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

“Life’s a riddle: a most infernally hard riddle to guess. . . . My own opinion is, that like that celebrated conundrum, ‘Why’s a man in jail like a man out of jail?’ there’s no answer to it.”

—Montague Tigg Martin Chuzzlewit

The first sentence of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend has been out of print for more than a century. In the two editions of the novel that Dickens personally oversaw—the initial serial publication (1864–65) and the first book edition of 1865—a 1 x 4 inch slip of paper overlaps the opening paragraph. ¹ This slip contains instructions addressed to the reader:

^**^* The Reader will understand the use of the popular phrase OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, as the title of this book, on arriving at the Ninth Chapter

(page 84).

In a novel about surface and substance, disguised identity, linguistic conundrums—indeed, in 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 in the history of the serial. Popular since the Renaissance, the publication of word games exploded with the advent of affordable serial magazines in the late eighteenth century. By the time Our Mutual Friend began to appear in 1864, riddles, conundrums, and enigmas held a prominent place in such periodicals as Bentley’s Miscellany, The New Monthly Magazine, Punch, and Dickens’s own All the Year Round. The serial format provided the perfect forum for these games. Contributors posed riddles to be solved by the next issue, and subscribers competed to be the first to guess the answer. Significantly, the answer to one serial riddle frequently became the source and text for the next. For instance, in Dickens’s All the Year Round for 12 September 1863, a contributor published the riddle: “Misery, myself, and my wife.” The answer to this riddle, “wo(e)man,” in turn, served to inform the riddle for 19 September: “My first two letters are a man, my first three a woman, my first four a brave man, my whole a brave woman.” The answer announced the next week, “heroine,” became the source for an ensuing issue’s riddle, and so forth. Composed by writers as diverse as Tom Hood, Christina Rossetti, and Thomas Macaulay, these self-generating games relied on punning, on literal and/or metaphorical readings of words, diagrams, and pictures in which the answer proved hidden in the text. ²

Dickens considered riddles and puns important instruments in his comic repertoire. “Why are the well-skilled lively young men who puzzle [riddles] out condemned to write our burlesques and pantomimes,” All the Year Round observes in 1865, “while the unskilled dull dogs are nearly always selected to write our comedies and dramas?” ³ Dickens’s biography suggests the author’s own eclectic interest in riddles. It is no coincidence that riddles and verbal games find their way into many of Dickens’s letters. In two letters to W. H. Wills, Dickens’s editor for All the Year Round, the novelist hints at his extra-martial affair with the actress Ellen Ternan. In a letter dated 20 September 1857, Dickens refers to his visit to the Doncaster Races, explaining that he has come to Doncaster “along of his Richard Wardour,” a character Dickens recently played in an amateur...