Our Mutual Friend

Characters

Major characters

John Harmon – is heir to the Harmon estate, under the condition that he marry Bella Wilfer. He is presumed dead throughout most of the novel, though he is living under the name John Rokesmith, and working as a secretary for the Boffins in an attempt to better get to know Bella, the Boffins, and people's general reaction to John Harmon's "death". Harmon also uses the alias Julius Handford upon first returning to London. Harmon's "death" and subsequent resurrection as Rokesmith/Handford is consistent with Dickens's recurring theme in the novel of rebirth from the water. His upward social mobility through his own efforts is presented as favourable, in contrast with Headstone, Hexam, and the Lammles.

"Bella" Wilfer – is a beautiful young woman born into a poor family, who learns upon the death of Old Mr Harmon that she is the intended wife for his son, a condition of his inheritance. When her intended husband, John Harmon, is reported to have been killed, she is left without future prospects. She learns of the trouble money can bring when taken in by the newly rich Boffins. Bella rejects Rokesmith's proposal at first but later accepts it. Initially described as a "mercenary young woman", who describes herself upon meeting Lizzie Hexam as having "no more character than a canary bird", Bella undergoes a significant moral change in the novel. Although originally completely preoccupied with money, her complexity is eventually displayed in her ability to defy the societal pressures to achieve happiness unrelated to wealth. She is praised for her "vivacity and lifelikeness", with greater complexity than some of the other, more static characters. Her relationship with her father is more like that of a mother and son, as she consistently dotes upon him, calling him her "cherub". Her open and warm relationship with her father contrasts with her strained and resentful relationships with her mother and sister.

Nicodemus "Noddy" Boffin, the Golden Dustman (the dust from the ashes of coal fires dominated in waste materials at this period, so “dust” became a term used for waste or rubbish generally) – becomes a member of the nouveaux riches when Old Mr Harmon's heir is considered dead. He is illiterate, but wants to fit the image of a wealthy man, and so hires Silas Wegg to read to him in hopes of gaining more intelligence and worldliness. He is nearly blackmailed by Wegg. He assumes the role of a miser to show Bella the dangers of wealth, but eventually admits this behaviour was an act and gives his money to Bella and John. Boffin's innocence, naïve curiosity, and desire to learn in his new position in life contrast with his "elaborate performances as Boffin the miser". Critics speculate that Dickens's decision to have Boffin playing a part may not have been planned, as it was not very convincing for a man who has shown his simplistic ignorance on several occasions. Boffin's inheritance of Old Harmon's money is appropriate because Harmon had attained it by combing the dust heaps, because this suggests social mobility. Boffin represents a wholesome contrast to such wealthy characters as the Veneerings and Podsnaps, and may have been based on Henry Dodd, a ploughboy who made his fortune removing London's rubbish.

Minor characters

Mr Inspector – a police officer, who acts as a witness to several important events, such as when the corpse from the river is mistakenly identified as John Harmon, when Gaffer Hexam is taken into custody, and when the real John Harmon is named. In general, he is "imperturbable, omnicompetent, firm but genial, and an accomplished actor", who commands authority. However he is not particularly effective in his administration of the law, and this leads to doubt about the justice system in the novel.

Mr John Podsnap – a pompous man of the upper middle class, married to Mrs Podsnap and the father of Georgiana, who is smug and jingoistic. Some critics believe that Dickens used Podsnap to satirise John Forster, Dickens's lifelong friend and official biographer. However, Dickens insisted he only used some of Forster's mannerisms for this character, who was in no way to represent his closest friend. Forster, like Dickens, rose with difficulty from an impoverished middle-class background. The character of Podsnap was used to represent the views of "Society", as shown in his disapproval of Lizzie Hexam and Eugene Wrayburn's marriage.

Mrs Podsnap – the mother of Georgiana Podsnap. Though she embodies the materialistic ideals of her husband and daughter, Mrs Podsnap is the least prominent of the family. She is described as a "fine woman" in her embodiment of the typical upper middle class wife.

