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Our Mutual Friend
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Our Mutual Friend
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Our Mutual Friend
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Our Mutual Friend

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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Our Mutual Friend is a satiric masterpiece about money. The last novel Dickens completed, and perhaps his most angry, it sounds all the great themes of his later work: the innocence and venality of the aspiring poor, the hollow pretensions of the nouveau riche, the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt everyone it touches. Among those caught up in the ruthless forces of change in Dickens's London are the archetypal innocent Noddy Boffin, who 'inherits' a dustheap where the trash of the rich is thrown; Silas Wegg, a grotesque, one-legged man with unlimited fantasies of grandeur and power; Mr. Veneering, Member of Parliament, whose house, furnishings, servants, carriage, and baby are all 'bran-new'; and Alfred and Sophronia Lammle, who marry one another because each wrongly believes the other is rich. The social themes of Our Mutual Friend--having to do with the treatment of the poor, education, representative government, even the inheritance laws--are informed and brought into coherence by the underlying presence of the Thames, signifying the perpetual flow of life into death, and acting as agent of retribution and regeneration too, as a kind of river god in fact, in a novel in which no other god is very present.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 1, 2000
ISBN9780679641353
Author

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer and social critic. Regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, Dickens had a prolific collection of works including fifteen novels, five novellas, and hundreds of short stories and articles. The term “cliffhanger endings” was created because of his practice of ending his serial short stories with drama and suspense. Dickens’ political and social beliefs heavily shaped his literary work. He argued against capitalist beliefs, and advocated for children’s rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens advocacy for such causes is apparent in his empathetic portrayal of lower classes in his famous works, such as The Christmas Carol and Hard Times.

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Rating: 4.171764525647059 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It was a happy day when I, for whatever reason, elected to sample Charles Dickens. Having read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, I digressed to more popular fiction (Michener, Clavell, McMurtry, King, Grisham), as well as periods of science fiction and even non-fiction (Ambrose, McCollough for example), before making an effort to upgrade my reading list.I read some Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck and Hemingway with mixed success before reading Great Expectations. I liked it enough to read David Copperfield, and I was hooked. A Tale of Two Cities followed and then Oliver Twist (not my favorite), Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son and Little Dorritt before taking on this door stop of a novel.Much of Dickens’s work tends to be lengthy and excessively wordy, perhaps due to their nature of having been serialized prior to being printed in a single volume. Truth be told, after having read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Tale of Two Cities I confess to being disappointed with several of the following Dickens novels, particularly Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son. I was therefore very pleasantly surprised with Little Dorritt, and this novel, while not the equal of some of the best, is only a notch below. While Dickens is certainly famous for character development, and I’ve found no one better, the novels that I’ve truly enjoyed have been those that also feature an advancement of story line and this one is no different in that regard. It is simply an excellent story, with several divergent threads that come together nicely in the end. It also boasts the kind of outrageous characters that you’ve come to expect in any Dickens work. As in other Dickens works, a period of acclimation is required to become comfortable with the vocabulary and social conventions of the era. For some reason, perhaps the length of time since my last Dickens novel, it took me a little longer this time. Having read almost all of Dickens’s work, I place this novel just behind David Copperfield, Tale of Two Cities and Little Dorritt, roughly on a par with Great Expectations.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another of Dickens sagas wherein the reader has plenty of time to settle down and come to consider each of the characters of the novel as very old acquaintances (yes, this one was serialized too of course). There's a very amusing premise here about the pursuit of wealth and it's consequences: a disagreeable man having made a great fortune from dust (which is just what is sounds like), leaves his great wealth to his son on the condition that he marry a certain young lady named in the will. The young son, who is to arrive from overseas, is found drowned and presumably murdered. The dustman's fortune ends up going to his long-suffering servants, a coupe of very simple folks by the name of Mr and Mrs Boffin, who are among a huge cast of characters, including a mysterious man (the mutual friend of the title), the young woman who was meant to marry the dustman's son, and several despicable characters that you just love to hate, with most everyone coming to meet the end they deserve in what is a most perplexing final plot twist which took away from my general appreciation of the story, I must say, though that is a question of personal taste only. Great narration on this audiobook version read by David Timson.