SOURCE: “Savages in a ‘Bran-New’ World: Carlyle and Our Mutual Friend,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 10, No. 2, Summer, 1978, pp. 199-217.

In the following essay, Qualls suggests that Thomas Carlyle's vocabulary, stock characters, and social concerns strongly influenced Dickens's writing of Our Mutual Friend.

Though Dickens, a few months before beginning Our Mutual Friend, wrote to Carlyle of “always reading you faithfully and trying to go your way,”¹ no close attention has been given to any role Carlyle's work might play in that novel.² Yet in essential ways Carlyle's presence is as strong and significant in Dickens's last completed work as in the more “obviously” Carlylean Hard Times and Tale of Two Cities. Many of its themes had of course been in the air for decades, and to say “Dickens is using Carlyle here and here and here” is a dangerous and even silly business. Concern with Mechanism...