Mrs Wilfer – Bella's mother, a woman who is never satisfied with what she has. Her haughtiness is apparent in the way she acts at the Boffins' home and when Bella and Rokesmith return after their wedding. Her animosity towards her husband, her greed and discontent contrast with her husband's good nature and provide an image of what Bella could become, should she not change.

Lavinia Wilfer – Bella's younger sister and George Sampson's fiancée. Vocal and opinionated, she is the only character who will stand up to Mrs Wilfer by matching her derisiveness and audacity. In some ways, she acts as a foil to Bella, and while Bella overcomes her desire for money and appreciates other aspects of life, Lavinia remains resentful in her poverty.

George Sampson – Lavinia Wilfer's suitor, who was originally in love with Bella. He provides comic relief and a contrast with the idyllic relationship between Bella and Rokesmith/Harmon.

Plot summary

Having made his fortune from London's rubbish, the rich misanthropic miser Mr Harmon dies, estranged from all except his faithful employees Mr and Mrs Boffin. By his will, his fortune goes to his estranged son John Harmon, who is to return from his home abroad (possibly in South Africa) to claim it, on condition that he marries a woman he has never met, Miss Bella Wilfer.

John does not appear, though some knew him aboard the ship to London. A body is found in the Thames by waterman Gaffer Hexam, rowed by his daughter Lizzie. Hexam makes his living by retrieving corpses and taking the cash in their pockets before handing them over to the authorities. Papers in the pockets of the drowned man identify him as Harmon. Present at the identification of the water-soaked corpse is a young man, who gives his name as Julius Handford and disappears.

The elder Harmon's estate devolves upon Mr and Mrs Boffin, who wish to enjoy it for themselves and to share it with others. They take pity on Miss Bella Wilfer, whose fortunes are thought to have been lost with John's death, take her into their household, and treat her as their pampered child and heiress. Bella is disgusted by her lower middle class upbringing and obsessed with marrying a wealthy man. They also accept an offer from the man who had called himself Julius Handford – now going under the name of John Rokesmith – to serve as their confidential secretary and man of business at no salary for a trial period of two years. Rokesmith uses this position to watch and learn everything about the Boffins and Miss Wilfer. Mr Boffin engages one-legged ballad-seller Silas Wegg to read aloud to him in the evenings. When the Boffins purchase a large home, Wegg is invited to live in the old Harmon home. Wegg hopes to find hidden treasure in the house or in the mounds of rubbish on the property.

Gaffer is accused of murdering John Harmon by fellow waterman Roger "Rogue" Riderhood, who is bitter at having been cast off as Hexam's partner and covets the reward offered by the Boffins in relation to the murder. As a result of the accusation, Gaffer is shunned by his fellows on the river and excluded from The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, the public house they frequent. Hexam's young son Charley leaves Gaffer's house to better himself at school and to train to be a schoolmaster, encouraged by his sister Lizzie. Lizzie stays with Gaffer, to whom she is devoted.

Original publication

Our Mutual Friend, like most Dickens novels, was published in monthly instalments. Each of the 19 instalments cost one shilling (with the exception of the nineteenth, which was double-length and cost two). Each issue featured 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Marcus Stone. Sales of Our Mutual Friend were 35,000 for the first monthly number, but then dropped by 5,000 for the second number. The concluding double number (instalments XIX–XX) sold 19,000.

BOOK THE FIRST: THE CUP AND THE LIP

I – May 1864 (chapters 1–4);

II – June 1864 (chapters 5–7);

III – July 1864 (chapters 8–10);

IV – August 1864 (chapters 11–13);

V – September 1864 (chapters 14–17).

BOOK THE SECOND: BIRDS OF A FEATHER

VI – October 1864 (chapters 1–3);

VII – November 1864 (chapters 4–6);

VIII – December 1864 (chapters 7–10);

IX – January 1865 (chapters 11–13);

X – February 1865 (chapters 14–16).