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It took me a good 100 pages to get into this book, but then I was hooked. I enjoyed certain characters more than others: the scenes involving the Veneerings, Lammles and poor Mr Twemlowe were very entertaining, also those involving Mrs Wilfer.. On the other hand, I struggled with the Wegg/Venus and Riderhood/Gaffer chapters, especially as their speech was often rendered phonetically. Miss Jenny Wren did not appeal to me AT ALL and the way she treated her father was very disturbing, but I am pleased to say that I saw the romance with Sloppy coming a mile off. This was, of course, cleverly plotted - the reader believes he is in on the Harmon/Rokesmith secret, only to find there are more layers of plotting to be revealed at the end. Bella seemed to have to wait in the dark unnecessarily long for everything to be explained to her and seemed more accepting than I would have been of what her husband and the Boffins had been up to. Also, was she even legally married and was their baby legitimate, given that John married her under a false name?This may just be my stupidity, but did we ever really find out why John was attacked and left for dead and by whom? Was it connected to the fact that he was the heir to a fortune or just bad luck? Some of the aspects of the novel were very "Victorian" - the saintly toddler Johnny, the way Bella spoke to her father, the way every single person in the novel was connected to all the others by a series of coincidences etc.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read this some 40 years ago and still remember it as an adventure to read. As with most Dicken's books its pages are filled with characters both fascinating and ugly.Despite it being an assigned book in Freshman English I have kept it with me all these years because I treasure it as one of the great books to sit on my library's shelves.I recently read how John Irving considers it to be the best of Dicken's.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.

    Seven months of nibbles, most of these clusters, all braced with serious efforts to remember characters, enlisting wikipedia and rereading, rather often, entire chapters. I'm glad I read such, though I felt most of the characters lived on plotlines like so many pigeons perched above the interstate. Maybe I am being greedy, but i wanted some tension between the molar and molecular, maybe like my instincts I prefer the argumentative quantity, a murder of crows assuming control on the deserted football pitch. Maybe I want more struggle and uncertainty. That said, Our Mutual Friend does have the example of Bradley Headstone; there is an example of actualized potential. Well, the plot certainly benefited. His plausibility should be left for the fore-mentioned crows. Such fare would be a diversion.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dickens's last completed novel is not one of his best in my view, but it does contain some interesting themes on the effects of money on individuals at different levels of society, and a range of colourful and interesting characters, interspersed with some more tedious ones. The more interesting characters were Silas Wegg, the Boffins, the Hexams (but what happened to Charley?), the dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren, and the Wilfers, especially the depiction of the inverted relationship between Bella and her father (matched by that between Jenny Wren and her father), and the imperious attitude of her mother Mrs Wilfer. Rather less interesting were the title character himself John Rokesmith/Harmon, and more especially the rich and/or upwardly mobile Twemlow, the Veneerings, the Podsnaps and Fledgeby; my interest waned appreciably in the chapters based around their lives. More ambiguous was Mr Riah, a character whose only function seems to be to provide a positive Jewish character to counterbalance the negative stereotype of Fagin in Oliver Twist (albeit nearly 30 years earlier); the insertion doesn't really work as Riah is a very minor character and is very two dimensional. There is also a brace of moving deaths that Dickens does so well, those of little Johnny in a children's home and of the elderly Betty Higden, who has run away to avoid going into the workhouse. Overall I found the plot too rambling to be as effective as it might be and, as so often, the best descriptive passages are those around the lives of the poor, in those case often based on and around the river Thames and its environs.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    One of my favorites. First read it on a train. Beginning of my love affair with Dickens. Read it this time on my kindle.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    How I avoided reading so many Dickens novels as an English major in college I do not understand, but I am grateful to whoever donated a set of Dickens novels to the free bin at my local library, because thanks to that donation I managed to read Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby and now Our Mutual Friend. The last is a superb novel, even though one thinks one knows the plot twist early on. Well, it is a plot twist but Dickens has much more in store. A wonderful, surprising novel.