Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend

by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend

by Charles Dickens

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The last completed work of Charles Dickens retains his buoyant narrative voice, unique and intentional characters and sheer depth of meaning. It all begins with an inheritance and spirals into a memorable story satirizing life, death and the state of industrial London.

Our Mutual Friend is a satiric masterpiece about money. The last novel Dickens completed, and perhaps his most angry, it sounds all the great themes of his later work: the innocence and venality of the aspiring poor, the hollow pretensions of the nouveau riche, the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt everyone it touches. Among those caught up in the ruthless forces of change in Dickens's London are the archetypal innocent Noddy Boffin, who 'inherits' a dustheap where the trash of the rich is thrown; Silas Wegg, a grotesque, one-legged man with unlimited fantasies of grandeur and power; Mr. Veneering, Member of Parliament, whose house, furnishings, servants, carriage, and baby are all 'bran-new'; and Alfred and Sophronia Lammle, who marry one another because each wrongly believes the other is rich. The social themes of Our Mutual Friend--having to do with the treatment of the poor, education, representative government, even the inheritance laws--are informed and brought into coherence by the underlying presence of the Thames, signifying the perpetual flow of life into death, and acting as agent of retribution and regeneration too, as a kind of river god in fact, in a novel in which no other god is very present.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780679641353
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 11/01/2000
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 880
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

About The Author
Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, England, where his father was a naval pay clerk. When he was five the family moved to Chatham, near Rochester, another port town. He received some education at a small private school but this was curtailed when his father's fortunes declined. More significant was his childhood reading, which he evoked in a memory of his father's library: 'From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas and Robinson Crusoe came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time.'

When Dickens was ten the family moved to Camden Town, and this proved the beginning of a long, difficult period. (He wrote later of his coach journey, alone, to join his family at the new lodgings: 'I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I had expected to find it.') When he had just turned twelve Dickens was sent to work for a manufacturer of boot blacking, where for the better part of a year he labored for ten hours a day, an unhappy experience that instilled him with a sense of having been abandoned by his family: 'No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God!' Around the same time Dickens's father was jailed for debt in the Marshalsea Prison, where he remained for fourteen weeks. After some additional schooling, Dickens worked as a clerk in a law office and taught himself shorthand; this qualified him to begin working in 1831 as a reporter in the House of Commons, where he was known for the speed with which he took down speeches.

By 1833 Dickens was publishing humorous sketches of London life in the Monthly Magazine, which were collected in book form as Sketches by 'Boz' (1836). These were followed by the publication in installments of the comic adventures that became The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1837), whose unprecedented popularity made the twenty-five-year-old author a national figure. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth, who would bear him ten children over a period of fifteen years. Dickens's energies enabled him to lead an active family and social life, including an indulgence in elaborate amateur theatricals, while maintaining a literary productiveness of astonishing proportions. He characteristically wrote his novels for serial publication, and was himself the editor of many of the periodicals--Bentley's Miscellany, The Daily News, Household Words, All the Year Round--in which they appeared. Among his close associates were his future biographer John Forster and the younger Wilkie Collins, with whom he collaborated on fictional and dramatic works. In rapid succession he published Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and Barnaby Rudge (1841), sometimes working on several novels simultaneously.

Dickens's celebrity led to a tour of the United States in 1842. There he met Longfellow, Irving, Bryant, and other literary figures, and was received with an enthusiasm that was dimmed somewhat by the criticisms Dickens expressed in his American Notes (1842) and in the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). The appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 sealed his position as the most widely popular writer of his time; it became an annual tradition for him to write a story for the season, of which the most memorable were The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845). He continued to produce novels at only a slightly diminished rate, publishing Dombey and Son in 1848 and David Copperfield in 1850; of the latter, his personal favorite among his books, he wrote to Forster: 'If I were to say half of what Copperfield makes me feel tonight how strangely, even to you, I should be turned inside out! I seem to be sending some part of myself into the Shadowy World.'

From this point on his novels tended to be more elaborately constructed and harsher and less buoyant in tone than his earlier works. These late novels include Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1857), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1861). Our Mutual Friend, published in 1865, was his last completed novel, and perhaps the most somber and savage of them all. Dickens had separated from his wife in 1858--he had become involved a year earlier with a young actress named Ellen Ternan--and the ensuing scandal had alienated him from many of his former associates and admirers. He was weakened by years of overwork and by a near-fatal railroad disaster during the writing of Our Mutual Friend. Nevertheless he embarked on a series of public readings, including a return visit to America in 1867, which further eroded his health. A final work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a crime novel much influenced by Wilkie Collins, was left unfinished upon his death on June 9, 1870, at the age of 58.

