects, vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct” (I, 7), the world of the novel is not entirely obscure, but, more cruelly, only partially obscure, tantalizing the perceiver with half-truths. Twemlow is confused by the appearance of friendship and entirely deceived by Fledgeby's false humility. At her death, Betty Higden takes Lizzie to be “the boofer lady,” Bella. Georgiana Podsnap, reared in the shade, seeing life mainly in the reflections of her father's boots and in “the walnut and rosewood tables of the dim drawing-room” (I, 11), naïvely accepts the Lammles' interest in her as genuine. Sophronia and Alfred Lammle mistake the appearance of wealth for wealth, realize their error only after marriage, and resolve to use appearances to prey upon others. Bradley Headstone devotes his life to the appearance of respectability and, in so caging his own nature, teases the beast within him.

In such a world of limited knowledge and confused perception, the ability to understand and to judge is flawed. Bella misjudges herself by thinking that wealth is all that she values. Limited information leads Miss Potterson to believe Riderhood and to condemn Hexam, and Jenny Wren to misjudge Riah. Like the reader who misapprehends Boffin, these characters err innocently because they do not know all there is to know. At the other extreme is Podsnap, proud in his ignorance, dismissing with a flourish of his right arm the facts which do not conform to his preconceptions: “I don't want to know about it; I don't choose to discuss it; I don't admit it!” (I, 11).

Throughout the novel, only John Harmon has both the inclination and the position to acquire sufficient knowledge before judging and acting. The initial reason for his return to London in disguise is his desire to know Bella before acceding to his father's wishes. Later, his supposed death allows him the flexibility to prove Bella, to seek the truth behind the charges against Hexam, to “repair a wrong” against Lizzie (II, 13), and to resolve his questions about his own identity. Yet even Harmon's power to know and to set things right with his knowledge is limited. There are areas, as James A. Davies notes, “where his efforts have no effect, the Headstone/Wrayburn sequence being the main example. His effectiveness is pessimistically qualified by our sense of a world of dark and uncontrollable emotion and violence, unsusceptible to order or to virtuous influence.”¹⁸

The narrator of Our Mutual Friend does not free the reader from the limitations on knowledge which plague the characters but immerses him in the crowded world of appearances and entanglements. Only occasionally does the narrator immediately share his omniscience and invite the reader to judge with him. This happens primarily in the heavily satiric passages: the descriptions of Society, the Veneerings, the Podsnaps, and Mrs. Wilfer. For much of the novel, however, the reader is forced to discover for himself, as in his gradual perception of the Harmon disguise, and in the case of Boffin, to learn from the error of his discoveries.

The equation of reading with a process of learning and discovery has been described by Wolfgang Iser in his study of the development of the author-reader relationship from Bunyan to Beckett: “The reader discovers the meaning of the text, taking negation as his starting-point; he discovers a new reality through a fiction which, at least in part, is different from the world he himself is used to; and he discovers the deficiencies inherent in prevalent norms and in his own restricted behavior.” The nineteenth-century novel, according to Iser, makes a transition between the form of the eighteenth-century novel, which “gives the reader the impression that he and the author are partners in discovering the reality of human experience,” and the twentieth-century novel, which forces the reader “to strive for himself to unravel the mysteries of a sometimes strikingly obscure composition.”¹⁹ The relationship between the author and the reader in Our Mutual Friend clearly falls between these two poles and, if one accepts Iser's notion of development, can be seen as a transition between the eighteenth-century and twentieth-century forms. On the one hand, the satiric and morally righteous voices of Dickens's narrator create a partnership between reader and author, so that when the narrator judges, the reader shares his moral sympathies; even when the reader is misjudging Boffin, he is allied with the narrator in condemning greed. On the other hand, the reader of Our Mutual Friend is not always told, but often offered clues which lead him to unravel for himself the complexities of plot and character and, in the case of Boffin's pretense, to misapprehend reality.