BOOK THE THIRD: A LONG LANE

XI – March 1865 (chapters 1–4);

XII – April 1865 (chapters 5–7);

XIII – May 1865 (chapters 8–10);

XIV – June 1865 (chapters 11–14);

Historical contexts

Dickens and Our Mutual Friend

Inspiration for Our Mutual Friend possibly came from Richard Henry Horne's essay "Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed", published in Household Words in 1850, which contains a number of situations and characters that are found in the novel. These include a dust heap, in which a legacy lies buried, a man with a wooden leg, who has an acute interest in the dust heap, Silas Wegg, and another character, Jenny Wren, with "poor withered legs". In 1862 Dickens jotted down in his notebook: "LEADING INCIDENT FOR A STORY. A man—young and eccentric?—feigns to be dead, and is dead to all intents and purposes, and ... for years retains that singular view of life and character". Additionally, Dickens's longtime friend John Forster was a possible model for the wealthy, pompous John Podsnap.

Our Mutual Friend was published in nineteen monthly numbers, in the fashion of many earlier Dickens novels, for the first time since Little Dorrit (1855–57). A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860–61) had been serialised in Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. Dickens remarked to Wilkie Collins that he was "quite dazed" at the prospect of putting out twenty monthly parts after more recent weekly serials.

Our Mutual Friend was the first of Dickens's novels not illustrated by Hablot Browne, with whom he had collaborated since The Pickwick Papers (1836–37). Dickens chose instead the younger Marcus Stone and, uncharacteristically, left much of the illustrating process to Stone's discretion. After suggesting only a few slight alterations for the cover, for instance, Dickens wrote to Stone: "All perfectly right. Alterations quite satisfactory. Everything very pretty". Stone's encounter with a taxidermist named Willis provided the basis for Dickens's Mr Venus, after Dickens had indicated he was searching for an uncommon occupation ("it must be something very striking and unusual") for the novel.

Dickens, who was aware that it was now taking him longer than before to write, made sure he had built up a safety net of five serial numbers before the first went to publication for May 1864. He was at work on number sixteen when he was involved in the traumatic Staplehurst rail crash. Following the crash, and while tending to the injured among the "dead and dying," Dickens went back to the carriage to rescue the manuscript from his overcoat. With the resulting stress, from which Dickens would never fully recover, he came up two and a half pages short for the sixteenth serial, published in August 1865. Dickens acknowledged this close brush with death, which nearly cut short the composition of Our Mutual Friend, in the novel's postscript:

Marriage

In Our Mutual Friend Dickens explores the conflict between doing what society expects and the idea of being true to oneself. With regard to this the influence of the family is important. In many of Dickens's novels, including Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit, parents try to force their children into arranged marriages. John Harmon, for example, was supposed to marry Bella to suit the conditions of his father's will, and though, initially, he refused to marry her for that reason, he later married her for love. Harmon goes against his father's wishes in another way when, by taking the alias of John Rokesmith, he refuses his inheritance. Bella is also swayed by the influence of her parents. Her mother wishes her to marry for money to better the fortunes of the entire family, although her father is happy with her marrying John Rokesmith for love. Bella's marriage to Rokesmith goes against what is expected of her by her mother, but eventually her mother accepts the fact that Bella has at least married someone who will make her happy. However, later on in the novel, Bella accepts the everyday duties of a wife, and seemingly gives up her independence. Yet she refuses to be the "doll in the doll's house"; and is not content with being a wife who rarely leaves her home without her husband. Furthermore, Bella reads up on the current events so that she can discuss them with her husband, and is actively involved in all of the couple's important decisions.

Lizzie Hexam also objects to the expectation of marriage to Eugene Wrayburn, because she sees the difference in their social class status. Without marriage, their connection risks her reputation. She does not aspire to marrying Wrayburn even though she loves him and would be elevated in society simply by marrying him, which almost any woman would have done at the time. Lizzie feels that she is unworthy of him. Wrayburn, however, feels that he is unworthy of such a good woman. He also knows that his father would disapprove of her low social status. She goes against expectations when she refuses to marry Bradley Headstone. He would have been an excellent match for her by social class, according to norms of the time, however, Lizzie does not love him. She unselfishly does what others expect of her, like helping Charley escape their father to go to school, and living with Jenny Wren. Marrying Wrayburn is the only truly selfish act Lizzie commits in Our Mutual Friend, out of her love for him, when he made up his mind to ask her.

