n purely
physical jokes--jokes about the body. The general dislike which every
one felt for Mr. Stiggins's nose is of the same kind as the ardent
desire which Mr. Lammle felt for Mr. Fledgeby's nose. "Give me your
nose, Sir," said Mr. Lammle. That sentence alone would be enough to show
that the young Dickens had never died.

The opening of a book goes for a great deal. The opening of _Our Mutual
Friend_ is much more instinctively energetic and light-hearted than that
of any of the other novels of his concluding period. Dickens had always
enough optimism to make his stories end well. He had not, in his later
years, always enough optimism to make them begin well. Even _Great
Expectations_, the saddest of his later books, ends well; it ends well
in spite of himself, who had intended it to end badly. But if we leave
the evident case of good endings and take the case of good beginnings,
we see how much _Our Mutual Friend_ stands out from among the other
novels of the evening or the end of Dickens. The tale of _Little Dorrit_
begins in a prison. One of the prisoners is a villain, and his villainy
is as dreary as the prison; that might matter nothing. But the other
prisoner is vivacious, and even his vivacity is dreary. The first note
struck is sad. In the tale of _Edwin Drood_ the first scene is in an
opium den, suffocated with every sort of phantasy and falsehood. Nor is
it true that these openings are merely accidental; they really cast
their shadow over the tales. The people of _Little Dorrit_ begin in
prison; and it is the whole point of the book that people never get out
of prison. The story of _Edwin Drood_ begins amid the fumes of opium,
and it never gets out of the fumes of opium. The darkness of that
strange and horrible smoke is deliberately rolled over the whole story.
Dickens, in his later years, permitted more and more his story to take
the cue from its inception. All the more remarkable, therefore, is the
real jerk and spurt of good spirits with which he opens _Our Mutual
Friend_. It begins with a good piece of rowdy satire, wildly exaggerated
and extremely true. It belongs to the same class as the first chapter
of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, with its preposterous pedigree of the Chuzzlewit
family, or even the first chapter of _Pickwick_, with its immortal
imbecilities about the Theory of Tittlebats and Mr. Blotton of Aldgate.
Doubtless the early satiric chapter in _Our Mutual Friend_ is of a more
strategic and ingenio