The manipulation of the reader's knowledge in the Boffin case is only one instance of Dickens's confusing the reader in order to force him into a more active role of discovery. The first chapter of the novel offers examples of two stratagems which Dickens continues to use throughout the novel. First, in the opening paragraphs, the narrator seems tentative or even unsure about the Thames scene he describes:

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 recognisable 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 lookout. 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 boat-hook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in a 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.

(I, 1)

As he reads this passage, the reader's role is not unlike that of the detective searching for the clue which will bring the scene into focus and make sense of what he sees. Much of the description proceeds by negatives: “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 boat-hook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman.” The mystery and tentativeness are compounded by the narrator's repetition of the words “something” and “thing” throughout the first chapter. In the girl's look there is “a touch of dread or horror,” not “dread and horror” but “dread or horror,” as if the narrator is guessing; similarly, her age is “nineteen or twenty.” Secondly, in this initial description, the narrator withholds significant facts and thus offers the reader only partial knowledge. The “something” that the “strong man with ragged grizzled hair” searches for is later revealed to be a corpse. The “something” that he washes in the river (I, 1) turns out to be money. Dickens continues to use these two stratagems, description by negation and withholding of information, to engage the reader in the themes of the novel and to force upon him a limited perspective.

By far Dickens's most effective way of limiting the reader's knowledge in Our Mutual Friend is the narrator's shifting point of view, particularly his adoption of limited, third-person points of view. Throughout the novel the narrator manipulates point of view, as we have already seen him doing in the Boffin plot. Either he limits the reader's point of view to the perspective of one character, or he includes the internal perspective of one character in an otherwise objective narration. Furthermore, the character whose perceptions are most accessible to the reader is often confused by what he witnesses, misled by his perceptions, or ill-prepared to understand thoroughly what he perceives. For instance, Bradley Headstone's mysterious pursuit of Eugene Wrayburn through the Plashwater Weir Mill Lock is presented from the point of view of a rather sleepy Riderhood, who only gradually recognizes his visitor and still cannot account for Headstone's “honest man's dress”:

When Riderhood had run to his second windlass and turned it, and while he leaned against the lever of that gate to help it to swing open presently, he noticed, lying to rest under the green hedge by the towing-path astern of the Lock, a Bargeman.

The water rose and rose as the sluice poured in, dispersing the scum which had formed behind the lumbering gates, and sending the boat up, so that the sculler gradually rose like an apparition against the light from the bargeman's point of view. Riderhood observed that the bargeman rose too, leaning on his arm, and seemed to have his eyes fastened on the rising figure.

(IV, 1)

Headstone's subsequent attack on Wrayburn is narrated entirely from Wrayburn's point of view, but Wrayburn is emotionally torn by the crisis in his relationship with Lizzie and unable to recognize the disguised Headstone in the darkness:

He had sauntered far enough. Before turning to retrace his steps, he stopped upon the margin, to look down at the reflected night. In an instant, with a dreadful crash, the reflected night turned crooked, flames shot jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars came bursting from the sky.

Was he struck by lightning? With some incoherent half-formed thought to that effect, he turned under the blows that were blinding him and mashing his life, and closed with a murderer, whom he caught by a red neckerchief—unless the raining down of his own blood gave it that hue.

Eugene was light, active, and expert; but his arms were broken, or he was paralysed, and could do no more than hang on to the man with his head swung back, so that he could see nothing but the heaving sky. After dragging at the assailant, he fell on the bank with him, and then there was another great crash, and then a splash, and all was done.

(IV, 6)

Similarly, the reader's perception of the first meeting between Rokesmith and Boffin (I, 8) is limited almost entirely to the point of view of Boffin, who is uncomfortable with his new wealth and who has just been confused by Wrayburn's teasing. Although the reader maintains some ironic distance from Boffin, he perceives Rokesmith much as Boffin does and is given access to only Boffin's thoughts. Later when Harmon visits Pleasant Riderhood (II, 12), the reader is given Pleasant's perspective; of the two characters, she has the lesser ability to understand the meeting.

