Our Mutual Friend (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple)

By Charles Dickens

First published serially between 1864 and 1865, “Our Mutual Friend” is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens. The death of a wealthy miser, who is estranged from all except his trusted employees, Nicodemus and Henrietta Boffin, brings his son John Harmon back to London in order to claim his inheritance. The patrimony carries with it one condition, that he marries a woman he has never met, Miss Bella Wilfer. When a body is found floating in the Thames, it is presumed to be John, and the inheritance instead passes to the Boffins. The kind-hearted working class Boffins take into their household the disappointed bride to be Miss Wilfer and treat her as their own daughter, pampering her with their newfound wealth. They also accept the generous offer of John Rokesmith to attend to their financial affairs for free. Rokesmith, who also goes by the alias of Julius Handford, is in fact the heir John Harmon, presumed to be dead. Dickens’s novel is a thematically rich one, addressing the struggle of man between societal expectations and the desire to follow one’s heart. Rich with a symbolism of rebirth, “Our Mutual Friend” brilliantly dramatizes the impact that wealth plays upon society. This edition includes an introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Sep 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781420959086

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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OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

By CHARLES DICKENS

Introduction by

EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE

Our Mutual Friend

By Charles Dickens

Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5907-9

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5908-6

This edition copyright © 2018. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of the frontispiece by Marcus Stone for the 1901 edition of Our Mutual Friend, published by Chapman & Hall, London.

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CONTENTS

Introduction.

Book 1.

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

Chapter 10.

Chapter 11.

Chapter 12.

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Chapter 16.

Chapter 17.

Book 2.

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

Chapter 10.

Chapter 11.

Chapter 12.

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Chapter 16.

Book 3.

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

Chapter 10.

Chapter 11.

Chapter 12.

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Chapter 16.

Chapter 17.

Book 4.

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Chapter 7.

Chapter 8.

Chapter 9.

Chapter 10.

Chapter 11.

Chapter 12.

Chapter 13.

Chapter 14.

Chapter 15.

Chapter 16.

Chapter 17.

Postscript

Biographical Afterword

Introduction.

This romance was published in monthly numbers, extending from May, 1864, to November, 1865.{1} Dickens had conceived some of the characters and incidents of the story as far back as 1861. The feeling of improbability, which the least critical reader experiences in following the course of the narrative, is partly accounted for by the way in which the author picked up its materials. Almost everything in it is exceptional; but it may be said that portions which shock even the eager and ready credulity of the ordinary novel reader were founded on facts. In his wanderings by the banks of the Thames, he had seen hand-bills posted up, indicating that fishing for the bodies of persons drowned in the river was a regular business of some degraded watermen; and his ready imagination suggested the characters of Hexam and Rogue Riderhood. At Chatham, while once walking with Leech, the artist, both were struck and amused by observing a father and son together,—the uneducated father in fustian and the educated boy in spectacles. Charley Hexam was the extension of the educated boy. Marcus Stone, the illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, had discovered a queer character engaged in a strange trade, and carried Dickens to see him; and the result was the introduction into the story of Mr. Venus, preserver of animals and birds, and articulator of human bones. Mr. Riah, the patriarchal and benevolent old Jew, was made quite a prominent character in the book, because a Jewish lady, whom Dickens highly esteemed, considered that Fagin, in Oliver Twist, was calculated to bring reproach on the Jewish religion as well as on the Jewish race. In repairing the wrong, Dickens fell into the opposite error of making the scapegoat of Fascinating Fledgeby altogether too noble and august a creature for the business of discounting notes of hand at extravagant rates of discount. The germ of the character of Rokesmith was contained in a letter to Forster, written some time before he concluded to make him the hero of Our Mutual Friend. I think, he wrote, "a man, young and perhaps eccentric, feigning to be dead, and being dead to all intents and purposes external to himself, and for years retaining the singular view of life and character so imparted, would be a good leading incident for a story. The Lammles and the Veneerings, who occupy such a prominent position in the satirical portions of the novel, were thus hinted at before he converted them into characters: I have thought of a poor impostor of a man, marrying a woman for her money; she marrying him for his money; after marriage both finding out their mistake, and entering into a league and covenant against folks in general. These were to be connected with some perfectly new people. Everything was to be new about them. If they presented a father and mother, it seemed as if they must be bran new, like the furniture and the carriages—shining with varnish and just home from the manufacturers."

In combining these scattered memoranda into a romance, Dickens selected the man who feigns himself dead as the central figure. Starting with this improbability, he heaps improbability on improbability as the story proceeds to its improbable conclusion. Mr. Boffin’s relation to Silas Wegg is improbable; his affectation of turning miser in order to disgust Bella Wilfer out of her worldliness is improbable; and it is more improbable still that John Harmon should marry Bella, seemingly under the name of Rokesmith, and then live with her for more than a year without announcing his real name and the fact of his large fortune. Even if Mr. Boffin’s deception was artistically justifiable up to the time Bella left his house and married his discharged clerk, the mystery should have been solved the moment she consented to become his wife; for she had shown all the disinterested affection that the most exacting lover should have required. Dickens, of course, tries to explain John’s conduct by a reference to the eccentricity that had originally led him to feign being dead; but every test to which a woman’s affection could be properly subjected was fulfilled when she abandoned luxury and fortune to share the fortunes of a poor clerk, ignominiously kicked out of his employment; and John Harmon’s device of further testing her perfect confidence in his probity, by exposing it to the shock of seeing him arrested for murder,—the murder being committed by himself on himself,—is one of the most puerile contrivances, among the many puerile contrivances, to which writers of fiction have ever resorted. And all these elaborate improbabilities are intended to lead up to the melodramatic, the theatrical, the stagey scene, in the fifteenth chapter of the fourth book, where Bella is overwhelmed with wonder at the disclosure of Mr. Boffin’s plan of purifying her character from its worldly taint, and of making her as good as she is happy.

