Our Mutual Friend Study Guide

Born in 1812 in Portsmouth, England, Charles Dickens went on to become arguably the greatest writer of Victorian-era England, achieving widespread popularity during his lifetime and continued recognition among literary critics into the present. He came from an impoverished background, leaving school at age 12 to work in a factory while his father was locked up in a debtor’s prison. Although he began writing as a journalist and continued to write nonfiction throughout his lifetime, he is best remembered for his fiction, beginning in 1836 with his novel The Pickwick Papers, which like many of his novels was published serially in regular installments. Dickens went on to write 15 novels, including Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. He also wrote short stories and novellas, with A Christmas Carol being perhaps his best-known work and helping to invent or popularize several Christmas traditions. His final completed work was Our Mutual Friend. Dickens died in 1870 of a stroke in the middle of working on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a mystery novel that has no definitive solution.

Dickens’s works often receive praise for how accurately they portray the world of Victorian Britain, flaws and all. This includes the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, when new factories allowed for the rapid production of affordable goods but at a high cost—including extensive pollution and menial, often-dangerous jobs for lower-class workers, due to few laws protecting workers. This led to increasing wealth disparities, as shown in the novel by the vast gulf between the lifestyles of people like Lizzie Hexam on one end and the Veneerings on the other. Many critics have speculated about the extent to which characters and events in Dickens’s novels are based on real people or even on Dickens’s own autobiography (since like many of his protagonists, he rose from a humble background to a position of wealth and fame). During portions of the novel when Boffin is pretending to be a miser, he buys books that reference several real-life British misers from around the same time period, including John Elwes and Daniel Dancer (men who have also been suggested as inspirations for his earlier character of Ebenezer Scrooge). The novel also alludes to Britain’s status as a major imperial power during this time period, with one of the goals of colonialism being to spread British culture around the world. Dickens challenges the value of this goal by satirizing the over-the-top patriotism of characters like Mr. Podsnap.

By the time of Our Mutual Friend, Dickens was well-established as a famous and respected writer, and the novel delivers many of the things that readers came to expect from his previous novels (like Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield)—wide casts of characters, satirical humor, and themes about wealth and social class. Dickens initially took influence from picaresque novels, which like many of Dickens’ works, also have an episodic structure. Some of the most famous examples of this genre are The Golden Ass by Apuleius and Don Quixote by Cervantes. Britain also had its own history with the picaresque novel, with two of the most famous authors in the genre being Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy) and Henry Fielding (Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews). Dickens even named one of his sons Henry Fielding Dickens. As with many writers, Shakespeare was a major influence on Dickens; some of Shakespeare’s best-known plays include Hamlet, Macbeth, and Much Ado About Nothing. Out of Dickens’s contemporaries in Britain, one of the most notable was William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair), who at times admired Dickens and at other times was a rival. Dickens’s own influence on culture has been wide-ranging and continues into the present—from Russian writers like Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace) to Barbara Kingsolver’s contemporary retelling of David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead.