OUR MUTUAL FRIEND, A TALE OF TWO CITIES

About one-third of the way through Our Mutual Friend (1865), the character Mrs Wilfer is moved to pronounce on the impassable social distance that separates her and her family from another pair of characters, the Boffins. Her youngest daughter, Lavinia, or Lavvy, has just incited her sister Bella to what is adjudged to be an almost mutinous degree of ‘levity’, simply by asking her, ‘And how are your Boffins?’ Mrs Wilfer's reproach can stand as a fairly typical expression of the way she functions in the novel as a whole:

It is possible to render Mrs Wilfer even more intelligible than she herself is aware by registering the presence of another phrase standing behind the one she actually employs:

The transformation of the phrase, not only in the context of this episode and of this strand of the novel, but also in the context of the novel as a whole, is particularly suggestive. It is also an example of something that is going on in Dickens all the time: the inability to let sleeping words lie, the need to reanimate dead bits of language, to resuscitate phrases that long usage has made almost meaningless. There are plenty of examples in this novel alone; and there are plenty of examples also in this novel of other tripartite phrases. Tripartite phrases seem to be designed to tie down words that will need redefinition in the course of the novel.