But all these improbabilities and inconsistencies, which would have exposed an ordinary novelist to merciless ridicule, are redeemed by the genius with which they are inseparably connected. Simply stated,—that is, divorced from Dickens’s imaginative way of representing them,—the leading incidents and characters are almost as unreal as anything in the Arabian Nights, or in the fairy stories which are the delight of childhood. It seems impossible that they could be embodied in a novel of modern English society, in the development of which thirty or forty thousand of intelligent English readers should be eagerly interested for twenty months in succession, to the extent of rushing to secure the last number of The Mutual Friend, with news from Dickens’s dreamland, as they would hasten to secure the latest edition of The Times, with news from more actual countries. The reason is to be found in the fact that everything Dickens touched was so intensely individualized, that it became real to the heart and imagination when seemingly most unreal to the practical understanding. Why quarrel with Mr. Boffin, or Mrs. Boffin, or Mr. Silas Wegg, or Lizzie Hexam, or Mr. Venus, or Riderhood, or any of the other characters, which are altogether outside of our own actual experience, when we feel more interest in them, either as persons to love or detest, than we do in the men and women we daily meet? The improbability being granted, everything goes on smoothly. The wit and the humor, the comedy and the tragedy, the earnest faces, all alive with human meaning, which start up from the printed page and effect a lodgment in our imagination, reconcile us to all the incongruities which cool criticism relentlessly exposes. Criticism, for instance, may prove that Mr. Boffin ought not to exist; but then the trouble remains that he does exist. The late Mr. Tudor, a Boston ice merchant, took it into his head that he would raise tropical fruits and flowers on the rocky shores of the bleak Nahant. The spot was certainly ill selected; all horticultural critics predicted his failure, and doubted his success until the products were palpably placed before their eyes. In doing this, Mr. Tudor wasted much money which might have been more profitably employed; but he succeeded in realizing his whim. In a similar way, Dickens squandered much genius in settling that portion of Dickens-land included in the characterization of Our Mutual Friend; he might have selected a better place for colonizing the beings of his brain; but still the colonists are there, as much alive as any inhabitants of Canada or Australia, and as visible to the eye of the mind as Mr. Tudor’s orange flowers and pine-apples were to the bodily eye. Both, in seemingly struggling against Nature, conquered her by going through the preliminary process of obeying her; and they conquered, one in his gardens, the other in his romance, by being regardless of expense in turning her away from her instinctive process of adapting her productions to the soils where they naturally grow.

Among all the delicious oddities that Dickens has portrayed, who exceeds Mr. Boffin, as supplemented by his wife? Throwing out of view the improbability of the thing, what can be more richly humorous than Mr. Boffin’s relation with Mr. Silas Wegg, his "literary man, with a wooden leg, who professionally declines and falls, and as a friend drops into poetry? From the first meeting of the patron with his hired man of letters, through all the varied incidents of their intercourse, to the time when Sloppy takes him out of the house, and pitches him, with a prodigious splash, into a scavenger’s cart opportunely passing by the door, the scenes in which they appear are full of laughable matter,—an enjoyable combination of comedy and farce of which the reader never tires. The negotiation between the contracting parties is conducted and concluded on the corner of the street, where Mr. Wegg has established his business of selling ballads, apples, oranges, nuts, and gingerbread, and where he has established imaginary relations with the tenants of the neighboring mansion, whom he christens Miss Elizabeth, Master George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker, and of whom he knows nothing. As to his stock in trade, it gave you the face-ache to look at his apples, the stomach-ache to look at his oranges, and the toothache to look at his nuts. The interview with Mr. Boffin affords Wegg an opportunity to play off his cunning against the other’s simplicity and ignorance. All Print is open to you! exclaims the admiring Mr. Boffin. Why truly sir, I believe, you couldn’t show me the piece of English Print that I wouldn’t be equal to collaring and throwing. On the spot? asks Mr. Boffin. On the spot, confidently replies Mr. Wegg. The wonder to Mr. Boffin is increased by this avowal. Here am I, he says, a man without a wooden leg, and yet all Print is shut to me. In the bargain that is soon after concluded, that Mr. Wegg shall read to his employer at a crown a week, the former is at first inclined to ask more for reading poetry than for reading prose; for, he declares, when a person comes to grind off poetry night after night, it is but right he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind. The ease with which Dickens individualizes a person, to whom he may devote only a page, is shown in the case of the hoarse man driving a donkey in a truck, with a carrot for a whip. He is introduced merely to give Wegg a lift, as he is trudging towards Boffin’s Bower to keep his appointment; and yet he is as distinctly a character as any in the novel. When Mr. Wegg, after mellering his organ with meat jelly, ham, and gin and water, opens the book he is to read for Mr. Boffin’s edification, he finds that it is The Decline and Fall of the Roman, instead of the Russian Empire. What’s the difference? Mr. Boffin asks. The difference, sir? Mr. Wegg falters in reply, for he knows nothing of the difference between the two. Suddenly, however, a bright thought occurs to him. There you place me in a difficulty, Mr. Boffin; suffice it to observe that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs. Boffin does not honor us with her company. In Mrs. Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it. The conception of introducing such a man as Mr. Boffin to the treasures of literature and history, by beginning with such an author as Gibbon, is a grotesquely humorous idea which nobody but Dickens could have imagined. After Wegg closes his first reading, the proprietor of Boffin’s Bower is left in a horror of amazement at the strange doings of Commodious and Vittle-us. Wegg, he says, takes it easy, but upon-my-soul to an old bird like myself these are scarers.... I didn’t think this morning there was half so many scarers in Print. But I’m in for it now!" Up to the time he makes the acquaintance of Bully Sawyers (Belisarius), he finds nothing, in nightly declining and falling with the Roman Empire and with Mr. Wegg, which meets his own experience; and the separation of human nature in Print from human nature as he knows it by his own heart and his eyes, grows continually wider and more unaccountable. But his simplicity is accompanied with shrewdness; after Rokesmith has become his secretary, he sees through all the pretences by which a numerous variety of persons seek to plunder him; and Wegg, and Mrs. Lammle, and many others, find in the end that the Golden Dustman, by being intrinsically honest and kind-hearted, bears in his breast a talisman which enables him eventually to distinguish an honest man from a rogue, and a pretender to philanthropy from a real philanthropist.

Of Mrs. Boffin there can be but one opinion, or rather one feeling. Such a joyous, simple-hearted example of buxom beneficence, alive in every part of her soul and body, never before thrust her round, rosy, matronly face into the company of the imagined personages of a romance. A certain vulgarity in speech and manners, arising from her necessarily neglected education, cannot prevent us from exalting her far above any of the ladies she meets during the course of the narrative. The depth of motherly sentiment she felt for the poor, abandoned children of the curmudgeon whom she and her husband had faithfully served, is specially indicated by the delight she experiences in finding in Rokesmith the poor little John Harmon she had loved and protected as a boy,—a delight increased rather than diminished by the thought that she can give up all the wealth she so thoroughly enjoys to this equitable heir. Before, however, she makes the discovery, she engages in a search for a desirable orphan to adopt, which may remind her of her early favorite. The account of her hunting after this seemingly common urchin, allows Dickens an opportunity to introduce into his story such characters as the Rev. Mr. Milvey and his wife, Betty Higden, Sloppy, and the poor little Johnny, who is fixed upon as the most eligible among many orphans to be adopted, but who dies in the hospital before he can be transported to Mrs. Boffin’s home. His death is very pathetically told. As Rokesmith and the doctor bend over the dying boy, they note some disquiet in his efforts to speak. What is it? they ask. Little Johnny answers, Him! Those! meaning by him the child with the broken leg, whose bed was next to his in the hospital; and by those the toys which were placed over his own bed, and which he has seen his small neighbor eyeing with peculiar pleasure, before he moaned himself to sleep. After the horse, the ark, the yellow bird, and the man in the Guards have been softly transferred to their proper destination, according to the faint pointing of his hand, he remembers Bella Wilfer, as a vision of beauty who had accompanied Mrs. Boffin in visits to his sick bed. Sustaining himself on Rokesmith’s arm, he seeks the face of the lover of Bella with his lips, and says, A kiss for the boofer lady! And having in Dickens’s words, now bequeathed all he had to dispose of, and arranged his affairs in this world, Johnny, thus speaking, left it." Is there not something exquisitely pathetic in this scene?

