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Education vs. Real-World Experience
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Our Mutual Friend, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Several characters from Our Mutual Friend come from the margins of society. Often, this is due to a physical condition, like Silas Wegg’s wooden leg or Jenny Wren’s back. But it can also arise from something less tangible, like how Riah faces discrimination because he is a Jewish man living in a largely Christian country. On the one hand, the novel often treats these characters with dignity, portraying Jenny for example as a loyal friend and dedicated daughter in spite of her physical disability and strange profession of sewing clothes for dolls. Jenny is forced to find a job that she can do and to occasionally rely on the kindness of people like the “fairy godmother” Riah, who watches over Jenny and eventually comes to live with her as a surrogate father. The young man Sloppy is another outcast, abandoned by his parents because he was born out of wedlock. Still, while Sloppy’s parents rejected him, he proves himself to have many good qualities, including loyalty—perhaps even to a fault—to people like Betty who help him and don’t care that he’s illegitimate. The novel argues that these characters are fully formed people, deserving of dignity and respect despite how they differ in class, physical disability, or religion from the novel’s obviously upper-class or upstanding characters.
Still, as much as the novel skewers upper-class London society and frequently presents lower-class characters as acting more virtuously, this is not a universal rule. Silas Wegg, for example, reveals a greedy, vindictive side to himself as he tries to blackmail Noddy Boffin near the end of the novel. Riah is a more morally gray character—although he carries out the wishes of Fledgeby, financially ruining people in the process, he regrets these actions, ultimately quitting his position at Fledgeby’s company. Because of London society’s strict rules, Riah has to adapt to a world where he’s an outsider, doing work that he finds unsavory in order to survive. Still, he manages to act as a kind of “godmother” to Jenny and Lizzie, helping the latter hide during her time of need and proving that he’s not the stereotype Fledgeby sees him as. Our Mutual Friend portrays people at the margins of society as sympathetic and fully formed people who often suffer because of how society has rejected them, but it avoids painting them as saintly, showing how they sometimes have to make compromises to survive in London’s corrupt society, with some even succumbing to this corruption themselves.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Misfits and Outcasts ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Misfits and Outcasts appears in each chapter of Our Mutual Friend. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Misfits and Outcasts Quotes in Our Mutual Friend
Below you will find the important quotes in Our Mutual Friend related to the theme of Misfits and Outcasts.
Book 1, Chapter 5
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Over against a London house, a corner house not far from Cavendish Square, a man with a wooden leg had sat for some years, with his remaining foot in a basket in cold weather, picking up a living on this wise:—Every morning at eight o’clock, he stumped to the corner, carrying a chair, a clothes-horse, a pair of trestles, a board, a basket, and an umbrella, all strapped together. Separating these, the board and trestles became a counter, the basket supplied the few small lots of fruit and sweets that he offered for sale upon it and became a foot-warmer, the unfolded clothes-horse displayed a choice collection of halfpenny ballads and became a screen, and the stool planted within it became his post for the rest of the day.
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Book 1, Chapter 14
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They ran to the rope, leaving him gasping there. Soon, the form of the bird of prey, dead some hours, lay stretched upon the shore, with a new blast storming at it and clotting the wet hair with hail-stones.
Father, was that you calling me? Father! I thought I heard you call me twice before! Words never to be answered, those, upon the earth-side of the grave. The wind sweeps jeeringly over Father, whips him with the frayed ends of his dress and his jagged hair, tries to turn him where he lies stark on his back, and force his face towards the rising sun, that he may be shamed the more.
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Book 2, Chapter 2
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“Talking of ideas, my Lizzie,” they were sitting side by side as they had sat at first, “I wonder how it happens that when I am work, work, working here, all alone in the summer-time, I smell flowers.”
“As a commonplace individual, I should say,” Eugene suggested languidly—for he was growing weary of the person of the house—“that you smell flowers because you do smell flowers.”
“No I don’t,” said the little creature, resting one arm upon the elbow of her chair, resting her chin upon that hand, and looking vacantly before her; “this is not a flowery neighbourhood. It’s anything but that. And yet as I sit at work, I smell miles of flowers. I smell roses, till I think I see the rose-leaves lying in heaps, bushels, on the floor.[…] I have seen very few flowers indeed, in my life.”
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Book 3, Chapter 8
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Sewn in the breast of her gown, the money to pay for her burial was still intact. If she could wear through the day, and then lie down to die under cover of the darkness, she would die independent. If she were captured previously, the money would be taken from her as a pauper who had no right to it, and she would be carried to the accursed workhouse.
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Book 4, Chapter 9
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For it is not, in Christian countries, with the Jews as with other peoples. Men say, “This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.” Not so with the Jews. Men find the bad among us easily enough—among what peoples are the bad not easily found?—but they take the worst of us as samples of the best; they take the lowest of us as presentations of the highest; and they say “All Jews are alike.”
Book 4, Chapter 10
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“But I have heard my birds sing,” cried the little creature, “and I have smelt my flowers. Yes, indeed I have! And both were most beautiful and most Divine!”
“Stay and help to nurse me,” said Eugene, quietly. “I should like you to have the fancy here, before I die.”
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