The Cup and the Lip and the Riddle of Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

In a novel about surface and substance, disguised identity, linguistic conundrums-indeed, a novel where the very plot is carried forward through the exchange of slips and scraps of paper-such a tipped in slip deserves critical attention. Yet the slip heretofore exists as a sort of purloined letter, so conspicuously present that it has been missed entirely. Scholarly reprints of the novel, including the most recent Everyman's Library edition (1994), omit the slip, while critical works maintain more than a century of silence on the subject. A careful study of this slip of paper and the first page of the novel, however, reveals Dickens's ambitious attempt to open his work with a riddle that introduces some of the main aspects of his narrative. A reading of Our Mutual Friend, as we shall see, involves a complex working out of the mysteries and idiosyncrasies presented on the first page. Riddles, conundrums, enigmas, and other word games occupy a unique position the history of the serial. Popular since the Renaissance, the publication of word games exploded with the advent of affordable serial magazines the late eighteenth century. By the time Our Mutual Friend began to appear 1864, riddles, conundrums, and