It is needless to say that all these proceedings fill with supreme disgust the soul of Mr. Boffin’s literary man, with a wooden leg, who has vindicated his asserted capacity to collar and throw at sight anything which meets him in English Print, by his nightly struggles with the difficulties of Gibbon’s prose. The sad ending of the hunt for an orphan gives him a corresponding pleasure. If, he sagaciously argues in his capacious mind, they wanted an orphan, why did they go beating about Brentford bushes in search of the article, when they had one near at hand? Am I not an orphan? exclaims Mr. Wegg in the secure lodgment he has established in Boffin’s Bower; and what more can they want? The fact that he has been an orphan for some fifty or sixty years only intensifies his sense of injury in being overlooked. Perhaps his prowling about the house, and poking among the mounds, in order to find some means of plundering his benefactor, may have been stimulated by the bad taste evinced by Mrs. Boffin in not immediately perceiving that in him she had an orphan, eager to be adopted, on whom her matronly affection might at once be exercised, without her wasting time in fruitless researches after an impossible ideal, directed to the discovery of a tenderer and more youthful specimen than he of the orphan variety of the human species.

John Harmon, who has appeared at the inquest which announces his own death, is connected with the family of the Wilfers by being connected with the Boffin family. As he understands his father’s will, the property is left to him provided he marries Bella Wilfer. He has no idea of gaining fortune by a marriage to a woman who does not love him; and after escaping from the ruffians who thought they had succeeded in sending him to that world where fortune is of little importance, and discovering that the person killed is recognized as John Harmon, he concludes to preserve his incognito, and, as Rokesmith, to pay court to the unknown bride devised to him under the terms of the will. For this purpose he hires a room in poor Mr. Wilfer’s shabby house, and becomes a secretary to Mr. Boffin. He is attracted by the beauty of Bella Wilfer, in spite of the openness with which she expresses her horror of poverty, and her determination to make, under the patronage of Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, a mercenary marriage; and he finally falls desperately in love with her, declares his love, and is contemptuously rejected. He concludes to go away, leaving the Boffins in possession of his fortune, when Mrs. Boffin, looking in upon him as he broods over the fire in his room, detects the lone, lorn, despairing look which the boy, John Harmon, had so often cast up to her motherly face, and she cries, I know you, now! You’re John! and drops fainting in the arms of her recovered favorite. From that time everything in the house is subordinated to the one purpose of enabling John to appear in a noble light to Bella, even at the expense of forcing good Mr. Boffin to assume the character of a miser, to become a regular brown bear, a grizzly old growler,—the benevolent old couple discussing every night, how far Mr. B.’s growing insults to John Harmon, exhibiting that gentleman in the noblest attitude of self-respect mingled with forbearance, should succeed in gradually converting Bella into a disinterested woman, ready to surrender her hopes of wealth for a portionless union with the persecuted man she had all along really loved. In the interim, John has frequent opportunities to show his superiority to the other men she meets. Before the time arrives of her leaving the Boffin mansion to be the wife of Mr. Boffin’s discharged clerk, she has become acquainted with Lizzie Hexam, has been connected with other personages in the story, and, above all, has furnished the author with an opportunity to exhibit the whole Wilfer family.

As to the latter, it may confidently be said that Dickens, in none of his previous novels, had delineated a domestic group so rich in individual qualities and humorous contrasts, as that gathered under the humble roof of Reginald Wilfer, clerk of the great firm of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles,—represented, in this romance, by Mr. Veneering, who gathers society around his dinner table. Whenever a Wilfer appears in Our Mutual Friend, you may, in Joe Gargery’s phrase, look out for larks. However unpromising his family may appear to R. Wilfer, and however much that little cherub’s heart may be wrung on leaving his quiet desk in the counting house for the absurd little hell which he calls his home, there can be no doubt that the reader profits by the miseries which the husband cheerfully endures. Such a household! Mrs. Wilfer is a tall, angular, majestic woman, with a head tied up in a pocket-handkerchief knotted under her chin, and with a pair of thick, worn gloves, ever on her hands, always mourning over the descent in station she had incurred in marrying R. W., and acting the part of Lady Macbeth to her liege lord in a manner that appalls that innocent gentleman, and makes him sometimes wish that she had married a person superior to him in rank; and his daughters are as distractingly afflicted with the disease of giddiness as his wife is with that of overpowering composure. The poor man finds his domestic content somewhat disturbed between the two; but Bella, the elder of the daughters, and the heroine of the story, though wilful, skittish, fretful, flighty, discontented, and in every way aggravating, with no more character, as she afterwards confesses, than a canary bird, still loves her father, in a half-affectionate, half-compassionate way, while as contemptuous of her mother, when she assumes her Act of Parliament tone, as her pert younger sister, Lavinia, who loves nobody, father or mother, who domineers over everybody as far as she can, and who is specially tyrannical to a cast-off, slender-witted adorer of her elder sister, named George Sampson, whom she wills to hold in her toils until she can catch some more promising specimen of the male sex, with a larger income and a better brain. From the time that Mrs. Boffin calls on Mrs. Wilfer, to carry Bella away to a happier home,—not however before the craft, the secrecy, the dark, deep, underhanded plotting, written in Mrs. Boffin’s countenance, have made Bella’s mother shudder,—to the time when Bella, as Mrs. John Harmon, welcomes the whole family to her magnificent mansion,—the Wilfers afford many delicious scenes, on which Dickens employs all the resources of his observation and humor. The father, the mother, the two daughters, are thoroughly individualized; and Bella, especially, is so perfectly represented, that we see and feel the very soul of the giddy girl, as it is whirled this way and that,—the levity of her character gradually giving way before an overmastering affection, which leaves her all the delightful spontaneousness of her original disposition, while every good quality in her nature is deepened and enlarged by it. The scene of her elopement and marriage is so narrated as to make every reader envy the happy husband. Before this occurs, however, she has been the occasion of her lover’s quietly making the noblest remark to be found in all Dickens’s writings. After Bella has been closeted with Lizzie Hexam, has felt the beauty of her self-abnegation, and has cheered her by her maidenly sympathy, she afterwards says despairingly to John Harmon, that she feels she is useless in this world. No one, he replies, is useless in this world, who lightens the burden of it for anyone else. Is not here contained the very essence of practical philanthropy? The little sentence is almost worthy of being blazoned, and placed among those scriptural texts in golden letters which we often see exhibited in Christian homes, where the exhortations to a Christian life are made into artistic ornaments of the rooms, preaching continually their benignant precepts to the eye and imagination.