As Fred W. Boege has argued in his important article on Dickens's use of point of view, our image of Dickens as “primarily an objective novelist who uses the loosely omniscient point of view” is “incomplete.”²⁰ Although Dickens's narratives hardly anticipate the consistent and studied use of the limited point of view in the fiction of James or Conrad, Dickens was clearly aware of the effect on the reader. Richard Stang also notes Dickens's use of the technique in Our Mutual Friend and argues that Dickens “saw it as a valuable means of rendering the inner life of his characters.”²¹ Certainly John Harmon's long monologue (II, 13) and Bella's debates with herself are designed to render the inner life. Yet Dickens's frequent choice of the perspective of exceptionally minor characters indicates that he uses the limited point of view not only to give his characters psychological depth, but also to limit the reader's perspective and thereby engage him in the blurred and shadowy world of the novel. Thus, to describe the Harmon wedding, the narrator creates Gruff and Glum and renders the scene from the perspective of the old pensioner who plays no other role in the novel (IV, 4).²² Or the narrator will invent only an undelineated presence, limited in space and time, like the “Whosoever” of the following passage:

Whosoever had gone out of Fleet Street into the Temple at the date of this history, and had wandered disconsolate about the Temple until he stumbled on a dismal churchyard, and had looked up at the dismal windows commanding that churchyard until at the most dismal window of them all he saw a dismal boy, would in him have beheld, at one grand comprehensive swoop of the eye, the managing clerk, junior clerk, common-law clerk, conveyancing clerk, chancery clerk, every refinement and department of clerk, of Mr. Mortimer Lightwood, erewhile called in the newspapers eminent solicitor.

(I, 8)

The frequent shifting of what Uspensky calls the temporal and spatial planes, from the omniscient, objective voice of the narrator to the third-person, limited points of view of numerous characters, shatters the reader's expectation of a controlled, unified world in the novel. At the very least, the accessibility of whatever unity there is has been limited.

By frequently limiting the reader to the impaired perspective of confused or gulled characters, by deliberately suspending knowledge or obscuring what the reader wants to know, the narrator thus creates a structure characterized by “the juxtaposition of incompatible fragments in a pattern of disharmony or mutual contradiction,” as J. Hillis Miller argues.²³ Although given clues, the reader must often form his own pattern of the fragments, resolve for himself the contradictions and participate actively in the process of discovery that he shares with the characters. In this process of discovery, the reader is led by the narrator's clues into confusion and error.

Dickens's active engagement of the reader in the world of Our Mutual Friend should not surprise us. Dickens is always the rhetorical artist, fashioning from the matter of his world structures and narrations designed to affect his reader. From Dickens's handling of character and plot to his manipulation of point of view, all the techniques of his craft work to affect the reader: to arouse him to sympathy or anger, to confuse him, to instruct him.²⁴ In a letter to Forster, Dickens spoke of “that particular relation … which subsists between me and the public.”²⁵ Indeed, that relation was very “particular” because, as a nineteenth-century writer, he enjoyed an audience for whom the popular novel and the serious novel had not become antithetical forms and because he, more than any other nineteenth-century novelist, emotionally and aesthetically depended upon the reactions of his readers. The public readings, which he pursued so feverishly that they hastened his death, were to him “like writing a book in company.”²⁶ Similarly, periodical publication was suited to that relationship between Dickens and his public, for it offered him the knowledge of his readers' reactions to a novel before it was completed and the luxury of responding to those reactions.²⁷ Furthermore, as editor of Household Words and All the Year Round, he insisted that his contributors not underestimate the intelligence of the audience, “that, though their essays must be clear, they should not write down to their audience.”²⁸ This advice he himself took seriously, particularly in the later novels in which he increasingly told the reader less and led him to discover more. Thus in Our Mutual Friend “that particular relation” assumes a very active form. In his last completed novel, Dickens limits the reader's perspective and knowledge and leads him through error to discovery.

Notes

1. Our Mutual Friend, introd. E. Salter Davies, New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), Bk. III, ch. 13. Subsequent references are to this text and indicate book and chapter.

