Parallels Between Our Mutual Friend and the Alice Books

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Parallels Between Our Mutual Friend and the Alice Books Richard Arnoldi (bio) "Then pray," said Bella, sternly putting the question to herself in the looking-glass as usual, "what do you mean by this, you inconsistent little Beast?" The looking-glass preserving a discreet ministerial silence when thus called upon for explanation, Bella went to bed. . . Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London, 1957), p. 442. "And here Alice's adventures are told as though they came from the inside of a dream." (Horace Gregory, "Foreword" to Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, (New York, 1964), p. vi.) Dicken's Our Mutual Friend was published in monthly numbers running from May, 1864 to November, 1865. The first edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published on July 4, 1865. Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871. On January 16, 1868, Lewis Carroll wrote an entry in his journal, from which these lines are excerpted: "I have also added a few pages to the second volume of Alice. . . . One novel has been all my reading, Our Mutual Friend, one of the cleverest that Dickens has written." Roger Lancelyn Green notes parenthetically that "the second volume of Alice" actually refers to Through the Looking-Glass."1 It is clear that Carroll read and enjoyed Our Mutual Friend, but the time sequence suggests several additional things. Although he could not have read all of Our Mutual Friend before he wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll did read the Dickens novel at precisely the same time he was working on Through the Looking-Glass. In fact, Carroll may have read excerpts from the novel before its publication in book form and neglected to mention them. Any enthusiastic follower of Dickens would at least have known the existence of a given work at the time of its first publication—and Carroll makes it clear elsewhere that he admired some of Dickens' other novels (i.e., David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit). It is apparent that Dickens and Carroll shared certain interests and images. The looking-glass section of Dickens' description of the Veneering dinner party shows Dickens' awareness of the dramatic and symbolic possibilities inherent in mirror-images. It remained for Carroll to actualize in Through the Looking-Glass the conception of the world behind the mirror. In Our Mutual Friend, when Wegg finally decides to drop down upon Boffin, he recites this bit of poetry: [End Page 54] If you'll come to the Bower I've shaded for you,Your bed shan't be roses all spangled with doo:Will you, will you, will you, will you come to the Bower?2 "The Lobster-Quadrille" in Alice in Wonderland contains the following lines: Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?3 It is possible that both poems are parodies of Mary Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly." However, the refrains of "will you, will you" (in the case of Dickens) and "will you, won't you" (in the case of Carroll) have no counterpart in Howitt's poem. That the two writers should each independently create such a distinctive refrain seems more than a coincidence in taste and inventiveness, particularly since Carroll's poem was added after he wrote the first version of Alice4 and presumably after the publication of Our Mutual Friend. Our Mutual Friend offers a great store of characters, situations, and observations that would have been especially appealing to Carroll. Jenny Wren is first described as "a child—a dwarf—girl—a something." She explains that she cannot get up "because my back's bad, and my legs are queer" (p. 208). She asks Bradley Headstone to guess her profession, and when he cannot guess, she says: ". . . I'll give you a clue to my trade, in a game of forfeits. I love my love with a B because she's Beautiful; I hate my love with a B because she is Brazen; I took her...