Our Mutual Friend

The multiple plots of Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’s last complete novel, twine around the miser John Harmon’s legacy of profitable heaps of refuse (“dust”). Harmon dies and leaves the dustheap operation to his estranged son John, on the condition that he marries Bella Wilfer, a young woman unknown to him. When a body found in the Thames is believed to be the younger Harmon, travelling home to receive his inheritance, the dustheaps descend instead to Harmon’s servant Noddy Boffin (“The Golden Dustman”).

Boffin and his wife respond to their new status by hiring Silas Wegg, a “literary man with a wooden leg” to teach Boffin to read; arranging to adopt an orphaned toddler from his poor great-grandmother; and bringing the socially ambitious Bella Wilfer into their home, where she is watched and evaluated by John Rokesmith, a mysterious young man employed as Boffin’s secretary. Rokesmith is actually John Harmon, who has survived betrayal and attempted murder and is living incognito so that he can observe Bella.

Boffin’s negative transformation by his wealth, Bella’s moral awakening as she witnesses the changes wealth produces in Boffin and in herself, and the developing love relationship between Rokesmith and Bella form one key sub-plot. Another is the romance between gentlemanly idler Eugene Wrayburn and Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of the waterman who finds the drowned body. Class differences and the obsessive love and jealousy of schoolmaster Bradley Headstone threaten their relationship, but they are finally married with the help of the crippled dolls’ dressmaker Jenny Wren.

The smaller plots that interweave these sensation/romance narratives comment on the hypocrisy of fashionable life (“Podsnappery”) and the destruction of the family lives of both rich and poor by an industrialized, materialistic society. Characters: John Harmon, Bella Wilfer, Noddy Boffin, Mrs Henrietta Boffin, Lizzie Hexam, Charley Hexam, Eugene Wrayburn. Themes: One of the most prevalent symbols in Our Mutual Friend is that of the River Thames, which becomes part of one of the major themes of the novel, rebirth and renewal.

Water is seen as a sign of new life, used by churches during the sacrament of Baptism as a sign of purity and a new beginning. In Our Mutual Friend, it has the same meaning. Characters like John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn end up in the waters of the river, and come out reborn as new men. Wrayburn emerges from the river on his deathbed, but is ready to marry Lizzie to save her reputation. Of course, 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 his “body” out of the waters, he 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. [29] Throughout Our Mutual Friend, Dickens uses many descriptions that relate to water.

Some critics refer to this as “metaphoric overkill,” and indeed there are numerous images described by water that have nothing to do with water at all. [30] Phrases such as the “depths and shallows of Podsnappery,” [31] and the “time had come for flushing and flourishing this man down for good” [31] show Dickens’s use of watery imagery, and help add to the descriptive nature of the book. Historical Background: Our Mutual Friend was published in nineteen monthly numbers in the fashion of many earlier Dickens novels and for the first time since Little Dorrit (1855–7).

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860–1) had been serialized 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 serial. Our Mutual Friend was the first of Dickens’s novels not illustrated by Hablot Browne, with whom he had collaborated since The Pickwick Papers (1836–7).

Dickens instead opted for the younger Marcus Stone and, uncharacteristically, left much of the illustrating process to his 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.