Lizzie Hexam is a continuation of Little Nell, of Florence Dombey, of Agnes Wickfield, of Little Dorrit, of Lucie Manette. The circumstances differ, but the root of the character, self-sacrifice, is the same. Yet we can hardly call in their case by so austere a word as sacrifice, a self-denial which is prompted by a filial and family love so deep, that not to exercise it would produce intense misery in the affectionate hearts of which it is the spring of a healthy activity. Their self-sacrifice, in short, is but a form of self-expression. The nature being what it is, any obstruction to its outlet would be the saddest misfortune it could experience. What we admire in their disinterestedness is something as real in their characters as that impulse which urges other daughters to disregard father, mother, and brothers, in acting out their own selfish instincts. Duty, indeed, has become with them an instinct; and they not only obey its obligations with a certain joy, but they are incapable of any remorse which is not connected with some fancied oversight of an occasion where it might have been more effectively exercised. There are such young women scattered over the world; and it is the glory of Dickens that he has embodied their finest elements in ideal characters so attractive to the heart and the imagination, that to contemplate them has a direct tendency to increase the number of their actual representatives in common life. The task that Lizzie Hexam sets to herself is only more difficult than that of the other members of Dickens’s saintly sisterhood, because she stands by a father who is engaged in the most repulsive and degrading of human occupations, and by a brother who is a selfish, ungrateful, conceited little snob, whose qualities require an affection almost divine to bear with for a moment. As the story goes on, Lizzie is called upon to combat a passion for Eugene Wrayburn, which further complicates her relation to her brother; for he urges her, for his advantage, to receive the attentions of his head master, Bradley Headstone, whom she instinctively abhors. The wretched youth thinks that his sister is obstructing his rise into respectability, by foolishly refusing a husband whom he has selected as a person who might benefit him. That his sister’s soul and body are not at his service, to be disposed of in the best way to advance his interests, is an idea that Charley is at last indignantly compelled to admit; and it furnishes him, as he thinks, with a just reason for discarding her forever. The tendency of self-sacrifice to generate the most odious forms of selfishness, when the objects of it are abject natures, who receive it as one of their rights, was never better illustrated than in the case of Lizzie Hexam and her whelp of a brother. If Lizzie had been a little more selfish, Charley would probably have grown up into a less despicable specimen of manhood, or rather mannishness.

Eugene Wrayburn is the culmination of a character which Dickens had repeatedly attempted to represent in some of his previous novels,—a dawdling, drawling young Englishman of the present day, born of aristocratic parentage, liberally educated, qualified in some degree for a profession, but still acting on the theatre of life as if, like the Duke of Orleans described Saint Simon, he had been born bored. He is a consumer of cigars; a welcome visitor at dinner tables where he simply eats and yawns; and reaches a certain kind of social distinction by drawlingly preaching the doctrine of idleness which he somewhat laboriously practices. His friend, Mortimer Light-wood, is of the same disposition, and is indeed much surprised by the business accidentally forced upon him by Mr. Boffin and Rogue Riderhood. Both of these young gentlemen agree that if anybody would give them an opportunity really worth being energetic about, they would show energy; but as it is, they detest the name. Am I, says Eugene, to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance I meet in the street, shake him, and say, ‘Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I’ll be the death of you’? Yet that would be energy. Mr. Boffin afterwards tells him there’s nothing like work. Look, he exclaims, at the bees. Eugene treats this trite illustration somewhat in the style with which it had been previously played with by Harold Skimpole. Conceding for a moment, argues Eugene, that there is any analogy between a bee and a man in a shirt and pantaloons (which I deny), and that it is settled that the man is to imitate the bee (which I also deny), the question still remains, what is he to learn? To imitate? Or to avoid? When your friends the bees worry themselves into that highly fluttered extent about their sovereign, and become perfectly distracted touching the slightest monarchical movement, are we men to learn the greatness of tuft-hunting, or the littleness of the Court Circular? I am not clear, Mr. Boffin, but that the hive may be satirical. Mr. Boffin replies that at all events they work. Ye-es, Eugene disparagingly retorts, they work; but don’t you think they overdo it? They work so much more than they need—they make so much more than they can eat—they are so incessantly boring and buzzing at their one idea until Death comes upon them—that don’t you think they overdo it? Are human laborers to have no holidays because of the bees? And am I never to have a change of air because the bees don’t? Mr. Boffin, I think honey excellent at breakfast; but, regarded in the light of my tyrannical schoolmaster and moralist, I protest against the tyrannical humbug of your friend the bee. With the highest respect for you.

What gives some tension to the vagrant faculties of this young aristocrat is his love for Lizzie Hexam. He pursues her without any clearly defined intention either of seducing or marrying her; but he feels that he is attracted to this exceptional maiden by a moral quality in her nature, which he had never before perceived in a woman, and which stirs in him all the latent goodness in the depths of his being. This had heretofore been crusted over by all those fopperies of indifference to everything and everybody, which give distinction to the youths enrolled as members of the aristocracy which shed lustre on the vast kingdom of Boredom. Bradley Headstone, whom he goads into madness by his insults, pounds his coxcombry out of him by nearly depriving him of his existence. His rescue by Lizzie completes the reformation of his character. He marries her on his reviving sick bed, with the determination of living for her—of disregarding all the taunts of a society composed of the Veneerings, Podsnaps, and Tippinses, and of working resolutely for his living hereafter, like other self-respecting heroes of industry.

