Our Mutual Friend: Foil 4 key examples

Both characters reverse the traditional parent-child relationship. Bella plays the part of a teasing yet sympathetic mother, washing her father’s face and treating him to lavish lunches. She treats him with quasi-maternal care and sympathy: “Ah, poor dear struggling shabby little Pa!” she exclaims at one point before resolving to secure him a better future. In slightly similar fashion, Jenny Wren is a strict disciplinarian to her “child.” She supplies the drunkard Mr. Dolls with the self-control and moral responsibility that he lacks.

To the extent that they cut motherly figures, Bella and Jenny also subvert their immediate gender expectations. They find a degree of freedom within Victorian society but do so through different avenues. Bella rejects conventional female submission through her forceful personality and mercenary motives. Her pursuit of wealth gives her a previously unavailable independence: rather than being pursued by suitors, like Lizzie, she freely rejects John Rokesmith. “Gold-digging” affords Bella an autonomy otherwise denied to her.

But Bella’s money-seeking greed still works within a system of courtship and marriage. Our Mutual Friend raises failed cases of “marrying for money,” such as Mrs. Lammle, as if to show the pitfalls of Bella’s strategy. The novel also emphasizes her sexual appeal—routinely describing her “dimples” or bouncing curls—in standard appeals to feminine beauty. However much she tries to distance herself from female expectations, Bella must ultimately conform to the trope of the “boofer lady.”

Jenny enjoys a fuller degree of agency. Bella is constrained by her beauty; by contrast, Jenny’s “lame” leg and “bad” back draw her beyond romantic considerations. She serves instead as Lizzie’s wingwoman of sorts, a sidekick who pierces through Headstone and Fledgeby’s ulterior romantic motives. Jenny accomplishes through craft what Bella tries to do with snobbery. “When I see a great lady very suitable for my business, I say ‘You'll do, my dear!’ and I take particular notice of her, and run home and cut her out and baste her,” Jenny tells Riah. By manipulating the rich ladies with her doll dressmaking, Jenny effectively frees herself from gender norms. Her cutting and pasting enables her to parody the upper-class ladies and envision a life for herself.

But beyond this respect, Dickens emphasizes their diverging paths. John Rokesmith’s arrival in London initiates a journey of self-erasure and concealment. He nearly dies at the hands of George Radfoot, and then does so figuratively after the imposter himself gets murdered. With his own name erased from the records, he constructs multiple alternate personas and spends at least half the novel masquerading as “John Rokesmith.” On the other hand, Charley Hexam finds himself on the rise. Prophesied to “still go on better and better,” the formerly illiterate boy ascends to the position of schoolteacher.

These differences change the way the two characters relate to the past: an unearthing for one is a suppressing for the other. John Rokesmith revives his identity after he wins over Bella, at last restoring the “sparkle” in his father’s fortune. By the novel’s end, he has brought “John Harmon” back to life and come to terms with his history. But what John Harmon celebrates, Charley Hexam rejects. In defense of his social status, he buries the shame of his past by severing ties from Lizzie and even Headstone.

Their narrative arcs create stark contrasts of character. Between John Harmon and Charley, Dickens shows his reader the different ways of processing pride. In acting as Rokesmith, John Harmon patiently bears Bella’s rejection and puts up with his new life of anonymity. Charley meanwhile fails to see beyond his own reputation. “You shall not disgrace me,” Charley warns Lizzie when she rejects Headstone’s marriage proposal. The point almost deliberately recalls the Veneerings' first dinner party, in which Mortimer narrates how John Harmon sailed back from Brussels and “pleaded his sister’s cause.” John Harmon defends his sister before his father. Charley disowns her. Through them, Our Mutual Friend stages a contest of self-denial against self-interest.