Status of women

Because of the rapid increase in wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution, women gained power through their households and class positions. It was up to the women in Victorian society to display their family's rank by decorating their households. This directly influenced the man's business and class status. Upper-class homes were ornate, as well as packed full of materials, so that "A lack of clutter was to be considered in bad taste." Through handcrafts and home improvement, women asserted their power over the household: "The making of a true home is really our peculiar and inalienable right: a right, which no man can take from us; for a man can no more make a home than a drone can make a hive" (Frances Cobbe).

Jews

The Jewish characters in Our Mutual Friend are more sympathetic than Fagin in Oliver Twist. In 1854, The Jewish Chronicle had asked why "Jews alone should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed." Dickens (who had extensive knowledge of London street life and child exploitation) explained that he had made Fagin Jewish because "it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew". Dickens commented that by calling Fagin a Jew he had meant no imputation against the Jewish faith, saying in a letter, "I have no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public or private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them". Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in June 1863 urging that "Charles Dickens the large hearted, whose works please so eloquently and so nobly for the oppressed of his country ... has encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew." Dickens responded that he had always spoken well of Jews and held no prejudice against them. Replying, Mrs Davis asked Dickens to "examine more closely into the manners and character of the British Jews and to represent them as they really are."

In his article, "Dickens and the Jews," Harry Stone claims that this "incident apparently brought home to Dickens the irrationality of some of his feelings about Jews; at any rate, it helped, along with the changing times, to move him more swiftly in the direction of active sympathy for them." Riah in Our Mutual Friend is a Jewish moneylender yet (contrary to stereotype) a profoundly sympathetic character, as can be seen especially in his relationship with Lizzie and Jenny Wren; Jenny calls him her "fairy godmother" and Lizzie refers to Riah as her "protector", after he finds her a job in the country and risks his own welfare to keep her whereabouts a secret from Fledgeby (his rapacious—and Christian—master).

Water imagery

A major symbol is the River Thames, which is linked to the major theme of rebirth and renewal. Water is seen as a sign of new life, and associated with the Christian sacrament of Baptism. Characters like John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn end up in the river, and come out reborn. Wrayburn emerges from the river close to death, but is ready to marry Lizzie, and to avoid naming his attacker to save her reputation. He surprises everyone, including himself, when he survives and goes on to have a loving marriage with Lizzie. John Harmon also appears to end up in the river through no fault of his own, and when Gaffer pulls a body dressed like Harmon out of the waters, Harmon adopts the alias of John Rokesmith. This alias is for his own safety and peace of mind; he wants to know that he can do things on his own, and does not need his father's name or money to make a good life for himself.

Dickens uses many images that relate to water. Phrases such as the "depths and shallows of Podsnappery," and the "time had come for flushing and flourishing this man down for good", are examples of such imagery. Some critics see this as being used excessively.

Themes

Aside from examining the novel's form and characters, modern critics of Our Mutual Friend have focused on identifying and analysing what they perceive as the main themes of the novel. Although Stanley Friedman's 1973 essay "The Motif of Reading in Our Mutual Friend" emphasises references to literacy and illiteracy in the novel, Friedman states, "Money, the dust-heaps, and the river have been seen as the main symbols, features, that help develop such themes as avarice, predation, death and rebirth, the quest for identity and pride. To these images and ideas, we may add what Monroe Engel calls the 'social themes of Our Mutual Friend—having to do with money-dust, and relatedly with the treatment of the poor, education, representative government, even the inheritance laws.'"