Date of Birth:

February 7, 1812

Date of Death:

June 18, 1870

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, England

Place of Death:

Gad's Hill, Kent, England

Education:

Home-schooling; attended Dame School at Chatham briefly and Wellington

Read an Excerpt

PART I
 
Chapter 1
 
ON THE LOOK-OUT
 
 
In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.
 
The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognisable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look-out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boat-hook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in a cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight headway against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as she watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.
 
Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder, with the loose knot of a looser kerchief Iying low on his bare breast in a wilderness of beard and whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat, still there was business-like usage in his steady gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with every turn of her wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or horror; they were things of usage.
 
‘Keep her out, Lizzie. Tide runs strong here. Keep her well afore the sweep of it.”
 
Trusting to the girl’s skill and making no use of the rudder, he eyed the coming tide with an absorbed attention. So the girl eyed him. But, it happened now, that a slant of light from the setting sun glanced into the bottom of the boat, and, touching a rotten stain there which bore some resemblance to the outline of a muffled human form, coloured it as though with diluted blood. This caught the girl’s eye, and she shivered.
 
‘What ails you?’ said the man, immediately aware of it though so intent on the advancing waters; ‘I see nothing afloat.’
 
The red light was gone, the shudder was gone, and his gaze, which had come back to the boat for a moment, travelled away again. Wheresoever the strong tide met with an impediment, his gaze paused for an instant. At every mooring chain and rope, at every stationary boat or barge that split the current into a broad-arrow-head, at the offsets from the piers of Southwark Bridge, at the paddles of the river steamboats as they beat the filthy water, at the floating logs of timber lashed together lying off certain wharves, his shining eyes darted a hungry look. After a darkening hour or so, suddenly the rudder-lines tightened in his hold, and he steered hard towards the Surrey shore.
 
Always watching his face, the girl instantly answered to the action in her sculling; presently the boat swung round, quivered as from a sudden jerk, and the upper half of the man was stretched out over the stern.
 
The girl pulled the hood of a cloak she wore, over her head and over her face, and, looking backward so that the front folds of this hood were turned down the river, kept the boat in that direction going before the tide. Until now, the boat had barely held her own, and had hovered about one spot; but now, the banks changed swiftly, and the deepening shadows and the kindling lights of London Bridge were passed, and the tiers of shipping lay on either hand.
 
It was not until now that the upper half of the man came back into the boat. His arms were wet and dirty, and he washed them over the side. In his right hand he held something, and he washed that in the river too. It was money. He chinked it once, and he blew upon it once, and he spat upon it once,—‘for luck,’ he hoarsely said—before he put it in his pocket.
 
‘Lizzie!”
 
The girl turned her face towards him with a start, and rowed in silence. Her face was very pale. He was a hook-nosed man, and with that and his bright eyes and his ruffled head, bore a certain likeness to a roused bird of prey.
 
‘Take that thing off your face.’
 
She put it back.
 
‘Here! and give me hold of the sculls. I’ll take the rest of the spell.’
 
‘No, no, father! No! I can’t indeed. Father!—I cannot sit so near it!’
 
He was moving towards her to change places, but her terrified expostulation stopped him and he resumed his seat.
 
‘What hurt can it do you?’
 
‘None, none. But I cannot bear it.’
 
‘It’s my belief you hate the sight of the very river.’
 
‘I—I do not like it, father.’
 
‘As if it wasn’t your living! As if it wasn’t meat and drink to you!’
 
At these latter words the girl shivered again, and for a moment paused in her rowing, seeming to turn deadly faint. It escaped his attention, for he was glancing over the stern at something the boat had in tow.
 
“How can you be so thankless to your best friend, Lizzie? The very fire that warmed you when you were a baby, was picked out of the river alongside the coal barges. The very basket that you slept in, the tide washed ashore. The very rockers that I put it upon to make a cradle of it, I cut out of a piece of wood that drifted from some ship or another.’
 
Lizzie took her right hand from the scull it held, and touched her lips with it, and for a moment held it out lovingly towards him; then, without speaking, she resumed her rowing, as another boat of similar appearance, though in rather better trim, came out from a dark place and dropped softly alongside.
 
‘In luck again, Gaffer?’ said a man with a squinting leer, who sculled her, and who was alone. ‘I know’d you was in luck again, by your wake as you come down.’
 
