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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Our Mutual Friend, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Society, Class, and Character
Greed and Corruption
Marriage, Adoption, and Family
Education vs. Real-World Experience
Misfits and Outcasts
Summary
Analysis
Gaffer Hexam and Lizzie Hexam float in a small, dirty boat down the River Thames in London, England, towing something new that they found. Gaffer is a man with a wild beard, and Lizzie is his daughter, who is about 20 years old. Lizzie doesn’t like the river, but Gaffer says she’s acting ungrateful toward her “friend” the river: from coal to a cradle, Gaffer has always scavenged things out of the river to use to take care of Lizzie.
The novel begins by showing a lower-class, impoverished side of London, an environment that Dickens explored many times in his fiction. Gaffer and Lizzie literally survive on scraps and things that other people discard, showing how they are on the bottom of society. The first chapter sets up the central importance of the River Thames, which runs through the middle of the city, reflecting how even upper-class city residents can’t escape the river.
Themes
Gaffer and Lizzie run into a man, (Roger “Rogue" Riderhood, who greets Gaffer as “pardner.” Although Gaffer is friendly at first, he eventually says that he’s no partner to the man ever since the man was accused of robbing a live man. Gaffer scavenges from corpses all the time and doesn’t even consider it robbing, but he considers robbing a live man to be a real crime.
The way that the characters speak in the novel (for example, “pardner” instead of “partner”) is often a sign of social class. Roger comes from a similarly low social class to Gaffer, but this doesn’t mean they’re both equally good people. Gaffer, at least, has a distinct idea of what makes a person moral and good, and Roger flouts that by robbing living people.
Themes
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