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A bit dull for Dickens. Read something else of his!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Moody, dense look at Dickens's London characters. The city and river as wonderful characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An excellent story, though it does drag a bit in parts. I saw the BBC TV production which I loved before reading the book and may have found the written version a little lackluster in terms of character development compared to the TV version. It is a very good story, likely with more elements of surprise if you haven't seen it first.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Dickens last completed novel still finds the author at the height of his powers, but Our Mutual Friend is a curiously disjointed affair. I selected this for our book club read and as I laboured through the first 150 pages, I feared that many of the club readers would not have gotten even this far. Perhaps my ear was not tuned to the author’s style; after all it was 15 years since I had read any of his novels and I had always thought you can’t rush Dickens you have to take him slowly, but suddenly it all started to click: new characters had been introduced at the start of part 2 and the plot started to unfold. I was gripped and remained so until the rather contrived ending 600 pages later..The novel starts with a powerhouse opening chapter; Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie are out on the river Thames in a rowboat. This is no pleasure cruise they are near the dock area and the half savage man is searching for corpses. The mud, dirt and grime are oppressive but they find a body, which could be the missing John Harmon. Mr Boffin old Harmon’s foreman inherits the fortune following the death of the son John and installs himself in the town house. His former place of business the Bower is home to three large mounds of dust which have also been left to him and which may contain further riches. The kindly Bowers take in Bella Wilfer who was mentioned in old Harmon’s will and sets her up as a lady. Silas Wegg an itinerant peddler is also befriended by Mr Boffin and is placed in the Bower as custodian of the dust heaps, he immediately starts plotting to embezzle his patron. A grand deception is played out on Bella, but she is not the only person to be deceived, as identities are concealed. There is murder, there is blackmail, there are rich society folk intent on squeezing the downtrodden poor for all they are worth. The need for money corrupts most people and even Mr Boffin starts to worship at the feet of mammon; becoming a miser, women are sorely tested as they attempt to take a step up in society, there are love stories; romantic love, obsessive love even homosexual love, but overarching everything is the love of money, and the central mystery as to who will gain control of the Harmon fortune and what role John Rokesmith; Boffins secretary will play in this drama.Avarice and the relentless drive to make money in a society that seems threadbare of human virtues is a major theme and it brought to my mind the well known English aphorism “where there’s muck there’s money”. A juxtaposition that is evident throughout: from Gaffer Hexam picking the pockets of the muddy corpses hauled from the river to Silas Wegg and Mr Venus picking away at the enormous dust mounds in Boffin’s Bower. Dickens continually refers to Boffin as The Golden Dustman. The dirt and the grime of the city where the dark and gloomy counting houses are situated is home to the evil young money man Fascination Fledgely. He delights in using the good Jew Riah as a tool for calling in his debts. Dickens is not content to merely portray the winners and losers on the financial merry-go-round, this is not enough, these are nasty vindictive people and he wants his readers to be appalled by their actions. If money is dirty then so is the city of London and the Thames that flows through it is ugly and full of menace. Dust detritus and gloom is everywhere, everything and everyone is covered by it:”The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and, as it sawed, the sawdust whirled around the saw-pit, every street was a saw-pit, and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding and choking him.That mysterious paper currency, which circulates in London when the wind blows, gyrated here there and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush. Flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders on every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the 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 nothing but dust. There sharp eyes and sharp stomachs reap even the east wind, and get something out of it.The wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled. The shrubs wrung their many heads, bemoaning that they had been over-persuaded by the sun to bud, the young leaves pined; the sparrows repented of their early marriages, like men and women; the colours of the rainbow were discernible, not in floral spring, but in the faces of the people whom it nibbled and pinched. And ever the wind sawed and the sawdust whirled.” This is typical of the some of the writing especially in the first half of the book. Dickens takes much delight in repeating a word or phrase to emphasise his point. Money would appear to be the root of most of the evil in this book and Dickens lashes out at the unfettered capitalism that drove the society he saw around him. This is Dickens though and there are good people who will shine through the gloom. Our Mutual Friend has two people with the moral fibre to assert themselves in this rapacious world. Betty Higden and Lizzie Hexam two of the poorest characters in the novel are prepared to make sacrifices for what they believe is right. There are other characters that have good qualities but they are slightly bent out of shape by the world in which they live. I am thinking of John Rokesmith who continues to test the worth of his wife beyond reasonableness, Bella Wilfer and Jenny Wren good characters but both have curious father child relationships a sort of role reversal which feels very odd indeed. There are the two solicitors Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn that are content to drift through life and finally Riah who finds himself blackmailed by Fledgely.While Dickens is able to tie the greedy money men and women into his plot and uses their machinations to move the story along he is not so successful with his attack on the society of the nouveau riche. The second chapter after the excitement of the river scene with the Hexams takes the reader into the rather too stately world of the Veneerings. These are newly rich people who are buying their way into society. They gather around them like minded people who are selfish and snobbish in the extreme. Their conversation and their ideas are all based on how much people are worth and where they are placed in society. Mr Veneering manages to buy his way into parliament and while we can feel Dickens grievance about the corrupt way things are done, their actions add nothing to the development of the novel. Most of the characters around the Veneerings table remain a sideshow, but Dickens spends so much time with them in the first half of the novel that they are a drag on the story element. Dickens at this stage of his life had become bored with such society dinners and his wish to expose them for what they were threatens to sink his novel.I do hope that my fellow book club members were able to grit their teeth and plough on through the less than vibrant story telling of the first part of Our Mutual Friend as there are rich rewards to come. Some wonderful characters are introduced: Mr Sloppy with his buttons and his mangling, Jenny Wren the little doll maker whose stock phrase “I know his tricks and his manners” is aimed at all the men she meets. The aptly named Bradley Headstone obsessed with Lizzie Hexam, Rogue Riderhood, Betty Higden who is terrified of the workhouse, and of course The Golden Dustman. There are also some brilliantly written dramatic scenes; Lizzie Hexams refusal to marry Bradley, The recovery of Rogue Riderhood in the Six Jolly Fellowships and the attempted murder of Eugene Wrayburn. Dickens takes his readers into the world of greed corruption and desperate times in Victorian London. It is a dark world indeed almost becoming supernatural at times, but there are always people who can shine on through. Despite its imbalance in some parts this remains a great novel: there is so much to enjoy, a 4.5 star read
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dickens’ last complete novel. I think that the influence of Wilkie Collins’ success is evident. Dickens’ novel has some of the same elements – a mystery (more than one, actually) and unexpected twists and turns in the plot.It still has Dickens’ exceptional treatment of the characters. There are many scenes in which the reader can revel in the details of character and setting – the first scene in the bone articulator’s shop, for instance.But the part of the novel that exasperated me was the plot to test the moral character of Bella Wilfer carried out by Rokesmith and the Boffins. It borders on lying to the reader. It is an intentional deception, at least. Such a deception should be accompanied by clues and symbolism that allow the reader to have a chance at predicting where the plot will turn. I don’t think there are any clues here. The Harmon/Handford/Rokesmith complication is amply telegraphed to the reader – it does not come across as an unexpected plot surprise. But the deception to fool Bella also fools the reader and leads to a certain amount of disgust – at least for me.I really enjoyed the rest of the novel, though. I think it would be much more popular if the unfortunate deception had been altered by Dickens.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Our Mutual Friend is my new favorite book. This is the last novel Dickens completed before he died, and critics seem to agree it is his most mature. The river Thames plays such a major role in the novel that it is almost a character; it is the scene of many of the novel's major events, including five drownings and one resurrection. There is a dead miser, an expatriated son who apparently drowns in his way to claim his inheritance, and two beautiful women who are sought after by various deserving and undeserving characters. For the panorama of human vice and virtue, Dickens cannot be bested. I read this novel slowly, in part because I really didn't want it to end.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My favourite dickens. I feel in love with Eugene early on, and his quest to gain Lizze provides one of the two main plots. This is a double love story, as well as a tale of murder, money, greed and hatred. There is no more sinister villian in dickens than Bradley Headstone, and none more piteable. A huge book, but one to savour, its complexities resolve into an ending which is both satisfying and truthful. Dickens never did like to sugar over the realities of a situation and here he does his utmost to be faithful to the time and to give his readers hope for the future.