Our Mutual Friend: Hyperbole 2 key examples

Ms. Higden’s threat is irrationally dramatic. She resolves—in terms impossible to accept literally—to throw her children under a “loaded waggon” or set fire to her cottage rather than end up in the care of the Poor-house. The exaggerated violence of these measures lends itself to terms of speech more than actual proposals. Their figurative force speaks to Ms. Higden’s “strong constitution” and “indomitable purpose.”

Hyperbole is not unusual for an author whose characters frequently tend towards overperformance. Like Mr. Podsnap, the Dickensian character has strange obsessions (shaving at a quarter-past and breakfasting at nine) or quirks of speech. Bearing more resemblance to the world of caricatures than of reality, they sometimes express their emotions in extremes. The outburst of this scene simplifies Ms. Higden into a portrait of well-meaning earnestness.

Ms. Higden’s disproportionate response serves a second function by advancing Dickens’s own social views. Couched in her reaction is the author’s unsubtle critique of England’s 1834 Poor Law, which rounded up the country’s poor to workhouses with terrible living conditions overseen by corrupt local boards. Like Oliver Twist, Ms. Higden’s violent distaste for the Poor-house offers a convenient opening for the novel to address the “Lord and Gentlemen and Honorable Boards” in protest of the country’s social conditions.

The familiar hyperbole of these admissions could reasonably belong to any love-sickened suitor. Trial by “fire,” “water,” “gallows,” and “death” are commonplace tropes that articulate the depth of romantic feeling. What frighteningly separates Headstone from the rest, though, is his sincerity. Failing persuasion and feminine sympathy, he resorts instead to violence. The schoolteacher’s maddened declarations of love are hard to believe until he actually begins to act on them—the bottom of his “raging sea” dislodges stones and bloodies his own knuckles. He not only sings the usual notes of lovelorn dates but follows through on those insane declarations. “I am in thorough earnest, dreadful earnest,” he warns Lizzie.

Headstone’s hyperbole shows how excess can be a formidable force in Dickens’s fictional repertoire. Following conventions of 19th-century melodrama, Dickensian fiction sometimes features simplistically evil characters. Characters from his previous works try thwarting the main characters with little motive besides love or greed, and Our Mutual Friend is no exception. In a novel that singles out its villains from heroes, the schoolteacher’s terrifying obsession with Lizzie slots him firmly in the former camp.