Previous
Soliloquy
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Our Mutual Friend puts Dickens’s reputation for profusion on full display. Long sentences overflow with metaphors, long clauses, and allusions that have the effect overwhelming the reader. This syntactic complexity foregrounds feeling—pent-up rage, biting humor, or rapturous joy—and weaves emotion into the reading experience.
The novel’s stylistic range is part of Dickens’s narratorial versatility. At times, these long sentences find humor through mimicry. As a third-person narrator, Dickens directly imitates the tics and speech patterns of his characters. Through free indirect discourse, Our Mutual Friend pokes fun at Lady Tippins’s flighty gossip and Mr. Podsnap’s pompous declarations—“that they, when unable to lay hold of him, should respectfully grasp at the hem of his mantle; that they, when they could not bask in the glory of him the sun, should take up with the pale reflected light of the watery young moon his daughter; appeared quite natural, becoming, and proper.”
Our Mutual Friend is not strictly limited to caricature. Dickens inhabits many stylistic effects and voices by changing his own narratorial stance. He speaks about his characters but also speaks at them, directly addressing the half-drowned Riderhood at one point: “if you are not gone for good, Mr. Riderhood, it would be something to know where you are hiding at present.” When observing his characters from afar, the novel uses parentheticals to add a sense of humorous irony. Declaring Mr. Lammle to be the “(most loving of husbands)” is a subtly comic jab at the entirely mercenary marriage.
Placing still greater distance from its characters, the novel sometimes switches tense. Our Mutual Friend deftly navigates through narrative time, suddenly speeding to two weeks after the Lammles’ marriage or summoning the “blooming summer days” of the Boffins’ wealth. It lifts the reader from one event to the next, shuffling its characters through the plot as though they are puppets in a play.
Dickens’s tendency towards extravagance makes fun of language’s limits, too—the novel pushes words to the verge of senselessness. In describing the many applicants to the Boffins’ charity, Dickens mentions “all the people alive who have made inventions that won't act, and all the jobbers who job in all the jobberies jobbed.” It experiments with high-blown, euphemistic circumlocutions in humorous fashion. The Milveys' search for children involves vague “emissaries,” “orphan scrip,” and “fluctuations” in “production” that cloaks a corrupt orphanage system in the vocabulary of stock trading. Lady Tippins doesn’t chew—she undergoes “mastication” and “deglutition.” The novel’s sentences create a tapestry of styles and emotions—at once discursive, parodic, and intimate.