According to Metz, many of the prominent themes in Dickens's earlier works of fiction are intricately woven into Dickens's last novel. She states, "Like David Copperfield, Our Mutual Friend is about the relationship between work and the realization of self, about the necessity to be 'useful' before one can be 'happy.' Like Great Expectations, it is about the power of money to corrupt those who place their faith in its absolute value. Like Bleak House, it is about the legal, bureaucratic, and social barriers that intervene between individuals and their nearest neighbours. Like all of Dickens's novels, and especially the later ones, it is about pervasive social problems—poverty, disease, class bitterness, the sheer ugliness and vacuity of contemporary life."

Literary significance and criticism

Contemporary critics of Dickens

At the time of its original serial publication, Our Mutual Friend was not regarded as one of Dickens's greatest successes, and on average fewer than 30,000 copies of each instalment was sold. Though The New York Times, of 22 November 1865, conjectured, "By most readers ... the last work by Dickens will be considered his best," direct evidence of how readers responded to Dickens's novels is scarce. Because Dickens burned his letters, the voices of his nineteenth-century serial audiences remain elusive. Thus, evidence of the reactions of his Victorian era readers must be obtained from reviews of Our Mutual Friend by Dickens's contemporaries.

The first British periodical to print a review of Our Mutual Friend, published 30 April 1864 in The London Review, extolled the first serial instalment, stating, "Few literary pleasures are greater than that which we derive from opening the first number of one of Mr Dickens's stories" and "Our Mutual Friend opens well".

In 1866 George Stott found the novel flawed: "Mr Dickens must stand or fall by the severest canons of literary criticism: it would be an insult to his acknowledged rank to apply a more lenient standard; and bad art is not the less bad art and a failure because associated, as it is in his case, with much that is excellent, and not a little that is even fascinating."

Dickens had his fans and detractors just like every author throughout the ages, but not even his most strident supporters like E. S. Dallas felt that Our Mutual Friend was perfect. Rather, the oft acknowledged "genius" of Dickens seems to have overshadowed all reviews and made it impossible for most critics to completely condemn the work, the majority of these reviews being a mixture of praise and disparagement.

In November 1865 E. S. Dallas, in The Times, lauded Our Mutual Friend as "one of the best of even Dickens's tales," but was unable to ignore the flaws. "This last novel of Mr Charles Dickens, really one of his finest works, and one in which on occasion he even surpasses himself, labours under the disadvantage of a beginning that drags ... On the whole, however, at that early stage the reader was more perplexed than pleased. There was an appearance of great effort without corresponding result. We were introduced to a set of people in whom it is impossible to take an interest, and were made familiar with transactions that suggested horror. The great master of fiction exhibited all his skill, performed the most wonderful feats of language, loaded his page with wit and many a fine touch peculiar to himself. The agility of his pen was amazing, but still at first we were not much amused." Despite the mixed review, it pleased Dickens so well that he gave Dallas the manuscript.

Later literary criticism

G. K. Chesterton, one of Dickens's critics in the early 20th century, expressed the opinion that Mr Boffin's pretended fall into miserliness was originally intended by Dickens to be authentic, but that Dickens ran out of time and so took refuge in the awkward pretence that Boffin had been acting. Chesterton argues that while we might believe Boffin could be corrupted, we can hardly believe he could keep up such a strenuous pretence of corruption: "Such a character as his—rough, simple and lumberingly unconscious—might be more easily conceived as really sinking in self-respect and honour than as keeping up, month after month, so strained and inhuman a theatrical performance. ... It might have taken years to turn Noddy Boffin into a miser; but it would have taken centuries to turn him into an actor." However, Chesterton also praised the book as being a return to Dickens's youthful optimism and creative exuberance, full of characters who "have that great Dickens quality of being something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an unfathomable farce—a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe."

In his 1940 article "Dickens: Two Scrooges", Edmund Wilson states, "Our Mutual Friend, like all these later books of Dickens, is more interesting to us today than it was to Dickens's public. Certainly the subtleties and profundities that are now discovered in it were not noticed by the reviewers." As a whole, modern critics of Our Mutual Friend, particularly those of the last half century, have been more appreciative of Dickens's last completed work than his contemporary reviewers. Although some modern critics find Dickens's characterisation in Our Mutual Friend problematic, most tend to positively acknowledge the novel's complexity and appreciate its multiple plot lines.

