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Book 1, Chapter 9
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
There’s excitement in the Veneering house about an upcoming marriage between a “mature” young lady and “mature” young man who each come from property. Twemlow is confused, because the Veneerings are acting like this young man and young lady, Alfred Lammle and Sophronia, are their oldest friends, and yet surely, they’re younger than Twemlow himself. Mr. Veneering invites Twemlow and Mr. Podsnap over and says he wants to tell all his family friends about the wedding—Twemlow realizes that Podsnap might be the only other family friend, until Veneering mentions Lady Tippins and Twemlow realizes there may be three Veneering family friends.
“Mature” is the Veneerings’ polite way of saying “old,” at least in their eyes. In the context of upper-class London society, the fact that Alfred Lammle and Sophronia get married later in life is a sign that both of them are undesirable for marriage. Still, while the Veneerings may be condescending toward Alfred and Sophronia, Twemlow is harshly judging the Veneerings themselves in this passage. His anxiety over the Veneerings’ number of family friends suggests his anxiety about his relationship to the Veneerings.
Themes
The Veneerings offer Twemlow the position of giving away Sophronia at the wedding, since she has no family of her own to do it and since Mr. Veneering feels he doesn’t look the part. They hold Alfred and Sophronia’s wedding. Afterwards, Twemlow is sad because one of the bridesmaids reminds him of a woman he used to love who rejected him. Lady Tippins and Mortimer also attend the wedding, noting that the bride looks about 45 years old. Presuming that she’s Twemlow’s daughter, they figure he must be relieved.
This passage once again brings out the conflict at the center of the relationship between the Veneerings and Twemlow: Twemlow believes that the Veneerings aren’t sophisticated and that the result of that is they don’t have a large social circle, while the Veneerings look at Twemlow as an old relic from another era. While Veneering seems to be honoring Twemlow by offering him a place at the wedding, what he’s really saying is that Twemlow looks old enough to have a 45-year-old daughter, unlike Mr. Veneering himself.
Themes
Alfred and Sophronia Lammle go on a honeymoon, and it takes two weeks for them to realize that neither of them actually comes from “property”—that was all just a story that the Veneerings told in order to set the two of them up. It turns out each barely knows the Veneerings. The newly married couple argues on the beach, each accusing the other of deception. At last, Alfred proposes that since they’ve both been foolish, perhaps they can reach a “mutual understanding.” He proposes that they forget all their past plans and instead work together on new “schemes” to make money.
This passage humorously shows the dangers of putting money first in a marriage decision. Alfred and Sophronia each believe that they’re tricking the other one, only to realize that in the end they’ve tricked themselves and now have to live with the consequences of their selfish decisions. While Alfred tries to put a positive spin on things, rationalizing that maybe he and Sophronia will make good partners in crime because of their similar goals, Alfred and Sophronia seem like people always doomed to be dissatisfied with their position in life due to greed.
Themes
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