SOURCE: “‘The Ring of Cant’: Formulaic Elements in Our Mutual Friend,” in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 24, 1996, pp. 167-84.

In the following essay, Edgecombe studies the “cant” often disparaged by critics of Our Mutual Friend, and suggests that this was part of a deliberate and highly-controlled strategy to reinforce the primary concerns of the author.

At one point of Our Mutual Friend Dickens turns to the Podsnaps in his audience and attacks them for their reductive use of language, for the way in which they have blocked sentient human responses with unreal, inhuman formulae. The rebuke to some extent recalls the arraignment of Scrooge by the Spirit of Christmas Present—“Man … if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is” (Christmas Books, 47; Stave 3):

A surprising spirit in this lonely woman after so many years...