The tragic interest of the story centres in Bradley Headstone. This dogged, stolid schoolmaster of twenty-seven, the perfection of mediocrity, who conducts teaching by the latest light afforded by the Gospel according to Monotony, bears under his decorous vest a heart capable of the deepest passion. Miss Peecher, the perfect model of a decorous schoolmistress, has an unselfish, unutterable tenderness toward this specimen of a perfect schoolmaster. In the natural order of things, Miss Peecher should have been married to Mr. Headstone. She certainly would have made him the most affectionate of wives, aiding him in all his schemes of rigidly training pupils to learn the externals of knowledge by the most repulsive methods under which knowledge can be bullied into the juvenile mind. They seem made for each other; but Mr. Headstone becomes inflamed with a mad passion for the sister of his cherished pupil. This is opposed, not merely by the repugnance of the woman on whom his heart is set, but by the insolent rivalry of Eugene Wrayburn. The slow,’ accumulated results of baffled passion in a dogged nature, ulcerating the heart and depraving the will, until the apparently frigid schoolmaster, attentive merely to the details of his monotonous work, ends in being a murderer, are described by Dickens with great power of psychological observation and analysis; but the general reader has a feeling that it would have been better to exert the same power on a more attractive subject. The tragedy of Dickens is always less attractive than his pathos, though perhaps he throws more of his imaginative force into the delineation of criminal natures than into the exhibition of souls working under the influence of humane and Christian sentiments.

Dickens crowds his stories with such a variety of characters that it is difficult to do justice to them all. For example, there is in the romance of Our Mutual Friend a certain character called Miss Jenny Wren (née Fanny Cleaver), the dolls’ dressmaker, and manufacturer of ornamental pincushions and pen-wipers, who is one of the quaintest of all the creations of Dickens’s humorous imagination and sensitive heart. Were she not so thoroughly individualized and so thoroughly English, there is something on the poetical side of her character which might place her, as a creation, by the side of Goethe’s Mignon. The poor, little, decrepit creature, with her beautiful face and luxuriant golden hair, working to support a hopelessly drunken father, and with sufficient force of will to keep him in some order as the child whom she scolds and protects; indulging in the wildest fantasies of imagination while engaged in her humble tasks; ever capable of helping others while seemingly making a pathetic appeal as an object for others to help; shrewd in perception and tart in expression; with an inner world of mental experience, resembling the oddest fancies of those who dwell permanently in Wonderland, combined with outward circumstances to the last degree sordid, wretched, and unsatisfying,—this small, queer, deformed, bright-brained, good-hearted specimen of maiden humanity is really deserving of a prominent rank among the original creations of the poets and romancers of the century. The point and sparkle of her conversation, and the somewhat vixenish way in which she expresses her kind-heartedness, disdaining always to be pitied or to be assisted, only give a deeper sense of the pathetic beauty of a character, in which physical suffering is contemptuously ignored as long as the mind retains its power of thinking rapidly, and the heart its capacity of loving warmly. How exquisite is the deformed girl’s statement of the consolations of her hard lot. I dare say, she musingly remarks to Lizzie Hexam, "my birds sing better than other birds, and my flowers smell better than other flowers. For, when I was a little child, the children that I used to see early in the morning were very different from any others that I ever saw. They were not like me; they were not chilled, anxious, ragged, or beaten; they were never in pain. They were not like the children of the neighbors; they never made me tremble all over, by setting up shrill noises, and they never mocked me. Such numbers of them, too! All in white dresses, and with something shining on the borders and on their heads, that I have never been able to imitate with my work, though I know it so well. They used to come down in long, bright, slanting rows, and say all together, ‘Who is this in pain! Who is this in pain!’ When I told them who it was, they answered, ‘Come and play with us!’ When I said, ‘I never play! I can’t play!’ they swept about me and took me up, and made me light. Then it was all delicious ease and rest till they laid me down, and said all together, ‘Have patience, and we will come again.’ Whenever they came back, I used to know they were coming before I saw the long bright rows, by hearing them ask, all together, a long way off, ‘Who is this in pain! Who is this in pain!’ And I used to cry out, ‘Oh, my blessed children, it’s poor me. Have pity on me. Take me up and make me light.’" We confess to be unable to transcribe this without a suffusion in the eyes as we merely copy the passage; and with what sobbing, and blinding tears, must Dickens have written it! It is in unrhymed prose; but there are few more essentially poetic passages, compact of sensibility and imagination, in the verses of contemporary poets.

Take, again, a character of the extremely opposite kind, the resolute old maiden, Miss Potterson, who keeps the tavern of The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, situated on the very edge of the Thames River, where such persons as Riderhood and the father of Lizzie Hexam are most inclined to congregate. The house is a drinking house; but she presides over it with an austerity, an autocracy, which would more properly become a secretary of a temperance society than a grim, good-hearted woman, who dispenses liquors of all kinds to the boatmen of the neighborhood. Mr. Evarts once said, in a humorous reference to the virtue of Vermont, that nobody could be admitted into its prisons without a certificate, testifying to his previous good moral character. Miss Potterson excludes, on the same principle, all tainted men from the privileges of her bar and parlor; and is specially careful in superintending and restricting the drinking of those gentlemen she allows to partake of her purl, flip, dog’s-nose, and whatever other preparations of beer, sherry, or rum for which she has established a just reputation, admitted even by the police inspector, as an adept in concocting. There is something comical in the meek obedience of her customers to her will and judgment. Captain Joey, she says to one, you have had as much as will do you good. The grog-drinkers tell him, You be guided by Miss Abby, Captain. Then after he has toddled home, she suddenly darts down on another, who had warmly joined with those who were for banishing the captain from the convivial society. Tom Tootle, she says, it’s time for a young fellow who’s going to be married next month to be at home and asleep. And you needn’t nudge him, Mr. Jack Mullins, for I know your work begins early to-morrow, and I say the same to you. Ruffians, like Riderhood, become tame and sycophantic at her frown; and a prominent element in the plot proceeds from his accusing the father of Lizzie Hexam of a skill in purwiding what he finds,"—that is, of killing the persons whose dead bodies he picks up in the river. The result of this cruel insinuation on the mind of Miss Potterson is, not to admit into the sanctuary of her bar, with the privilege of imbibing her liquors, the scoundrel she knows, but of banishing Gaffer Hexam from the select circle of her topers.

The satire of the novel gathers round the group assembled at the dinner table of Mr. Veneering. Neither he nor his wife seems qualified in any way to be connected with society; but the speculative merchant, sure in the end to be bankrupt, contrives to make himself eminently respectable by deceiving a positive representative of mercantile power, like Podsnap, to come to his dinners. Mrs. Podsnap goes because her attendance enables elderly osteologists, or critics in the matter of bones, to observe and admire her meagre shoulders, while she leaves her daughter to the mercies of such creatures as the Lammles, eager to marry her to the lowest specimen of human vermin on which Dickens had heretofore exercised his satirical talent, namely, the mean, false, base, nasty Mr. Fledgeby. The fun of the thing consists in the fact, that people are not so much invited to dine at the Veneerings as that they invite each other to dine there, and despise and disregard the hosts whose rich viands they eat, and whose delicate wines they drink. They politely endure the existence of Mr. and Mrs. Veneering, at the head and foot of the table; but they act as they would act at a tavern. They talk with each other, only acknowledging the giver of the feast by a few formal compliments. Lady Tippins is the person who lends dignity to the assemblage by her rank, while she is at the same time the most obviously foolish, chattering, impoverished, impertinent old dowager that could be selected from the pauper members of the nobility of Great Britain, Dickens’s great point is, that the charming Tippins, with her parrot beak and parrot tongue, and others like her, give the tone to English middle-class society, and interpose by their opinions a sort of aristocratic barrier to prevent any gentleman, like Eugene Wrayburn, to forfeit his caste by marrying below his rank. A full fourth of the book is devoted to a pitiless exposure of the false pretensions of what is called society, and especially to a presentation of the unutterable unsatisfactoriness of the boredom, which obedience to the behests of society exacts.