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Have tried Dickens before and had a hard time getting through it, but this one was wonderful, I didn't want the story to end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It took me 5 weeks to read the first 300 pages, and then a week to finish the last 500. Oh Dickens, why did you get paid by the word? I didn't think he would ever stop introducing new characters, but being Dickens, he brought it all together beautifully. I found one of the most interesting characters to be the schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone. Generally Dickens is very black and white in his characters, and the schoolmaster is a pretty black character, but he was more pathetic in his blackness instead of pure evil. I even found myself sympathizing with him a little bit. And, as usual with Dickens, I'm really glad I kept reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A wealthy miser dies leaving all of his money to his estranged son, John Harmon, with one major stipulation. He can only inherit his fortune if he marries Bella Wilfer, a woman he has never met. But before the will can be executed, John Harmon's body is found floating in the river under suspicious circumstances. The money is now bequeathed to the Boffins, poor kind-hearted servants who helped raise the son. Being both naive and generous, the Boffins decide to take in Bella Wilfer and raise her as their own daughter, giving her the benefit of the fortune that she missed. In their household, Bella transforms from a mercenary and cold young woman to a kind and generous soul. The Boffins also take in a secretary, John Rokesmith, to help Mr. Boffin in handling his new fortune. We quickly discover that John Rokesmith is actually the missing John Harmon who is able to observe and fall in love with Bella.

    This story had all the elements of a great Dickens novel - quirky but lovable characters, lots of twists and turns in the plot, and plenty of laugh out loud moments. Unlike some of his other novels, there were really no deep dark elements - more of a feel good happy ending type of book. I didn't find this to be as life changing or memorable as A Tale of Two Cities or Bleak House, but enjoyable from beginning to end. Definitely one of my favorite Dickens novels. I loved the narration performed by Simon Vance!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Certainly my favourite Dickens, and one of my favourtie books ever. Eugene Wrayburn is brilliant, Bradley Headstone truly disturbed and disturbing. It's incredible how Dickens managed to draw the character with such small actions. All the characters are drawn perfectly and the plot is wonderfully intricate and absorbing. It is difficult to get into and you might wonder what it's all about to start with, but it's worth sticking with!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Very difficult to get into and several extraneous characters who did little to move the plot forward. But the many threads came together nicely and happy endings were in store for most. As this was the last completed novel of Dickens, it struck me that he was yearning for a happy ending for himself at that point in his life.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I just finished a mini-marathon. Dombey and Son, Hard Times, and Our Mutual Friend in the space of two and a half weeks. It dawns on me that I there is a real danger that I could become a Dickens completist. Yikes! I'd better rush out for a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV and get back to reality.I liked Our Mutual Friend best of the three novels - and what a huge Howard Hughes-Spuce Goose of a novel it is...a wingspan of 42 characters. And made out of wood - good old fashioned Charles Dickens knotty, piney, planed, smoothed, polished, spit upon, rubbed against, all to your satisfaction sir! just knock it and see - Wood!And, believe-it-or-not Ripley, it DOES lift off and fly. Eight hundred pages of wood, off the ground, and flying.The only rough moment for me - and it is always take off - was in Book One, Chapter Two "The Man From Somewhere" when Twemlow is introduced as "an innocent piece of dinner furniture that went upon easy castors and was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street" I did stumble for several pages over inserted leaves until I realized that Twemlow was actually a human. The entire chapter introduces so many people in such a tongue in cheek fashion that I had to sit down in the nearest corner and fan myself, panting all the while. And come back and read the chapter again later.All the old Dickens parts and pieces are assembled here - poor Charles went to his death flogging school teachers, saving young single women, and skewering the greedy - but the effect is not so cloying in Our Mutual Friend. There's sentimentality, but there's also salt, pepper, suspense, flavor, and sarcasm.Dickens is Jenny Wren in this novel His dolls are as carefully crafted as ever, but the doll maker is there too, to laugh and carp and mock and tweak and hope, like us all, for love, and even fish for compliments. Consequently, the extremes in humor and pathos are more muted, the twists are more interesting, the personalities more complex, good and evil more blended and it all seems somehow more modern a novel. A Dickens novel, perhaps, for those who may think they don't like Dickens.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wacky, moving, and generally delightful! This novel has sold me on Dickens.