‘Ah!’ replied the other, drily. ‘So you’re out, are you?’
 
‘Yes, pardner.’
 
There was now a tender yellow moonlight on the river, and the new comer, keeping half his boat’s length astern of the other boat, looked hard at its track.
 
“I says to myself,’ he went on, ‘directly you hove in view, Yonder’s Gaffer, and in luck again, by George if he ain’t! Scull it is, pardner—don’t fret yourself—I didn’t touch him.’ This was in answer to a quick impatient movement on the part of Gaffer: the speaker at the same time unshipping his scull on that side, and laying his hand on the gunwale of Gaffer’s boat and holding to it.
 
‘He’s had touches enough not to want no more, as well as I make him out, Gaffer! Been a knocking about with a pretty many tides, ain’t he, pardner?
 
Such is my out-of-luck ways, you see! He must have passed me when he went up last time, for I was on the look-out below bridge here. I a’most think you’re like the wulturs, pardner, and scent ’em out.’
 
He spoke in a dropped voice, and with more than one glance at Lizzie, who had pulled on her hood again. Both men then looked with a weird unholy interest at the wake of Gaffer’s boat.
 
‘Easy does it, betwixt us. Shall I take him aboard, pardner?’
 
‘No,’ said the other. In so surly a tone that the man, after a blank stare, acknowledged it with the retort:
 
‘—Arn’t been eating nothing as has disagreed with you, have you, pardner?’
 
‘Why, yes, I have,’ said Gaffer. ‘I have been swallowing too much of that word, Pardner. I am no pardner of yours.”
 
“Since when was you no pardner of mine, Gaffer Hexam, Esquire?’
 
‘Since you was accused of robbing a man. Accused of robbing a live man!’ said Gaffer, with great indignation.
 
‘And what if I had been accused of robbing a dead man, Gaffer?’
 
‘You COULDN’T do it.’
 
‘Couldn’t you, Gaffer?”
 
“No. Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? T’other world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse’s? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don’t try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it’s worthy of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man.’
 
‘I’ll tell you what it is——’
 
‘No you won’t. I’ll tell you what it is. You’ve got off with a short time of it for putting your hand in the pocket of a sailor, a live sailor. Make the most of it and think yourself lucky, but don’t think after that to come over me with your pardners. We have worked together in time past, but we work together no more in time present nor yet future. Let go. Cast off!”
 
“Gaffer! If you think to get rid of me this way——’
 
‘If I don’t get rid of you this way, I’ll try another, and chop you over the fingers with the stretcher, or take a pick at your head with the boat-hook. Cast off! Pull you, Lizzie. Pull home, since you won’t let your father pull.’
 
Lizzie shot ahead, and the other boat fell astern. Lizzie’s father, composing himself into the easy attitude of one who had asserted the high moralities and taken an unassailable position, slowly lighted a pipe, and smoked, and took a survey of what he had in tow. What he had in tow, lunged itself at him sometimes in an awful manner when the boat was checked, and sometimes seemed to try to wrench itself away, though for the most part it followed submissively. A neophyte might have fancied that the ripples passing over it were dreadfully like faint changes of expression on a sightless face; but Gaffer was no neophyte and had no fancies.
 