The plot strand of Lizzie’s courtship tells two socioeconomic tales. Lizzie’s waterside upbringing is an obstacle to both Wrayburn and Headstone’s romantic aspirations—one of the novel’s conflicts lies in the class rift that stands between Lizzie and her suitors. But Wrayburn and Headstone represent dramatically different social backgrounds themselves. One enjoys membership in the elite: Wrayburn is an idle barrister, an upper-class gentleman with a controlling father—“M. R. F.”—to show for it. Headstone, by contrast, started as a “pauper lad” who rose the ranks through “mechanical” practice. Underlying Lizzie’s love is a conflict between pampered wealth and a tedious, middle-class work ethic.

These vastly different upbringings inform their respective personalities. Where nothing matters for Eugene Wrayburn, almost everything does for his rival. Wrayburn’s devil-may-care nonchalance could hardly be more different from Headstone’s monomaniacal obsession. Wrayburn can hardly be bothered to protect his own life, whereas Lizzie’s rejection amounts to an unforgivable affront to Headstone’s own pride. Wrayburn internalizes his love for Lizzie with a mindless whimsy that troubles Mortimer, whereas Headstone breeds an overmastering violence that stops at nothing to achieve his ends. He stalks his arch-rival down London’s streets all night and, in the courtship’s climax, even attempts to murder Wrayburn by the river.

“You are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me,” Headstone gasps before Lizzie, clutching at the stone and bloodying his fists. For an ascendant schoolteacher, this obsession with Lizzie will bring about his disgrace. Headstone literally “drowns” in love, but Eugene triumphs by it. In asking for Lizzie’s hand at last, the handicapped gentleman breaks free from M. R. F.’s wishes, defies upper-class social norms, and marries for love. By the end of Our Mutual Friend, Eugene has risen above the patter of Lady Tippins’s gossip and asserted his own will as an individual.

Both characters assume servant-like roles in the novel—the Boffins were longtime caretakers for the late Mr. Harmon, and they continue stewarding his property in the early parts of the story. Silas Wegg is the Boffins’ “reader,” who visits the Bower to share stories from the couple’s history volumes.

The similarities largely end there. Our Mutual Friend is quick to cast Silas Wegg as Mr. Boffin’s scheming counterpart. Silas Wegg turns on his employers no sooner than he begins his reading gig. His resentment grows in proportion with his rewards—the greater his social position, the greater his greed. Even when handed the keys to the Bower, the former street vendor rails about Mr. Boffin:

‘— Him that shall be nameless, under such circumstances passes me by, and puts a talking-over stranger above my head. Which of us two is the better man? Which of us two can repeat most poetry? Which of us two has, in the service of him that shall be nameless, tackled the Romans, both civil and military, till he has got as husky as if he'd been weaned and ever since brought up on sawdust? Not the talking-over stranger. Yet the house is as free to him as if it was his, and he has his room, and is put upon a footing, and draws about a thousand a year. I am banished to the Bower, to be found in it like a piece of furniture whenever wanted.

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The Boffins’ reader is slick wherever his wooden leg is not involved, rummaging through the Bower for the late Harmon’s treasures or hatching conspiracies to seize the property off Mr. Boffin’s hands. By the time he stumbles across Mr. Harmon’s alternate will, he can hardly control his violent, vicious greed.

Dickens positions Mr. Boffin as the clever opposite of this wily villain. If Silas Wegg must perform his loyalty in front of his employer, the Golden Dustman acts out ruthless disloyalty before his. As though following in Silas Wegg’s mercenary footsteps, Mr. Boffin dangerously skims the edges of moral corruption in the novel’s later half. Our Mutual Friend leads its readers to believe that Mr. Boffin has succumbed to moral decay: the Golden Dustman trims expenses, abuses John Rokesmith, and obsesses over wealth. And while its plot twist strains credibility, Mr. Boffin does not lose his loyalty—the novel’s conclusion reveals that he had been carrying out Rokesmith’s plan all along. What seems to be Silas Wegg’s close twin in fact reveals himself to be a model of righteous fidelity. The novel maintains a subtle contrast even before the conclusion’s disclosure—Mr. Boffin hires Silas Wegg so that one is an employer and the other an employee, as though to suggest that not all servants are the same.