    Similarly to The Mill on the Floss, this novel makes bitter that I cannot go find a Dickens fandom on the Internet. English class is good and all, but there's much less in the way of squeeing. I guess I will simply have to force everyone I know to read it....
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Our Mutual Friend marks a happy return to the earlier manner of Dickens at the end of Dickens's life. One might call it a sort of Indian summer of his farce. Those who most truly love Dickens love the earlier Dickens; and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a young man come back from the dead. In this book indeed he does not merely return to his farce; he returns in a manner to his vulgarity. It is the old democratic and even uneducated Dickens who is writing here. The very title is illiterate. Any priggish pupil teacher could tell Dickens that there is no such phrase in English as "our mutual friend." Any one could tell Dickens that "our mutual friend" means "our reciprocal friend," and that "our reciprocal friend" means nothing. If he had only had all the solemn advantages of academic learning (the absence of which in him was lamented by the Quarterly Review), he would have known better. He would have known that the correct phrase for a man known to two people is "our common friend." But if one calls one's friend a common friend, even that phrase is open to misunderstanding.

    I dwell with a gloomy pleasure on this mistake in the very title of the book because I, for one, am not pleased to see Dickens gradually absorbed by modern culture and good manners. Dickens, by class and genius, belonged to the kind of people who do talk about a "mutual friend"; and for that class there is a very great deal to be said. These two things can at least be said -- that this class does understand the meaning of the word "friend" and the meaning of the word "mutual." I know that for some long time before he had been slowly and subtly sucked into the whirlpool of the fashionable views of later England. I know that in Bleak House he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than he treats them in David Copperfield. I know that in A Tale of Two Cities, having come under the influence of Carlyle, he treats revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobbett he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in The Mystery of Edwin Drood he not only praised the Minor Canon of Cloisterham at the expense of the dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I know that he even took the last and most disastrous step in the modern English reaction. While blaming the old Cloisterham monks (who were democratic), he praised the old-world peace that they had left behind them -- an old-world peace which is simply one of the last amusements of aristocracy. The modern rich feel quite at home with the dead monks. They would have felt anything but comfortable with the live ones. I know, in short, how the simple democracy of Dickens was gradually dimmed by the decay and reaction of the middle of the nineteenth century. I know that he fell into some of the bad habits of aristocratic sentimentalism. I know that he used the word "gentleman" as meaning good man. But all this only adds to the unholy joy with which I realise that the very title of one of his best books was a vulgarism. It is pleasant to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for the gentility with which Dickens was half impressed. Dickens is the old self-made man; you may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages and its merits. No university man would have written the title; no university man could have written the book."

    Da introdução, de G. K. Chesterton
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dickens at his most wonderful and at his most dreadful. The good bits of this book are a very strong reminder of why we should read Dickens and keep on re-reading him at every opportunity; the bad bits help to explain why many of us don't do that. We get some of his most vivid, unexpected sketches of characters and settings, especially the famous characterization of the River Thames that gives the book a kind of Wagnerian Leitmotif. In Headstone we have one of the most striking descriptions of hate and obsession anywhere, the hapless Wegg is a brilliant description of small-minded envy, and the sensitive way Dickens treats his "minority" characters (a mentally-handicapped person, one with a physical disability, an alcoholic, and a Jew) is completely different from what you expect from the mid-Victorian period. Despite the length of the book, one of its most striking features is the economy with which Dickens handles the scene changes. The Veneerings and their friends, who provide a Greek chorus commenting on the action at critical points, would dominate the story if it had been written by Trollope or Thackeray; Dickens barely pencils them in, but we still feel as though we know them all intimately. On the other hand, there is one of the silliest and least plausible plot devices in the whole canon of Victorian fiction, we get two "good deaths" so sentimental they will make you feel physically sick, and there are a couple of father-daughter relationships that are almost as bad. Members of the teaching profession might also be forgiven for feeling a bit hard done by: apparently Dickens had not said all the nasty things he wanted to about education in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times, so he thought of a few more for this book...
