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Explanation and Analysis:
Our Mutual Friend is a last and a first. Written by one of Victorian England’s literary giants, Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’s final major published work. But it is also part of the first wave of mass-published, serial novels that swept the English literary scene. Our Mutual Friend—like the works of George Eliot or Wilkie Collins—came published in monthly installments, a format that allowed stories to reach a wider share of readers than ever before. Dickens’s own weekly magazine, All the Year Round, gained a considerable following among devoted readers.
The work’s serial format shows in its formal and structural features. Writing by the month enabled Dickens to gauge public reception and adjust the plot accordingly. Dickens took notes and changed plans even while writing, which may partly account for the novel’s dramatic if improvisational quality. Chapters end on cliffhangers, and improbable plot shifts headline the work: Mr. Boffin reveals that he was merely feigning greed and miserliness in the last chapters, Bella Harmon becomes the obedient housewife, and John Harmon miraculously reclaims his inheritance in a story that resolves into idyllic bliss.
While Our Mutual Friend’s success may be one of the more divisive of Dickens’s works, it follows many of the Victorian novel’s standard conventions and the author’s own style. As with other works, Our Mutual Friend features romantic plotlines filled with intrigue and feeling. Dickens presents a gallery of characters who wear their hearts on their sleeves and collide with each other through unexpected turns of circumstance. The novel marks out its villains and heroes from the outset before pitting them against one another.
In content and scope, the novel explores Victorian England’s social conventions as well. The primary conflicts in Our Mutual Friend arise from questions about social status, gender roles, and marriage. John Harmon seeks to reclaim his rightful inheritance, Eugene Wrayburn grapples with marrying beneath his social station, and Mr. Lammle cons his way up to London’s elite. By the end of the story, Bella and Lizzie serve as paragons of female virtue. The standard tropes of Victorian literature—wills, marriage, and money—each make their appearances in the novel.
Arguably one of Dickens’s most critical novels, Our Mutual Friend showcases the writer’s more sarcastic side. Dickens was as much a satirist as a fantasist, and his work takes issue with a world arranged around wealth and social status. His exaggerated portrayals of the Veneerings and Fledgeby, for instance, make brutal caricatures of England’s elite. Like Oliver Twist or Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend criticizes the troubling inequalities and corruption of an industrializing society. In speaking out against social issues, Dickens makes the case that literature can be an instrument for justice.
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