In November 2019, BBC Arts included Our Mutual Friend on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.

In his 2006 article "The Richness of Redundancy: Our Mutual Friend," John R. Reed states, "Our Mutual Friend has not pleased many otherwise satisfied readers of Dickens's fiction. For his contemporaries and such acute assessors of fiction as Henry James, the novel seemed to lack structure, among other faults. More recently, critics have discovered ways in which Dickens can be seen experimenting in the novel." Reed maintains that Dickens's establishment of "an incredibly elaborate structure" for Our Mutual Friend was an extension of Dickens's quarrel with realism. In creating a highly formal structure for his novel, which called attention to the novel's own language, Dickens embraced taboos of realism. Reed also argues that Dickens's employment of his characteristic technique of offering his reader what might be seen as a surplus of information within the novel, in the form of a pattern of references, exists as a way for Dickens to guarantee that the meaning of his novel might be transmitted to his reader. Reed cites Dickens's multiple descriptions of the River Thames and repetitive likening of Gaffer to "a roused bird of prey" in the novel's first chapter as evidence of Dickens's use of redundancy to establish two of the novel's fundamental themes: preying/scavenging and the transformative powers of water. According to Reed, to notice and interpret the clues representing the novel's central themes that Dickens gives his reader, the reader must have a surplus of these clues. Echoing Reed's sentiments, in her 1979 article "The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend," Nancy Aycock Metz claims, "The reader is thrown back upon his own resources. He must suffer, along with the characters of the novel, from the climate of chaos and confusion, and like them, he must begin to make connections and impose order on the details he observes."

Adaptations and influence

Television

1958. Our Mutual Friend: BBC serial adapted by Freda Lingstrom. Unusual for most BBC series of the time, the serial still exists entirely, and in 2017 was released to DVD by Simply Media.

1976. Our Mutual Friend: BBC serial directed by Peter Hammond.

1998. Our Mutual Friend: BBC serial adapted by Sandy Welch. It starred Steven Mackintosh and Anna Friel.

Film

1911. Eugene Wrayburn, a silent film adapted from the novel and starring Darwin Karr in the title role.

1921. Vor Faelles Ven (Our Mutual Friend) Danish silent film version directed by Ake Sandberg; restoration by Danish Film Institute (missing about 50% of the second part) shown at Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, on 12/21 and 12/22/12 (on DVD).

Radio

1984. BBC Radio 4 broadcast Betty Davies's 10-hour adaptation.

2009. BBC Radio 4 broadcast Mike Walker's 5-hour adaptation.

Miscellaneous

1919. In Thornton W. Burgess's Burgess Bird Book for Children, "Jenny Wren" is a leading character.

1922. T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land had, as a working title, "He Do the Police in Different Voices", an allusion to something said by Betty Higden about Sloppy.

1920s. Sir Harry Johnston wrote a sequel to Our Mutual Friend, titled The Veneerings, published in the early 1920s.

2004–2010. In the television show Lost, Desmond Hume saves a copy of Our Mutual Friend, the last book he intends to read before he dies. It is most prominently featured in the season 2 finale, Live Together, Die Alone. The same character later names his sailboat Our Mutual Friend.

2005. Paul McCartney released a song "Jenny Wren" on his Chaos and Creation in the Backyard album about the character of Jenny Wren.

2016. The video game Assassin's Creed: Syndicate included additional missions titled "The Darwin and Dickens Conspiracy". One of the memories in this extra game play is called 'Our Mutual Friend' and includes slightly altered character names and situations similar to the novel.

Lizzie Hexam, extracted from the book and transported into the real world, was a main character in the 2009–2015 Vertigo Comics series The Unwritten.

2024. The play London Tide, presented by the National Theatre in London, is based on Our Mutual Friend. It is adapted by Ben Power with songs by Ben Power and PJ Harvey.