Our Mutual Friend: Satire 6 key examples

Dickens sets Bella and Lizzie at similar starting points. The novel organizes romantic plotlines around two women who are both keenly conscious of their class statuses. Lizzie is the daughter of a waterside scavenger, and Bella comes from a household whose “embarrassed circumstances” make even “veal-cutlet” a luxury. Courted by upper-class men, they both end up in lopsided relationships.

They respond to these circumstances in tellingly different ways, however. Bella’s experience of financial hardship leads to a sense of neediness. She snivels with the knowledge of wealth denied and scoffs at John Rokesmith. She fantasizes about husbands who own an “impudent yacht” and “cashmere shawls” while gladly taking herself under the Boffins’ wings. The desire for wealth is simply “one of the consequences of being poor, and of thoroughly hating and detesting to be poor,” she explains. For Bella, poverty gives all the more permission for extravagance.

Being “poor” meanwhile steers Lizzie towards the very opposite extreme. As a blandly obedient character, she turns down opportunities for advancement—Charley and Eugene Wrayburn each force literacy classes upon her. Bella more than gladly enters high society while Lizzie completely retreats from it. She cuts off ties with her brother and flees London. At Plashwater Weir Mill, her rejection of Eugene Wrayburn has shame written all over it. “What else can I be, when I know the distance and difference between us?” she pleads with him.

Just as they react separately to class, they embody divergent ideals of femininity. Bella displays a more decisive and forceful vision of womanhood. She is unruly, demanding, and sarcastic, wielding her feminine power to an extent that Lizzie does not. Bella exerts a bossiness over her father and Rokesmith, empowered by her great expectations and sense of entitlement. By contrast, Lizzie’s courtship bears an implicitly predatory dynamic. The strong sexual undertones in Eugene’s conversation with Mortimer, Headstone’s violent outbursts, or even Fledgeby’s sidelong advances suggest that she is a thing to be possessed. Bella asserts herself whereas Lizzie acquiesces. The trajectories of their character development differ accordingly: one charts a narrative path towards greater humility and the other finds her way out of pure self-effacement.

Granted, none of these differences may matter much in the end. Dickens upholds both characters as domestic ideals—Lizzie, the wifely nurse for Wrayburn and Bella, whose 180-pivot transforms her from a brat into a resourceful, spirited housewife. But though the two characters submit themselves to marriage in the end, they demonstrate contrasting understandings of womanhood before doing so. Bella and Lizzie showcase the different possibilities of female expression within Victorian society’s constraints.

Mr. Podsnap’s pompousness meets its match in Mrs. Wilfer, whose sense of entitlement and “stinging discipline” is pathetically comic. She grudges the Boffins’ generosity but also fancies herself a distant relative to such lofty figures as “King Frederick of Prussia.” Mrs. Wilfer’s control over family and husband is an assertion of feminine power; it is also part of a suffocating puritanism. Bella’s mother makes a show of scorning wealth while secretly regarding it. She humiliates Bella in her self-abasement and exalts her family pedigree during her 25th anniversary with Mr. Wilfer. “Why not openly say that they are much too kind and too good for us?” she asks her daughter, only to remind her husband of his unworthiness at every possible opportunity. This highhandedness and mock humility exaggerate both the middle class’s narrow-minded conventions and its small-heartedness.

Through emphasis on the sheer improbability of these “innocent” requests, Dickens mocks the “alligators” who flock to the Boffins for help. He puts the range of fraudulent gimmicks on full display: some will “make an end of themselves at a quarter to one P.M.,” husbands and wives write behind each other’s backs, and still others invoke “the trust of a common humanity.” Our Mutual Friend playfully catalogues all the flimsy trappings of the charity appeals. In a mercenary age, gullibility may be as great a flaw as stinginess.