We have said enough to show that in Our Mutual Friend the readers of Dickens had reason to congratulate themselves on a fresh and original exercise of his powers. But the circumstances under which much of it was written were very discouraging. He was repeatedly ill during its composition. In February, 1865, the complaint in his foot, which was the unheeded precursor of the disease of which he died, broke out, and deprived him, for the time, of his favorite method of disposing of all ills, moral and bodily, by long and rapid walks. At last he concluded to make a trip to France. Work and worry, he wrote to Forster, without exercise, would soon make an end of me. If I were not going away now, I should break down. No one knows as I know to-day, how near to it I have been. In returning from his French journey, he was on the train which met with the accident, commemorated in his postscript-preface to Our Mutual Friend. On the 10th of June, 1865, he wrote to Forster: I was in the terrific Staplehurst accident yesterday, and worked for hours among the dying and the dead. I was in the carriage that did not go over, but went off the line, and hung over the bridge in an inexplicable manner. No words can describe the scene. Forster adds that Dickens never absolutely recovered from the nervous shock of that calamitous occurrence. I am curiously weak, he wrote later in the month; weak as if I were recovering from a long illness. . . . I begin to feel it more in my head. I sleep well and eat well; but I write half a dozen notes, and turn faint and sick. . . . I am getting right, though still low in pulse, and very nervous. Driving into Rochester yesterday, I felt more shaken than I have been since the accident. Indeed, considering all the circumstances which tended to interrupt his writing, while engaged on Our Mutual Friend, it is curious that there are so few evidences of what was the fact, that many chapters were written against the grain, and represented the forcing of his genius to do a work of which he tired before its completion.

A word should be said about the title of the novel, which occasioned much controversy during the period of its serial publication. Mr. Charles Folsom, the late accomplished librarian of the Boston Athenæum, a scholar under whose searching eye the manuscripts of some of the ablest historians and theologians of New England passed before they were committed to the press, and whose modest though valuable labors deserve a far higher acknowledgment and recognition than they have received, was especially distressed by the vulgarism of Our Mutual Friend being taken as a title by the most eminent of contemporary British romancers. After the first number of the book was issued, no man of letters could enter the library, without being accosted by Mr. Folsom, and implored to share his indignation at such an insult to the English language as Dickens had committed in substituting mutual for common friend. The grand old gentleman, with his genial rosy face, and the bright, earnest scholarly eyes blazing at you through his gold-rimmed spectacles, made you feel for the moment that all the treasures of wit, humor, fancy, sensibility, and characterization contained in the novel were incurably vitiated by the grammatical inaccuracy under which they were all included. But Dickens had chosen the title four years before the first number was published, and adhered to it against all remonstrance and objection from English friends. He probably supposed that Our Common Friend, however freed from the anathemas of grammarians, would not be so taking a title as the one he selected, open as it was to the obvious criticism of being a vulgarism of colloquial speech, unworthy of being chosen as the name of an extended work.

EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE.

1894.

Book 1.

THE CUP AND THE LIP

Chapter 1.

ON THE LOOK OUT

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight head-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.

Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder, with the loose knot of a looser kerchief lying low on his bare breast in a wilderness of beard and whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat, still there was a business-like usage in his steady gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with every turn of her wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or horror; they were things of usage.

‘Keep her out, Lizzie. Tide runs strong here. Keep her well afore the sweep of it.’

Trusting to the girl’s skill and making no use of the rudder, he eyed the coming tide with an absorbed attention. So the girl eyed him. But, it happened now, that a slant of light from the setting sun glanced into the bottom of the boat, and, touching a rotten stain there which bore some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form, coloured it as though with diluted blood. This caught the girl’s eye, and she shivered.

‘What ails you?’ said the man, immediately aware of it, though so intent on the advancing waters; ‘I see nothing afloat.’

The red light was gone, the shudder was gone, and his gaze, which had come back to the boat for a moment, travelled away again. Wheresoever the strong tide met with an impediment, his gaze paused for an instant. At every mooring-chain and rope, at every stationery boat or barge that split the current into a broad-arrowhead, at the offsets from the piers of Southwark Bridge, at the paddles of the river steamboats as they beat the filthy water, at the floating logs of timber lashed together lying off certain wharves, his shining eyes darted a hungry look. After a darkening hour or so, suddenly the rudder-lines tightened in his hold, and he steered hard towards the Surrey shore.

Always watching his face, the girl instantly answered to the action in her sculling; presently the boat swung round, quivered as from a sudden jerk, and the upper half of the man was stretched out over the stern.

The girl pulled the hood of a cloak she wore, over her head and over her face, and, looking backward so that the front folds of this hood were turned down the river, kept the boat in that direction going before the tide. Until now, the boat had barely held her own, and had hovered about one spot; but now, the banks changed swiftly, and the deepening shadows and the kindling lights of London Bridge were passed, and the tiers of shipping lay on either hand.

It was not until now that the upper half of the man came back into the boat. His arms were wet and dirty, and he washed them over the side. In his right hand he held something, and he washed that in the river too. It was money. He chinked it once, and he blew upon it once, and he spat upon it once,—‘for luck,’ he hoarsely said —before he put it in his pocket.

‘Lizzie!’

The girl turned her face towards him with a start, and rowed in silence. Her face was very pale. He was a hook-nosed man, and with that and his bright eyes and his ruffled head, bore a certain likeness to a roused bird of prey.

‘Take that thing off your face.’

She put it back.

‘Here! and give me hold of the sculls. I’ll take the rest of the spell.’

‘No, no, father! No! I can’t indeed. Father!—I cannot sit so near it!’

He was moving towards her to change places, but her terrified expostulation stopped him and he resumed his seat.

‘What hurt can it do you?’

‘None, none. But I cannot bear it.’

‘It’s my belief you hate the sight of the very river.’

‘I—I do not like it, father.’

‘As if it wasn’t your living! As if it wasn’t meat and drink to you!’

