Our Mutual Friend

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Dickens
Keyword(s):  
Individual Identity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Financial Speculation ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The City ◽  
Mutual Friend

Following his father's death John Harmon returns to London to claim his inheritance, but he finds he is eligible only if he marries Bella Wilfur. To observe her character he assumes another identity and secures work with his father's foreman, Mr Boffin, who is also Bella's guardian. Disguise and concealment play an important role in the novel and individual identity is examined within the wider setting of London life: in the 1860s the city was aflame with spiralling financial speculation while thousands of homeless scratched a living from the detritus of the more fortunate-indeed John Harmon's father has amassed his wealth by recycling waste. This edition includes extensive explanatory notes and significant manuscript variants.

"A Dismal Swamp": Darwin, Design, and Evolution in Our Mutual Friend

1994 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard W. Fulweiler
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Dismal Swamp ◽  
Human World ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend, published just six years after Darwin's The Origin of Species, is structured on a Darwinian pattern. As its title hints, the novel is an account of the mutual-though hidden-relations of its characters, a fictional world of individuals seeking their own advantage, a "dismal swamp" of "crawling, creeping, fluttering, and buzzing creatures." The relationship between the two works is quite direct in light of the large number of reviews on science, evolution, and The Origin from 1859 through the early 1860s in Dicken's magazine, All the Year Round. Given the laissez-faire origin of the Origin, Dicken's use of it in a book directed against laissez-faire economics is ironic. Important Darwinian themes in the novel are predation, mutual relationships, chance, and, especially, inheritance, a central issue in both Victorian fiction and in The Origin of Species. The novel asks whether predatory self-seeking or generosity should be the desired inheritance for human beings. The victory of generosity is symbolized by a dying child's "willing" his inheritance of a toy Noah's Ark, "all the Creation," to another child. Our Mutual Friend is saturated with the motifs of Darwinian biology, therefore, to display their inadequacy. Although Dickens made use of the explanatory powers of natural selection and remained sympathetic to science, the novel transcends and opposes its Darwinian structure in order to project a teleological and designed evolution in the human world toward a moral community of responsible men and women.

scholarly journals “Pictures in the Fire”: the Dickensian Hearth and the Concept of History

2009 ◽  
pp. 0 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adelene Buckland
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Social Vision ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Coal Reserves ◽  
The Cost ◽  
The City ◽  
Mutual Friend

Abstract At the symbolic centre of every Dickens novel is the roaring fire of a domestic hearth. Readers of Dickens frequently related clustering in familial groups around a fireplace, sharing in the fire’s uncertain pools of light and warmth while they read the text aloud. And within the texts themselves, the Dickens fireside has been seen as an idyllic space of conflict resolution: as Alexander Welsh has put it, “if the problem that besets” Dickens “can be called the city, his answer can be named the hearth.” This essay seeks to remember the materiality of the fireside alongside its more symbolic evocations. Comparing Dickens’s representation of the coal fuelling the fires of A Christmas Carol (1843) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), written over twenty years later, and taking in several short fictions published in Household Words in the intervening decade, it shows that Dickens often based plots of fictional transformation on the fantastic metamorphoses embodied in the lump of coal itself. While there was something exuberant about this change in the 1840s and 1850s, when Britain’s plentiful coal supplies were frequently imagined as tokens of a divine plan favourable to British industrial and imperial expansion, the darkening mood of Dickens’s late fiction chimed with contemporary fears about the waste and depletion of resources and the increasing competitiveness of the global markets. Most importantly, however, throughout his career the material dimension of coal offered Dickens both narrative possibility, and representational trouble. So important was it to his social vision that he often overlooked the cost of coal in his desire to keep his poorest characters warm, and in the 1860s he repeatedly ridiculed the national panic that Britain’s coal reserves might run out. Thinking about Dickens’s firesides as both symbolic and material spaces, fuelled by the coal whose history was of such fascination to the readers of Household Words, we see that the hearth was not only Dickens’s all-solving “answer” to the problems of the “city.” It was a space in which many of his most central concerns would sit in unequal, and unresolved, tension.

DICKENS'S “JEWISH QUESTION”: PARIAH CAPITALISM AND THE WAY OUT

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Epstein Nord
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Amy Levy ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
Great Writer ◽  
Mutual Friend

The story – we might almost saylegend – of how Dickens came to make the character of Riah inOur Mutual Frienda benign figure and a deliberate revision of Fagin, underworld denizen ofOliver Twist, is well known. In 1860, an Anglo-Jewish couple, J. P. and Eliza Davis, bought Charles Dickens's London home, Tavistock House. Dickens remarked to his personal secretary, William Wills, that he could not recall any “money-making dealings . . . that have been so satisfactory, considerate, and trusting” (Johnson 487). This expression of relief and slight surprise that the sale of his property to a Jewish family was without complication followed on Dickens's suspicion, crudely expressed earlier in the negotiations, that the “Jew Money-Lender” (as he referred to J. P. Davis) would not come through on the deal (Stone 243). But, though the Davises proved surprisingly cooperative in this phase of the transaction as far as Dickens was concerned, Mrs. Davis did ultimately have a complaint to register with the great writer and delivered it politely in a letter three years later. It was not about the house or the terms of purchase but rather about the character of Fagin, created by Dickens in 1837, some twenty-six years earlier. English Jews, she told him, had taken offense at this portrayal of one of their people and believed Dickens had done them a “great wrong” by offering the greedy, thieving, child-corrupting, sausage-eating criminal as representative of their “scattered nation” (Lane 98). Still, she added, while the author lived he might conceivably “justify himself or atone” for this deed. Apparently contrite and unaware of feeling any of the prejudices his portrait of the London fence might convey, Dickens declared in a letter back to Mrs. Davis that he had only “friendly feelings” for the Jews. His contrition did not end there. For the novel he was then beginning to write, Dickens would create a beneficent Jewish character, Riah, friend to the river dredger's daughter, Lizzie Hexam, and her misshapen companion, the dolls’ dressmaker, Jenny Wren. As the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish poet and novelist Amy Levy put it, Dickens “trie[d] to compensate for his having affixed the label ‘Jew’ to one of his bad fairies by creating the good fairy Riah” (Levy 176).

JASPER PACKLEMERTON, VICTORIAN FREAK

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-232
Author(s):  
Kelly Hager
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Novel ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Mutual Friend

ONE OF THEOED'S DEFINITIONSof the word “freak” is that of a freak of nature, “a monstrosity, an abnormally developed individual of any species; a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” The freak of nature I wish to focus on in this essay is marriage, and specifically, marriage as it is “exhibited” in Dickens's novelThe Old Curiosity Shop(1840–41). To refer to marriage in a Victorian novel as a freak of nature is perhaps surprising. To refer to the sacred institution as freakish in a Dickens novel may seem to border on heresy. After all, Dickens is the self-appointed novelist of hearth and home, the creator of conservative domestic plots that celebrate marriage as the institution that establishes closure for the novel and for the society it represents. Despite this apparent conservatism and despite our vague sense that most marriages in Dickens are as happy as David and Agnes's, Esther and Allen Woodcourt's, Biddy and Joe's, it is in fact the case that in all his novels, fromThe Pickwick PaperstoOur Mutual Friend, Dickens is fascinated–in a multiplicity of ways both large and small, in a manner that is alternately comic, tragic, melodramatic, ironic–with marriage's discontents. In fact, the disintegration of the institution is one of the things that Dickens makes fictions from, giving the failure of marriage a surprisingly high degree of visibility and presenting the breaking of the matrimonial bond with remarkable clarity and persistence. Dickens novels are full of wives who leave their husbands (Edith Dombey, Lady Dedlock, Louisa Gradgrind), breach of promise suits (inPickwickandOur Mutual Friendmost famously) and characters who try to find legal ways of escaping their marriages (Stephen Blackpool, Betsey Trotwood,Nickleby's Madame Mantalini). This essay, then, is an analysis of how Dickens undermines the institution early in his career, and of how the comic and grotesque display of the body, the sprawling, teeming physical surfaces ofThe Old Curiosity Shop, both conceal and reveal a story of marital skepticism.

Proto-Reading and the Positing of Character in Our Mutual Friend

2021 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Kevin Ohi
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Near Drowning ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Recursive Structures ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
As If ◽  
Mutual Friend ◽  
The Way

The openings of Dickens’s novels schematically isolate the elements that will form the texts: beginning with the “two figures” of the novel’s opening, this chapter examines the positing of character in Our Mutual Friend. It traces the novel’s fascination with proto-, incomplete, or newly emerging persons: the partial assembly of skeletons, the emergence of the nouveau riche or of “made” men, the awakening to consciousness after a near-drowning, the looming of forms that might be (but that are not yet) human out of the darkness or at the borders of perception. The novel repeatedly produces scenarios where recursive structures of gazing (fond spouses attending to their spouses’ looks, a daughter watching to see what her father sees) as if produce faces that loom out of the void. It also repeatedly dramatizes forms of reading that aren’t literally reading: Silas Wegg teaching Boffin to “decline and fall”; Lizzie Hexham seeing stories in the fire; Charlie Hexham looking at the spines of books; Gaffer “reading” posters illegible to him, and so on. The novel’s concern with incipient forms and, as it were, proto-reading, indexes the way its major and minor plots and subplots are structured by an overarching concern with inception.

The Movement of History in Our Mutual Friend

PMLA ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 89 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-495
Author(s):  
William J. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Past History ◽  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Our Mutual Friend ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Main Protagonist ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
Mutual Friend

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.

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