I just finished two excellent chapters in Our Mutual Friend. The mood has definitely darkened; I can’t help but feel pinpricks of anxiety even though I’ve read the story before. Both of these chapters illustrate Dickens’s technique of stage-setting a scene before he lets his players enter and perform (he was interested in the theater throughout his life).
In “Podsnappery,” Dickens provides a more in-depth analysis of one of Veneering’s “oldest friends,” Mr. Podsnap, and his family:
The Podsnaps lived in a shady angle adjoining Portman Square. They were a kind of people certain to dwell in the shade, wherever they dwelt. Miss Podsnap’s life had been, from her first appearance on this planet, altogether of a shady order . . . Miss Podsnap’s early views of life being principally derived from the reflections of it in her father’s boots, and in the walnut and rosewood tables of the dim drawing- rooms, and in their swarthy giants of looking-glasses, were of a sombre cast; and it was not wonderful that now, when she was on most days solemnly tooled through the Park by the side of her mother in a great tall custard-coloured phaeton, she showed above the apron of that vehicle like a dejected young person sitting up in bed to take a startled look at things in general, and very strongly desiring to get her head under the counterpane again.
After this bleak introduction, we observe the newlywed Lammles—disappointed in each assuming the other was bringing wealth to the marriage—begin to cultivate the shy Georgiana Podsnap, with an eye toward making money.
In “The Sweat of an Honest Man’s Brow,” we experience London in the spring:
It was not summer yet, but spring; and it was not gentle spring ethereally mild, as in Thomson’s Seasons, but nipping spring with an easterly wind, as in Johnson’s, Jackson’s, Dickson’s, Smith’s, and Jones’s Seasons. The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit, and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding him and choking him.
In a moment, Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn—fellow lawyers and old school friends—will be visited by Rogue Riderhood (echoes of Red Ridinghood?), a river rat who’s going to turn in fellow Thames denizen Gaffer Hexam for the death of John Harmon.