At these latter words the girl shivered again, and for a moment paused in her rowing, seeming to turn deadly faint. It escaped his attention, for he was glancing over the stern at something the boat had in tow.

‘How can you be so thankless to your best friend, Lizzie? The very fire that warmed you when you were a babby, was picked out of the river alongside the coal barges. The very basket that you slept in, the tide washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it upon to make a cradle of it, I cut out of a piece of wood that drifted from some ship or another.’

Lizzie took her right hand from the scull it held, and touched her lips with it, and for a moment held it out lovingly towards him: then, without speaking, she resumed her rowing, as another boat of similar appearance, though in rather better trim, came out from a dark place and dropped softly alongside.

‘In luck again, Gaffer?’ said a man with a squinting leer, who sculled her and who was alone, ‘I know’d you was in luck again, by your wake as you come down.’

‘Ah!’ replied the other, drily. ‘So you’re out, are you?’

‘Yes, pardner.’

There was now a tender yellow moonlight on the river, and the new comer, keeping half his boat’s length astern of the other boat looked hard at its track.

‘I says to myself,’ he went on, ‘directly you hove in view, yonder’s Gaffer, and in luck again, by George if he ain’t! Scull it is, pardner—don’t fret yourself—I didn’t touch him.’ This was in answer to a quick impatient movement on the part of Gaffer: the speaker at the same time unshipping his scull on that side, and laying his hand on the gunwale of Gaffer’s boat and holding to it.

‘He’s had touches enough not to want no more, as well as I make him out, Gaffer! Been a knocking about with a pretty many tides, ain’t he pardner? Such is my out-of-luck ways, you see! He must have passed me when he went up last time, for I was on the lookout below bridge here. I a’most think you’re like the wulturs, pardner, and scent ’em out.’

He spoke in a dropped voice, and with more than one glance at Lizzie who had pulled on her hood again. Both men then looked with a weird unholy interest in the wake of Gaffer’s boat.

‘Easy does it, betwixt us. Shall I take him aboard, pardner?’

‘No,’ said the other. In so surly a tone that the man, after a blank stare, acknowledged it with the retort:

‘—Arn’t been eating nothing as has disagreed with you, have you, pardner?’

‘Why, yes, I have,’ said Gaffer. ‘I have been swallowing too much of that word, Pardner. I am no pardner of yours.’

‘Since when was you no pardner of mine, Gaffer Hexam Esquire?’

‘Since you was accused of robbing a man. Accused of robbing a live man!’ said Gaffer, with great indignation.

‘And what if I had been accused of robbing a dead man, Gaffer?’

‘You couldn’t do it.’

‘Couldn’t you, Gaffer?’

‘No. Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? T’other world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don’t try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it’s worthy of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man.’

‘I’ll tell you what it is—.’

‘No you won’t. I’ll tell you what it is. You got off with a short time of it for putting you’re hand in the pocket of a sailor, a live sailor. Make the most of it and think yourself lucky, but don’t think after that to come over me with your pardners. We have worked together in time past, but we work together no more in time present nor yet future. Let go. Cast off!’

‘Gaffer! If you think to get rid of me this way—.’

‘If I don’t get rid of you this way, I’ll try another, and chop you over the fingers with the stretcher, or take a pick at your head with the boat-hook. Cast off! Pull you, Lizzie. Pull home, since you won’t let your father pull.’

Lizzie shot ahead, and the other boat fell astern. Lizzie’s father, composing himself into the easy attitude of one who had asserted the high moralities and taken an unassailable position, slowly lighted a pipe, and smoked, and took a survey of what he had in tow. What he had in tow, lunged itself at him sometimes in an awful manner when the boat was checked, and sometimes seemed to try to wrench itself away, though for the most part it followed submissively. A neophyte might have fancied that the ripples passing over it were dreadfully like faint changes of expression on a sightless face; but Gaffer was no neophyte and had no fancies.

Chapter 2.

THE MAN FROM SOMEWHERE

Mr. and Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.

For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings—the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.

There was an innocent piece of dinner-furniture that went upon easy castors and was kept over a livery stable-yard in Duke Street, Saint James’s, when not in use, to whom the Veneerings were a source of blind confusion. The name of this article was Twemlow. Being first cousin to Lord Snigsworth, he was in frequent requisition, and at many houses might be said to represent the dining-table in its normal state. Mr. and Mrs. Veneering, for example, arranging a dinner, habitually started with Twemlow, and then put leaves in him, or added guests to him. Sometimes, the table consisted of Twemlow and half a dozen leaves; sometimes, of Twemlow and a dozen leaves; sometimes, Twemlow was pulled out to his utmost extent of twenty leaves. Mr. and Mrs. Veneering on occasions of ceremony faced each other in the centre of the board, and thus the parallel still held; for, it always happened that the more Twemlow was pulled out, the further he found himself from the center, and nearer to the sideboard at one end of the room, or

Reviews for Our Mutual Friend (with an Introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple)

[eilonwy_anne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Time has slipped away from me on reviewing this book, so I'll be briefer than I meant.This is very Dickensish Dickens indeed. He delves into the littlest-known professions of London's economic underbelly, makes endless and intricate mock of the empty hearts and minds of the money- and status-obsessed nouveau riche, weaves a terrifically complicated plot, and engages in all the heart-rending melodrama for which you either hate or love him. He makes some amends here -- Riah, a noble Jewish character unable to escape the stereotypes others lay on him seems a clear apologia for Fagin. Jenny Wren's complex and fallible character may comfort a few who find the saintly Tiny Tim, Dickens's most famous disabled child, hard to take. (Jenny Wren has her twee moments as well: troops of angels visiting her in her worst childhood moments, Boz? Really?)The story is sprawling, of course, but its central theme is the corrupting effect of money. I found the central story and the characters of the Boffins effective and surprisingly poignant. The nouveau riche storyline, featuring the Veneerings and Lammles, was the least appealing to me. The descriptions of the Veneerings and their doings were so stylized as to occasionally lose focus, I thought, and I found Georgiana Podsnap frustrating to the point of apathy. This is late Dickens, and while as I say his melodramatic tendencies are in full force, there are more variations in moral fabric, more surprises about people's true natures and capacities, than I feel I find in some of his earlier novels. It's a rich book, full of unhappy love, fierce determination, human folly, and of course startling evocations of Victorian London. It's huge and complicated, but full of memorable images and people. A necessity for Dickens lovers.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Here, conveniently and healthfully elevated above the level of the living, were the dead, and the tombstones; some of the latter droopingly inclined from the perpendicular, as if they were ashamed of the lies they told.” — Charles Dickens, “Our Mutual Friend”“Our Mutual Friend” is a thick novel about thin lines. Throughout its (in my paperback edition) 800 pages of small print, Charles Dickens ponders those narrow lines that separate the living from the dead and people of different stations and conditions.His main plot involves the supposed drowning death of John Harmon, a wealthy young man returning home to claim his late father's estate. He was also to claim the hand of the beautiful Bella Wilfer as required by the terms of his father's will. Not wanting a bride who might marry him only for his money, Harmon fakes his death and returns as John Rokesmith, becoming secretary to Mr. Boffin, a man of modest means who inherits the house and the fortune in his place and then invites Bella to live with him and his wife.So already we can what Dickens has on his mind. Harmon is dead, but not really. Will Bella love him and consent to marry him when he is a poor man? Will she be changed by living in that great house and wearing the finest clothes? Will the fortune change the Boffins?These concerns are echoed in the novel's various subplots and in the lives of its many characters. Other men are dragged from the Thames presumably dead, yet they survive. Other characters seemingly die only to come back to life. There are even dolls treated as living persons and living persons treated as if dolls. References to death and tombstones return again and again in this novel that celebrates life.Another young couple consists of a man and woman of different social classes, and that difference threatens to keep them apart. Another couple, the opposite of John Harmon, pretends to be wealthy when they are impoverished. One boy, raised in poverty, struggles to rise in the world, yet as he rises his character lowers. Another poor boy finds contentment in his situation and maintains his strong character as that situation improves.This novel, the last one Dickens would complete (1865), is not a favorite of many readers because of its length, complexity and contrived plot. Yet there is much to admire here and much to think about. It makes a reader realize that those tombstones, even when not lying, do not tell the whole truth about those who lie below.

[idiotgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my favorites. First read it on a train. Beginning of my love affair with Dickens. Read it this time on my kindle.

[lostvampire_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wonderfully illustrated. By far the best. Charles Dickens classic written.

[telute · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[santhony_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[pgchuis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[librisissimo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked the story, although it moves slowly as all Dickens's serials do, and it has his trademark witticisms and off-beat characters in abundance, but I just couldn't make it past page 163 (of 850) and have no real incentive to continue. This is his last completed novel, and he pulls out all the stops in his satirical treatment of money, greed, snobbery, rigid class distinctions, and miserliness; while greatly sympathizing with those forced to live in poverty (especially those who might have fared better if not for the evil o others.The plot (in its basics) is transparent, and the endless machinations that keep boy from getting girl make up most of the story, with numerous sub-plots, of course.The foreword does indicate that the book still has "a quality of joy and optimism" that represents the quality most beloved in Dickens.Cover blurb claims it was dramatized on television.NOTES: p. 105 "And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it; but Good, never." (perhaps a tad over-optimistic, but basically sound).

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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!

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[ljhliesl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[raschneid_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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....

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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...

[seajack_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Narrator (Robert Whitfield a/k/a Simon Vance) does an excellent job with the many voices. 31 hours makes for a very long book, so I stopped halfway to listen to a completely different book, and came back to this one after that. An awful lot of sub-plots, that are (for the most part) well-resolved by the end.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was Dickens’s last completed novel, originally published in serial form in twenty episodes during 1864 and 1865. Though not as long as Bleak House, it contains more complexities of plot and is peopled by a vast cast of characters: perhaps rather too many for even a novelist of Dickens’s calibre to choreograph capably.The opening scene shows Dickens at his best, with Gaffer Hexham, a waterman from Rotherhithe, out in his small boat on the Thames with his beautiful daughter Lizzie, retrieving a corpse form the water. We soon learn that this is not as unusual an occurrence as might be supposed, and that Hexham is known as a finder of corpses. Papers on this particular corpse suggest that it is John Harmon, heir to the estate of his father, ‘the Golden Dustman’, who had made a fortune out of marshalling and removing the capital’s rubbish. John Harmon had been estranged from his father who had, as a consequence, attached some unconventional conditions to his will, including the unexplained requirement that, to inherit his legacy John Harmon would have to marry Miss Bella Wilfer, daughter of a nearby clerk. In the apparent absence of John Harmon, the whole estate reverts to Mr and Mrs Boffin, former servants of the Golden DustmanInterleaved with the developing story of the corpse in the river is an account of the Veneerings, a wealthy family with a complacent circle of acquaintances. Dickens uses the Veneering sand their circle to lampoon social mores among the caste of newly prosperous businessmen and their families, and also to compare the comfort and ostentation of their existence with the poverty rife around the city. They indulge in prurient discussion about the disposition of the estate of the Golden Dustman, and enjoy a good laugh at the prospect of the Boffins struggling to adjust to their new found wealth. In fact, the Boffins seem surprisingly unaffected by their good fortune, and are principally concerned at how they might help Miss Wilfer, and what other good works they might undertake.Dickens always tries to provide hefty doses of light relief (most notably to my mind in the person of Jerry Cruncher in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’). In ‘Our Mutual Friend, the comedy derives from Silas Wegg, a one-legged purveyor of fancy goods, whom Mr Boffin, recognising his own lack of education, commissions to read Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ to him. Wegg is a great opportunist, and drives a hard bargain, eager as he is to earn sufficient money to buy back his missing leg which has been preserved by Mr Venus, a prolific taxidermist.The plot is far too complex for me to attempt a synopsis here. There are, however, some of Dickens’s more common themes such as the gulf between the rich and poor, social pretension, the redeeming power of education and also rebirth and reinvention. I feel that Dickens let the gravity of his themes overwhelm him to the extent that he lost control of the plot. There are more unresolved threads than is usual for Dickens, and a lack of coherence within some of his principal characters. I enjoyed the book over all but felt that this was Dickens slightly overreaching himself.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[lylee-2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Too long. Wikipedia descriptions of characters was useful

[samfsmith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jschem-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[sartoel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[juliaboechat · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"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

[britt84 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.

[bibliolisa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.

[baswood · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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.

[jimnicol-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Moody, dense look at Dickens's London characters. The city and river as wonderful characters.

[lit_chick_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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!

[amerynth · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As an obsessed viewer of the television show "Lost," I had long been meaning to read Charles Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" thanks to the show's references to it. And I am ever so glad I finally did. I never knew Dickens good be this good!Dickens presents fabulous characters that lurk in the shadows of London's seedier sections and mixes in a few from the upper crust along with some social climbers too. He paints such vivid pictures of the characters that they draw you into the story very quickly. The plot is complex and sprawling and mainly revolves around the murder of John Harmon, a young man who was returning to London to collect and inheritance and a wife. There are plenty of side stories in the wide ranging novel, but it is all woven together skillfully enough that it keeps the story entertaining. The only thing I didn't like was the final plot turn involving the Boffins at the end of the book, which seemed rather contrived and sudden. But I had enjoyed the rest so much, that's really just a minor complaint.