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I enjoyed this Dickens immensely and read it just before the brilliant TV drama adaptation came out. David Morrisey is Bradley Headstone (the creepy infactuated teacher), one of the McGanns is the love interest and 'Miss Toner' of Tutti Frutti is the crippled ?seamstress...I've forgotten now! Anyway book and TV drama fantastic.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Quite a typical Dickens; full of humour, satirical, and a great read.I very much enjoyed it and liked the story a lot; I enjoyed the different characters, who are all in a way charicatures of the type of people they represent. I found it a bit hard at the beginning, especially because there are a lot of different characters introduced, but I really got drawn into it. It's a book that really makes you feel for the people in it, it gives you a sense that you are close to them and makes you wish for the best for all of the nice people, and wish for something dreadful to happen to the bad people...With a twist at the end, Dickens manages to do just that: the bad people are punished, the good are rewarded and live happily ever after. Though I found the ending somewhat unlikely, it did make for a nice twist to the story, and it was certainly unexpected.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    2007, Naxos Audiobooks, Read by David TimsonIn the opening chapters of Our Mutual Friend, a body is fished from the Thames and wrongly identified as that of John Harmon, a young man recently returned to London to claim his inheritance. According to the terms of his father’s will, John is required to marry Bella Wilfer, a beautiful mercenary girl whom he has never met, in order to inherit his enormous fortune. Fearing (no doubt correctly) that Miss Wilfer would marry him solely for his money, John takes advantage of the misidentification and assumes the alias, John Rokesmith. Can he get the lovely Bella fall in love with him without the lure of his great wealth? In the meantime, Harmon’s inheritance passes to the working-class Boffins, a decision which has wide-ranging consequences for various corners of London society. The parallel love story of another young couple has much in common with that of John and Bella: handsome society lawyer Eugene Wrayburn falls in love with Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of a corpse robber. Eugene, previously world-weary, comes alive when he meets Lizze for the first time. Of course, such a marriage is impossible. Isn’t it?Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’ last complete novel, is replete with his usual social criticism: mainly the power of money to impact people’s lives for good or ill, mostly the latter. Expect a Dickens-size cast of eclectic characters, including various villains, the pair of young couples aforementioned, and a pint-size doll’s dressmaker who will completely win your heart. Recommended: Highly! Particularly, of course, for lovers of the classics. This audio narration performance by David Timson is extraordinary!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This rivals Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities as my favorite Dickens, though now I want to reread Hard Times and Bleak House to make sure.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Too long. Wikipedia descriptions of characters was useful
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Charles Dickens' penultimate novel, and last complete one, is a compendium of the best and worst of his art. The characters are present, perhaps too many, but they lack the fresh life and spirit of earlier works like Dombey & Son or Bleak House.The metaphors are present, but the waters of Our Mutual Friend are dark and foreboding, ultimately leading to death; while the waters of earlier works, such as Dombey again, hold the promise of life. It seems that Dickens is worn out and it shows in the lack of energy; but in spite of this there remain beautiful passages and complex plotting, perhaps his greatest. His critique of social class and society surrounds the story with the caricature of the Veneerings at its apex. Within the story he uses his theme of false identity as well as he ever has with one of the central characters, John Harmon, the prime specimen. But he fails to provide a central character with whom we can identify as he did so well in David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations. The Boffins, who are very appealing at first, appear to change their moral character and thus disappoint (at least Mr. Boffin) while the most appealing characters, like Jenny Wren or Lizzie Hexam, are not substantial enough or central enough to carry the novel. So we have a novel that receives a mixed grade from this reader. I finished it longing for the early Dickens humor and the later Dickens greatness but was left with a bit of that but not enough to sustain the 800 pages he had devoted to the story of Our Mutual Friend.