Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens

I had a friend who was an avid reader. Whenever I asked him what he was reading, very often it was a re-read of a Dickens novel. Having only read Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Great Expectations he has been my inspiration to read more Dickens. Claire Tomalin's excellent biography was a further spur. So, this year it was the turn of Our Mutual Friend which for some is Dickens greatest novel. It is the last completed novel and was published in 19 monthly installments in 1864–65.

Where Bleak House is centred on the judicial system, Our Mutual Friend is a dark  satire, focusing on wealth, greed, social ambition, and identity in Victorian society.

The story begins with the sun setting over the river Thames. Gaffer Hexam, rowed by his daughter Lizzie, is searching for floating bodies in order to rob them of any valuables, before dragging them to the shore. He duly finds a body which is identified as John Harmon, the estranged son of a wealthy businessman, recently deceased. The body and the father's Will are the centre of the main mystery of the novel.  

The inheritance due to John Harmon passes on to Mr Boffin, a genial employee of old Harmon who had made his money from dust heaps - a Victorian re-cyling industry. Newly rich, Mr & Mrs Boffin move from their lowly house near the dust heaps into a mansion. They take into their care Bella Wilfer, a beautiful young woman who had been named in the Will as the father's intended bride for John Harmon - the son would only inherit his father's fortune if he married Bella. The Boffins did not want her to miss out on a wealthy future so they invite her to live with them.

Mr Boffin employs John Rokesmith, Our Mutal Friend of the title, as his secretary and Silas Wegg, a one-leggged ballad seller, as the caretaker of the dust mounds. 

We are introduced to the social climbing Veneerings and their circle of middle-class, money-obsessed friends:

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, thorses 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 haeir hve 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.

A main theme of the novel is the moral corruption of money. Those who have it lose their generosity and become miserly; they seek status and desire to mix in the best company; they are not content with their place on the social ladder but wish to climb higher. Dickens portrays the shallow lives of those who simply use money to make more money:

As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, ‘Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us’!

In contrast we have Lizzie Hexam who works hard to live independently, Jenny Wren a crippled doll's dress maker who has to support a drunken father, and old Betty Higden, a foster mother with indomitable will and pride who would rather die than go to the Poor House:

‘The Poor-house?’ said the Secretary.
Mrs Higden set that resolute old face of hers, and darkly nodded yes.
‘You dislike the mention of it.’
‘Dislike the mention of it?’ answered the old woman. ‘Kill me sooner than take me there. Throw this pretty child under cart-horses feet and a loaded waggon, sooner than take him there. Come to us and find us all a-dying, and set a light to us all where we lie and let us all blaze away with the house into a heap of cinders sooner than move a corpse of us there!’
...
‘Do I never read in the newspapers,’ said the dame, fondling the child—‘God help me and the like of me!—how the worn-out people that do come down to that, get driven from post to pillar and pillar to post, a-purpose to tire them out! Do I never read how they are put off, put off, put off—how they are grudged, grudged, grudged, the shelter, or the doctor, or the drop of physic, or the bit of bread? Do I never read how they grow heartsick of it and give it up, after having let themselves drop so low, and how they after all die out for want of help? Then I say, I hope I can die as well as another, and I’ll die without that disgrace.’

When a second version of the Harmon Will is discovered by Silas Wegg he sees a way to make himself rich and enlists the help of Mr Venus a taxidermist. Rogue Ridehood an old partner of Gaffer Hexam is also on the make. He resents Gaffer Hexam shutting him out of  a share in profits from the drowned bodies and accuses him of murdering John Harmon. 

Meanwhile Lizzie Hexam has attracted the attention of a lazy lawyer and the schoolmaster friend of her brother. Their rivalry and obsession play out in dramatic and deadly fashion towards the end of the novel. 

Wealthy Bella Wilfer is also the object of unrequited love but is determined that only a rich man is worthy of her hand. 

‘I fear, Bella dear,’ said Mrs Lammle one day in the chariot, ‘that you will be very hard to please.’
‘I don’t expect to be pleased, dear,’ said Bella, with a languid turn of her eyes.
‘Truly, my love,’ returned Sophronia, shaking her head, and smiling her best smile, ‘it would not be very easy to find a man worthy of your attractions.’
‘The question is not a man, my dear,’ said Bella, coolly, ‘but an establishment.’

Bella's hopes do not turn out as she planned. 

One of my dislikes of Dickens is his sentimental depiction of young women, but in Bella Wilfer he has created an interesting character who is self-aware, stands up for herself, is tested in an unusal way, passes the test and takes command of her own destiny.

Lizzie Hexam is also determined to plot her own course and resists demands made by her brother that her life should be conducted to further his ambitions rather than her own.

Although this is a dark novel in some ways, Dickens has a sharp eye for satire and the novel is shot through with humour:

The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned as a tavern of a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veranda impending over the water; indeed the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.

Dickens' novels are complicated for the reader by the numerous characters and sub-plots, togther with Dickens love of using twenty words instead of two. This can be frustrating, especially if you have to read a pargraph two or three times to make sense of it. Our Mutual Friend is no exception and has been criticised for the lack of clarity in the plotting and for some very unlikely coincidences. Nevertheless, I enjoyed being immersed again in Dickens world and his over-elaborate prose. 

Next year's Dickens? The Old Curiosity Shop.