Dickens further qualifies his stance on charity by valorizing self-sufficiency. The novel contrasts these weak-minded scams to Betty Higden’s “strong constitution” and sense of “indomitable purpose.” The “active old woman” steers clear of the poor-house and refuses public attention when she faints. Ms. Higden would rather request a loan from the Boffins than receive their charity. Her refusal of any outside help allows her to assert autonomy and industry in a novel where few others move themselves to action. While Ms. Higden’s self-reliance places her on the other extreme, her heart “may count in Heaven as high as heads.”

As a caricaturist, Dickens takes generous liberties to craft comically simplistic impressions. In this sketch, he shows the stories to be not only impractical but uselessly absurd. By extension, this facetious humor implicitly criticizes the moralizing quality of British education.

Equally absurd and even more problematic is the corruption within British government. A mix of abstract personification and fake seriousness underlies his comic account of “Britannia,” who “discovers all of a sudden” that the “Majesty’s faithful Commons are incomplete” without Veneering and will grant him a seat if he “‘put down’ five thousand pounds.” Veneering—an incompetent, depthless character—thus finds a seat in the country’s most powerful legislative bodies. Dickens plays up Parliament’s ethical shortcomings to an extravagant, farcical extent.

This is all part of Dickens’s tendency to criticize. While he rarely proposed solutions, the Victorian author often used his fictional appeal to raise awareness of social problems. Across his works and speeches, Dickens attacked factories, poor-houses, government boards, and the Chancery, among other institutions. Through a sense of deadpan humor and satire, he positioned himself as an outspoken critic of many fixtures of society.

The irony of the Lammles’ dilemma lies in its sheer misinterpretation. Book 1, Chapter 10 previously revealed to the reader that neither husband nor wife actually owns any property—frauds attract frauds, and both Mr. and Mrs. Lammle find themselves victims of their own schemes. But the charade, once started, goes on. London’s high society assumes that the Lammles’ many house-purchasing “disappointments” stem from high tastes rather than cash-strapped finances. Their poverty gets misinterpreted instead as a sign of overwhelming wealth.

Dickens extends this irony to satirical proportions. The reader knows, but the others don’t. In fact, the couple’s elite acquaintances are so mistaken that they envy the Lammles for their nonexistent “palatial residence.” The newlyweds create for themselves a “shining little reputation” and lofty expectations that send their friends to shame. Possessing no property of their own, they even inspire dissatisfaction among those who do. The Lammles’ new home goes the way of the emperor’s new clothes.

Through this irony, Dickens attacks all sides of upper-class society. He condemns the shallow judgment of its members and—even more—the nerve of its imposters. The novel strikes a reactionary stance amid the rise of a newly moneyed class, criticizing them through a couple that is all style and no substance.

And then there are the Veneerings—pun intended—who hold dinner parties in their gilded mansions to make up for their bland “newness.” “No man troubles himself about the Veneerings themselves,” the narrator remarks. Together, this band of London elites makes a joke of politics and fairness. They “lobby” on behalf of Mr. Veneering for Parliament, who then cuts side deals with “Chairman” and “Contractor.” England’s rich gloat over their privilege and wealth, insulated from the novel’s actual scenes of action.

Taken together, these follies and absurdities are the source of troubling injustices. Money, the novel suggests, is indeed the root of evil in its many variations. Fledgeby wrings his debtors dry while the Lammles prey on financially promising young women. Whether through its negligence or acts of ill-will, the upper class contributes to a prevailing social structure that brings out the worst within people. Silas Wegg plots for money, Riderhood commits perjury, and George Radfoot backstabs John Harmon. The cultural desire for wealth and status plays out most forcefully in Bella’s struggle against her own greedy impulses, when she admits to her father:

When I was at home expecting to be rich, I thought vaguely of all the great things I would do. But when I had been disappointed of my splendid fortune, and came to see it from day to day in other hands, and to have before my eyes what it could really do, then I became the mercenary little wretch I am.

Cite this Quote

Bella’s aspirations for upper-class status embody the worst of elitism, and they reveal the extent to which the upper class has eroded English society’s humanity and morals. The novel is an indictment of a society gone morally bankrupt in its pursuit of connections and wealth.