Table of Contents

BOOK THE FIRST (THE CUP AND THE LIP)
I. On the Look-out
II. The Man from Somewhere
III. Another Man
IV. The R. Wilfer Family
V. Boffin's Bower
VI. Cut Adrift
VII. Mr. Wegg Looks after Himself
VIII. Mr. Boffin in Consultation
IX. Mr. and Mrs. Boffin in Consultation
X. A Marriage Contract
XI. Podsnappery
XII. The Sweat of an Honest Man's Brow
XIII. Tracking the Bird of Prey
XIV. The Bird of Prey Brought Down
XV. Two New Servants
XVI. Minders and Reminders
XVII. A Dismal Swamp
BOOK THE SECOND (BIRDS OF A FEATHER)
I. Of an Educational Character
II. Still Educational
III. A Piece of Work
IV. Cupid Prompted
V. Mercury Prompting
VI. A Riddle without an Answer
VII. In which a Friendly Move is Originated
VIII. In which an Innocent Elopement Occurs
IX. In which the Orphan Makes his Will
X. A Successor
XI. Some Affairs of the Heart
XII. More Birds of Prey
XIII. A Solo and a Duet
XIV. Strong of Purpose
XV. The Whole Case so Far
XVI. An Anniversary Occasion
BOOK THE THIRD (A LONG LANE)
I. Lodgers in Queer Street
II. A Respected Friend in a New Aspect
III. The Same Respected Friend in More Aspects than One
IV. A Happy Return of the Day
V. The Golden Dustman Falls into Bad Company
VI. The Golden Dustman Falls into Worse Company
VII. The Friendly Move Takes up a Strong Position
VIII. The End of a Long Journey
IX. Somebody Becomes the Subject of a Prediction
X. Scouts Out
XI. In the Dark
XII. Meaning Mischief
XIII. Give a Dog a Bad Name, and Hang Him
XIV. Mr. Wegg Prepares a Grindstone for Mr. Boffin's Nose
XV. The Golden Dustman at his Worst
XVI. The Feast of the Three Hobgoblins
XVII. A Social Chorus
BOOK THE FOURTH (A TURNING)
I. Setting Traps
II. The Golden Dustman Rises a Little
III. The Golden Dustman Sinks Again
IV. A Runaway Match
V. Concerning the Mendicant's Bride
VI. A Cry for Help
VII. Better to be Abel than Cain
VIII. A Few Grains of Pepper
IX. Two Places Vacated
X. The Dolls' Dressmaker Discovers a Word
XI. Effect is Given to the Dolls' Dressmaker's Discovery
XII. The Passing Shadow
XIII. Showing How the Golden Dustman Helped to Scatter Dust
XIV. Checkmate to the Friendly Move
XV. What was Caught in the Traps that were Set
XVI. Persons and Things in General
The Last. The Voice of Society
Postscript. In Lieu of Preface






What People are Saying About This

George Orwell

The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius.

From the Publisher

‘The great poet of the city. He was created by London’
—Peter Ackroyd

Adrian Poole writes in his introduction to this new edition, ‘In its vast scope and perilous ambitions it has much in common with Bleak House and Little Dorrit, but its manner is more stealthy, on edge, enigmatic’.

Donna Tartt

I would always prefer to go get another Dickens off the shelf than pick up a new book by someone I've not read yet

Reading Group Guide

1. Many of Dickens’s contemporaries thought the world of eccentrics depicted in Our Mutual Friend went too far. Do you think this conceit got away from Dickens, or did he have a purpose?

2. Henry James, in his review of Our Mutual Friend in The Nation, says “In all Mr. Dickens's stories, the reader has been called upon . . . to accept a certain number of figures or creatures of pure fancy. . . . He was, moreover, always repaid for his concession by a peculiar beauty or power in these exceptional characters. But he is now expected to make the same concession with a very inadequate reward.” Does Dickens offer little reward?

3. Do you think Dickens originally meant to have Boffin have a change of heart?

4. Some scholars characterize Dickens’s work as giving a voice to the masses that, in his society, were never heard. Is this true of his Jewish characters? Consider the character of Riah and the role he plays in Our Mutual Friend. Do you think Dickens was anti-Semitic?

5. Consider Bella Wilfer and John Harmon/John Rokesmith’s relationship. Was Dickens making the novel neat when the betrothed couple truly falls in love, or was he creating a plot twist? Is this a comment about marriage?

6. Could it be said that Jenny Wren and the life she leads is the true heart of this novel?




From the Trade Paperback edition.

Foreword

1. Many of Dickens’s contemporaries thought the world of eccentrics depicted in Our Mutual Friend went too far. Do you think this conceit got away from Dickens, or did he have a purpose?

2. Henry James, in his review of Our Mutual Friend in The Nation, says “In all Mr. Dickens's stories, the reader has been called upon . . . to accept a certain number of figures or creatures of pure fancy. . . . He was, moreover, always repaid for his concession by a peculiar beauty or power in these exceptional characters. But he is now expected to make the same concession with a very inadequate reward.” Does Dickens offer little reward?

3. Do you think Dickens originally meant to have Boffin have a change of heart?

4. Some scholars characterize Dickens’s work as giving a voice to the masses that, in his society, were never heard. Is this true of his Jewish characters? Consider the character of Riah and the role he plays in Our Mutual Friend. Do you think Dickens was anti-Semitic?

5. Consider Bella Wilfer and John Harmon/John Rokesmith’s relationship. Was Dickens making the novel neat when the betrothed couple truly falls in love, or was he creating a plot twist? Is this a comment about marriage?

6. Could it be said that Jenny Wren and the life she leads is the true heart of this novel?

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