2. Charles Dickens (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 382.

3. The Imagination of Charles Dickens (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1962), p. 181.

4. Introd., Our Mutual Friend, Everyman's Library ed. (New York: Dutton; London: Dent, 1907), p. xii.

5. “No Change of Intention in Our Mutual Friend,” Dickensian, 63 (1967), 37-40.

6. Ernest Boll, “The Plotting of Our Mutual Friend,” Modern Philology, 42 (1944), 113. Boll's article includes a transcript of Dickens's notes for the novel. The manuscript may be found at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

7. Boris Uspensky, A Poetics of Composition, trans. Valentina Zavarin and Susan Wittig (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1973), pp. 57-80, discusses point of view on several planes: the ideological plane, the phraseological plane, the spatial and temporal plane, and the psychological plane. He defines the spatial and temporal plane as follows: “The author accompanies the character but does not merge with him; then the authorial description is not limited to the subjective view of the character but is ‘suprapersonal.’ In such cases the positions of the author and character correspond on the spatial plane, but diverge on the planes of ideology, phraseology, and so forth” (p. 58). Similarly, the narrator “may count time and order the chronological events from the position of one of the characters” (pp. 65-66).

8. Boll, p. 113.

9. “The Motif of Reading in Our Mutual Friend,” NCF [Nineteenth-Century Literature], 28 (1973), 52. See pp. 38-61 for a thorough account of the sources and thematic implications of Boffin's reading.

10. Introd., Our Mutual Friend, p. viii.

11. Mrs. Lammle shows up soon after, but there is no indication that she witnesses Boffin's performance and none that he was aware of her watching.

12. “Our Mutual Friend,” Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 215.

13. “Resolution of Identity in Our Mutual Friend,” Victorian Newsletter, No. 26 (Fall 1964), p. 8.

14. Dickens as Satirist (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), p. 225.

15. This argument, of course, does not account for the reader's emotional reaction, his sense of being “tricked.” There is a serious problem in the rather simple psychology of the “pious fraud”: having been shown his error, one is supposed to reform or convert. The strategy works with Bella, but it may not be so effective with a sophisticated reader. Furthermore, the problem is augmented by the modern reader's difficulty in accepting Bella's effusive gratitude after Boffin confesses.

16. “Our Mutual Friend: A Rhetorical Approach to the First Number,” Dickens Studies Annual, ed. Robert B. Partlow, Jr., III (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1974), 198.

17. The narrator gives the reader a sense of omniscience by allowing him geographical and temporal freedom; the reader witnesses more scenes than any one character. Yet, in many scenes, the reader's knowledge is limited to the perspective of one or two characters.

18. “Boffin's Secretary,” Dickensian, 72 (1976), 156. See pp. 148-57 for a discussion of the relationship between Harmon's position as Secretary and his increasing power and knowledge.

19. The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), pp. xiii, 102. Iser uses Vanity Fair to illustrate that the realistic novel is the halfway point in the development. Although he sees traces of the modern relationship between author and reader in Dickens's fiction, he cites primarily the early novels and is more interested in the narrator who is less identified with the implied author and more apt to become a character within the novel (like the narrator of Vanity Fair).

20. “Point of View in Dickens,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 65 (1950), 91.

21. The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), p. 103.

22. J. Hillis Miller cites Gruff and Glum as an indication of the narrator's need to see the world from the perspective of persons engaged in it and as an example of the fragmented world of the novel. See Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 292.

23. Miller, p. 284.

24. See Harvey P. Sucksmith, The Narrative Art of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), for the fullest treatment of Dickens's fiction as rhetorical art.

25. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (New York: Doubleday Doran, 1928), p. 646.

26. The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Walter Dexter, The Nonesuch Dickens, 3 vols. (London [Bloombury]: Nonesuch Press, 1938), II, 825.

27. George H. Ford, Dickens and His Readers (1955; rpt. New York: Gordian Press, 1974), p. 23, aptly compares the reciprocity offered by periodical publication to the dynamic relationship between a stage actor and his audience.

28. Stang, p. 99.