It is Mr. Venus’s voice that makes each object distinct, that calls forth individual objects from the muddle. Individuality comes out of the act of naming, not the other way around, and this ability makes Mr. Venus a creative figure in the book, acknowledged by Wegg as a man with a monumental task: “… you with the patience to fit together on wires the whole framework of society — I allude to the human skelinton.” The “skelinton” is articulated bones. The bones of perception are articulated in words. Words are the “framework of society,” but in this society, something dreadful has happened to them.
The word society refers to a particular group of characters in the novel, and this domain of the Podsnaps and their “bathing” guests, the fraudulent Lammles, and the Veneerings is given the full treatment of Dickens’s crushing satire. When the Veneerings give a dinner party, the scene is described not directly but through its reflection in a mirror. Significantly, this long passage is written as a series of sentence fragments, each one beginning with the word Reflects. A single fragment gives the feeling:
Reflects mature young lady; raven locks and complexion that lights up well when well powdered — as it is carrying on considerably in the captivation of mature young gentleman; with too much nose in his face, too much ginger in his whiskers, too much torso in his waistcoat, too much sparkle in his studs, his eyes, his buttons, his talk, and his teeth.
The use of the mirror damns society as flat, superficial, and illusory, but the reflection is also a field of brokenness, an image of piecemeal, not whole, bodies that returns the reader to Mr Venus’s bone shop. Like Dickens’s joke of the two noses, the mirror subverts the conventions of body image. The dissection of the “mature young gentleman” makes no distinction between his garments and his body parts. There is no inside or outside, only a flat visual impression signaled in the refrain “too much,” which applies equally to eyes and to buttons. The aged Lady Tippins, omnipresent at all of “society’s” functions, is also hard to grasp as a whole being: “Whereabout in the bonnet and drapery announced by her name any fragment of the real woman may be concealed is perhaps known to her maid.” There is inevitably something morbid about these descriptions of “society” and its creatures, a sense that these fragments smell of death. When Tippins rattles her fan, the noise is compared to the rattling of her bones, and when Eugene Wrayburn looks down at the ruined corpse of Radfoot early in the novel, he comments, “Not much worse than Lady Tippins.”
Like many of her cohorts, Tippins is little more than a name. When Veneering decides to run for Parliament, he asks Twemlow, a meek little man, if his powerful cousin Lord Snigsworth “would give his name as a member of my committee. I don’t go so far as to ask for his Lordship; I ask only for his name.” In terms of the narrative, this is entirely reasonable. The name is what counts in society. The gentleman himself is quite dispensable. The cleft between words and the world resists closing. This is the story’s metaphysical ache. Naming is arbitrary: signs appear to refer not to experience but to other signs.
While there is something noble about Mr. Venus’s efforts to articulate bits and pieces of the dead, because his work is an attempt to make order from what is in the end hopelessly “warious,” society resists meaning and order by allowing itself to be ruled by signs that have no referents. In Our Mutual Friend “the whole framework of society” is disintegrating under the weight of its dominant sign — money — which, not surprisingly, acts very much like dust:
That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the wind blows, gyrates here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come? Whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is caught flying by electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind legions of iron rails. In Paris where nothing is wasted, costly and luxurious city though it be, but where wonderful human ants creep out of holes and pick up every scrap, there is no such thing. There it blows only dust.
As the dominant cultural fiction of developed societies, money is an ideal nonsensical sign. Dickens penetrates the peculiar fact that paper can be exchanged for something real, that money serves as a society’s founding gibberish, what Marx called “the general confounding and compounding of all things — the world upside down.” But money is just one of a host of meaningless signs. One empty letter gives birth to the next. Veneering, for example, buys entrance to Parliament so that “he may write a couple of initials after his name at the extremely cheap rate of two thousand five hundred per letter.” L.S.D. is exchanged for M.P.:
Why money should be so precious to an ass so dull as to exchange it for no other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the earth, but the three dry letters L.S.D., not Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness, which they so often stand for, but the three dry letters.
Dry letters are everywhere. Dickens had a penchant for mysterious initials, acronyms, for alphabet jokes and pure nonsense. He brings his reader close to the abstractness of signs, to the surprise that these markings can be interpreted at all. As a young man, he studied shorthand, and the account of his struggles with that new alphabet is revealing. He called them “the most despotic characters I have ever known”:
The changes that were wrung upon dots which in such a position meant such a thing and in such another position meant something entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs, the tremendous effect of a curve in the wrong place, not only troubled my waking hours but reappeared before me in my sleep.
Dickens’s use of the word despotic to describe the unintelligible characters is significant, because it suggests a hierarchy — the reader laboring under the tyranny of signs. In Our Mutual Friend there is a strong connection between despotic written characters and paternal human characters. Fathers, real ones and figurative ones, are the keepers of letters, member of a ruling class eager to sire not children but paper. Veneering, for example, hosts the “Fathers of the Scrip-church” and among them is “the father of three hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.” Eugene Wrayburn’s overbearing father, who has pushed him into the law but never actually appears in the book, is called simply M.R.F. (My Respected Father) by his son. The ironic acronym stands in contrast to the meaning of the words, which are in effect devoured by the cryptogram. Twemlow, that modest participant in society’s gatherings, has a father figure, too — Lord Snigsworth. He never enters the story in person, either. He appears only as a portrait hung on the wall. John Harmon’s father, also invisible in death, is paper only, a figure who survives as nothing but text in the several conflicting wills he has left behind. These are paper men, mere ghostly markings somewhere between presence and absence. They are there, and they are not there.
Paternity, when associated with society, is usually mediated through signs or mirror images; and despite the fact that the thing these mediated forms represent is often unattainable, the paternal has power. Eugene stages several inner dialogues with M.R.F., and the paternal voice crushes the son with its blanket prohibitions. Harmon’s ghost manipulates his heirs through his dust fortune. And other paternal figures, although they may appear bodily in the narrative, are similarly unapproachable. Podsnap never once addresses his daughter Georgiana by name. For her, he is a specular image. The narrator tells us that Miss Podsnap’s “early views of life” were “principally derived from the reflections of it in her father’s boots.” Podsnap equates fatherhood with censorship. His job is to cut short conversations that he considers potentially injurious to “the young person”: With “a flourish of his arm,” he waves all undesirable subjects “from the face of the earth.” And again the text brings us back to the dead body through a meaningless name. When Podsnap insists that the half dozen people who have recently starved to death in the streets of London are themselves to blame, Twemlow, the mild arbiter of good sense in the novel, objects. Podsnap accuses him of “Centralization”: