Our Mutual Friend

1865, 1973 Penguin English Library edition
Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend
Original price unknown, bought used for $3.95
Falling apart, including broken spine
B+


Dickens's last completed novel is my favorite.  The various storylines are interesting and for the most part successfully used.  From the Thackerayan satire of the shallow Veneerings and their innumerable dearest, closest friends (they'd love Facebook!), to the Wrayburn-Lizzie-Headstone tragic triangle, Dickens uses a variety of tones.

As for the "mutual friend" plot, I have mixed feelings.  Topping the two Martin Chuzzlewits, this novel has three John Harmons.  The oldest is a cruel father who disinherits his children, his daughter permanently since she predeceases him, his son John more ambiguously.  The youngest John Harmon is the little boy that the Boffins try to adopt before he dies in poverty.  The Boffins have inherited the Harmon estate, which is made up of dust heaps, a source of wealth in the Victorian period apparently.  The living John Harmon fakes his death in order to see if Bella Wilfer, the young woman whom his father has semi-betrothed him to, would care for him if he weren't rich and if she didn't feel obligated to marry him.  He assumes the name Julius Handford, and then becomes John Rokesmith for most of the novel.  Then Mrs. Boffin, who knew him and loved him as a little boy, discovers who he is, and Rokesmith and the Boffins concoct a scheme in which Mr. Boffin pretends to be mean in the senses of cruel and stingy, in order to bring out the best in spoiled but good-hearted Bella.  When all this is revealed to Bella, who has indeed redeemed herself and married Rokesmith, she seems fine with it, although she expresses some frustration and confusion by using her baby, also named Bella, as a ventriloquist dummy.

As you can see, there are several parts to that main plot.  The faking his death part is kind of contrived but OK.  The Boffins inheriting, and Mr. Boffin pretending to be a miser, relate to the Wegg section and I'm ambivalent about that.  I like Wegg's misquotations of songs, poetry, and plays but I'm not sure if I buy him as the stupidly manipulative villain.  Mr. Boffin's scam is both unpleasant and implausible.  As Stephen Gill notes in the introduction, Boffin's transformation is more believable than the big reveal.  I just can't believe that nice, not very bright people like the Boffins, especially Mrs. Boffin, would deceive Bella for a couple of years without giving themselves away.

I'm not sure how I feel about Bella herself.  In a way, I like her combination of conceit and self-scolding.  She feels real and modern.  But she also has a twee side, as expressed with her Cupid-like father, Rokesmith once they're in love, and her namesake child.  I actually like her kid sister, "irrepressible" Lavvy, better in that she's bluntly honest throughout, even if it makes her obnoxious.

It's a strange novel in that a schoolteacher is the cruelest villain, and his pupil Charley, Lizzie's brother, is the most heartless.  Even more than Martin Chuzzlewit, this story is about selfishness and self-centredness.  I'm not sure I can say I fully liked anyone except for "Jenny Wren," the quirky dolls' dressmaker, and yet I kept reading, wanting to see what happened next to this cast of characters.  As in David Copperfield, there are Dickensian coincidences and reunions (Rokesmith lampshades this in one of the last chapters), but there's much more depth and realism than in that work from 15 years earlier.

The unintentionally funniest moment for a modern reader is when Dickens refers to L.S.D. a few times.  He doesn't mean "Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness," or lysergic acid diethylamide for that matter.  He's using an abbreviation for "librae, solidi, denarii," meaning "pounds, shillings, pence."  It was usually written as "£sd," but was sometimes written and pronounced as L.s.d.

This edition has a number of typos, if not so bad as Villette.  Some of these seem to be typesetting errors, as when there's a white gap where part of a word should be.  The most memorable typo is "lesss."  Yes, sometimes less is more, even with Dickens.

And, hey, three B+s in a row!  This won't last, but it's a pleasant surprise.