Our Mutual Friend (1865)

Multiple characters - heroes, heroines, villains, and Dickens' comedic writing at his best. Humour vested in simple phrases. I was touched by two relationships. One, the love between Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam, and the father-daughter love between Wilfer and his daughter, Bella; while the love between Bella and "Our mutual friend", John Harmon, seemed too unrealistic to suspend disbelief. I was also struck by how unaware of themselves some of the characters were - Charles Hexam, Silas Wegg and Roger Riderhood, serving as a grim reminder the trap we can fall into at times. ( )

Spooky, depressing, thoughtful and at times very funny. My favorite Dickens.

Just reread this after maybe ten years. It's just as good the second time around. ( )

Oh Dickens, I’ve missed you! I used to read one Dickens novel each year, but it’s been four years since I last picked up a new one of his tomes. It took me a minute to get into the novel, but once I got to know the characters I was completely hooked.

Dickens creates stories with a huge cast of supporting characters and half a dozen overlapping plots. His work was originally serialized, so imagine watching a complicated television drama. Each week there’s new twists and turns, but rarely are things resolved or revealed until those final chapters. His work is the same. You spend the first third of the book just trying to keep everyone straight and it was slow-going for a bit.

This novel, more than his others, starts off with an incredibly gripping scene. Lizzie and her father are rowing around the River Thames looking for dead bodies. They find a drowned man named John Harmon who is the heir to his grandfather’s fortune. From that moment on things become much more complicated.

There are the Boffins, an older couple that inherits the money when Harmon is declared dead. Then we meet Bella, the young lady who was destined to marry Harmon, even though they had never met. There’s a little crippled woman named Jenny Wren who makes clothes for dolls and a shady man named Silas Wegg with a wooden leg and a pile of schemes to get his hands on the inheritance.

SPOILERS
When John Rokesmith’s true identity was revealed I was so surprised! What an impossible situation to find yourself believed to be dead and then to realize that the woman you were supposed to marry didn't want to marry you. Then to fall in love with her without meaning to, even though you know she won’t love you because you’re “poor” now. If you tell her who you are she’ll marry you, but she won’t love you. Or you can walk away and lose your love forever.

The scene where Mr. Boffin tells him off and humiliates Bella was such a great one. I loved that they fell in love and he knew that she truly loved him and not his money. At the same time, I couldn’t believe he took so long to tell her who he was. I understand that she had seen something nasty in herself that scared her, but at some point you have to be honest with your spouse. I loved watching her transformation. She was such a frivolous creature and she found out what was really important to her when it was almost taken away.

A Few Highlights:
- The friendship between Lizzy and Bella, I love that relationship.
- I was so glad the Boffins were in on it and that he hadn't really turned miserly.
- The sweet scene towards the end with Sloppy and Jenny Wren was just the best.
- How perfect that the novel comes full circle for Lizzie. In the beginning she finds the dead body in the river and at the end she saves Eugene by pulling him from the river. No one does a full circle like Dickens!
- The schoolmaster was such a creepy stalker. That whole love story was sad an twisted. Eugene is so selfish and oblivious, Lizzie so hopeless, and Bradley is just aggressive and awful.
SPOILERS OVER

BOTTOM LINE: In Our Mutual Friend Dickens explores social classes, the dangers of greed, a twisted love triangle, and so much more. It was definitely one of my favorites of his books. This was his final completed novel, but I still have quite a few left to read. I’m sure I’ll pick a new one next year when the weather turns cold. There’s something about the first snow that always makes me want to curl up with his work.

"There's no royal road to learning and what is life but learning."

Classic ( )

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 Dustman

Interleaved 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. ( )