Contemporary critics of Dickens At the time of its original serial publication,
Our Mutual Friend was not regarded as one of Dickens's greatest successes, and on average fewer than 30,000 copies of each instalment was sold. Though
The New York Times, of 22 November 1865, conjectured, "By most readers ... the last work by Dickens will be considered his best," direct evidence of how readers responded to Dickens's novels is scarce. Because Dickens burned
his letters, the voices of his nineteenth-century serial audiences remain elusive. Thus, evidence of the reactions of his
Victorian era readers must be obtained from reviews of
Our Mutual Friend by Dickens's contemporaries. The first British periodical to print a review of
Our Mutual Friend, published 30 April 1864 in
The London Review, extolled the first serial instalment, stating, "Few literary pleasures are greater than that which we derive from opening the first number of one of Mr Dickens's stories" and "
Our Mutual Friend opens well". In 1866
George Stott found the novel flawed: "Mr Dickens must stand or fall by the severest canons of
literary criticism: it would be an insult to his acknowledged rank to apply a more lenient standard; and bad art is not the less bad art and a failure because associated, as it is in his case, with much that is excellent, and not a little that is even fascinating." Dickens had his fans and detractors just like every author throughout the ages, but not even his most strident supporters like
E. S. Dallas felt that
Our Mutual Friend was perfect. Rather, the oft acknowledged "genius" of Dickens seems to have overshadowed all reviews and made it impossible for most critics to completely condemn the work, the majority of these reviews being a mixture of praise and disparagement. In November 1865 E. S. Dallas, in
The Times, lauded
Our Mutual Friend as "one of the best of even Dickens's tales," but was unable to ignore the flaws. "This last novel of Mr Charles Dickens, really one of his finest works, and one in which on occasion he even surpasses himself, labours under the disadvantage of a beginning that drags ... On the whole, however, at that early stage the reader was more perplexed than pleased. There was an appearance of great effort without corresponding result. We were introduced to a set of people in whom it is impossible to take an interest, and were made familiar with transactions that suggested horror. The great master of fiction exhibited all his skill, performed the most wonderful feats of language, loaded his page with wit and many a fine touch peculiar to himself. The agility of his pen was amazing, but still at first we were not much amused." Despite the mixed review, it pleased Dickens so well that he gave Dallas the manuscript.
Plot Many critics found fault with the plot, and in 1865,
The New York Times described it as an "involved plot combined with an entire absence of the skill to manage and unfold it". and he also found that "the final explanation is a disappointment."
Characters Many reviewers responded negatively to the characters in
Our Mutual Friend. The 1865 review by
Henry James in
The Nation described every character as "a mere bundle of eccentricities, animated by no principle of nature whatever", and condemned Dickens for a lack of characters who represent "sound humanity". The reviewer in the
London Review in 1865 denounced the characters of Wegg and Venus, "who appear to us in all the highest degree unnatural—the one being a mere phantasm, and the other a nonentity." However he applauded the creation of Bella Wilfer: "Probably the greatest favourite in the book will be—or rather is already—Bella Wilfer. She is evidently a pet of the author's, and she will long remain the darling of half the households of England and America." E. S. Dallas, in his 1865 review, concurred that "Mr Dickens has never done anything in the portraiture of women so pretty and so perfect" as Bella. Dallas also admired the creation of Jenny Wren—who was greeted with contempt by
Henry James—stating that, "The dolls' dressmaker is one of his most charming pictures, and Mr Dickens tells her strange story with a mixture of humour and pathos which it is impossible to resist." In an 1867
Atlantic Monthly article entitled "The Genius of Dickens", critic
Edwin Percy Whipple declared that Dickens's characters "have a strange attraction to the mind, and are objects of love or hatred, like actual men and women."
Pathos and sentiment In October 1865 an unsigned review appeared in the
London Review stating that "Mr Dickens stands in need of no allowance on the score of having out-written himself. His fancy, his pathos, his humour, his wonderful powers of observation, his picturesqueness, and his versatility, are as remarkable now as they were twenty years ago." But like other critics, after praising the book this same critic then turned around and disparaged it: "Not that we mean to say Mr Dickens has outgrown his faults. They are as obvious as ever—sometimes even trying our patience rather hard. A certain extravagance in particular scenes and persons—a tendency to caricature and grotesqueness—and a something here and there which savours of the melodramatic, as if the author had been considering how the thing would 'tell' on the stage—are to be found in
Our Mutual Friend, as in all this great novelist's productions." However, in 1869
George Stott condemned Dickens for being overly sentimental: "Mr Dickens's pathos we can only regard as a complete and absolute failure. It is unnatural and unlovely. He attempts to make a stilted phraseology, and weak and sickly sentimentality do duty for genuine emotion." Still, in the manner of all the other mixed reviews, Stott states that "we still hold him to be emphatically a man of genius." The
Spectator in 1869 concurred with Stott's opinion, writing "Mr Dickens has brought people to think that there is a sort of piety in being gushing and maudlin," and that his works are heavily imbued with the "most mawkish and unreal sentimentalism", but the unsigned critic still maintained that Dickens was one of the great authors of his time. However, Chesterton also praised the book as being a return to Dickens's youthful optimism and creative exuberance, full of characters who "have that great Dickens quality of being something which is pure farce and yet which is not superficial; an unfathomable farce—a farce that goes down to the roots of the universe." As a whole, modern critics of
Our Mutual Friend, particularly those of the last half century, have been more appreciative of Dickens's last completed work than his contemporary reviewers. Although some modern critics find Dickens's characterisation in
Our Mutual Friend problematic, most tend to positively acknowledge the novel's complexity and appreciate its multiple plot lines. In November 2019, BBC Arts included
Our Mutual Friend on its list of the
100 most inspiring novels.
Form and plot In his 2006 article "The Richness of Redundancy:
Our Mutual Friend," John R. Reed states, "
Our Mutual Friend has not pleased many otherwise satisfied readers of Dickens's fiction. For his contemporaries and such acute assessors of fiction as Henry James, the novel seemed to lack structure, among other faults. More recently, critics have discovered ways in which Dickens can be seen experimenting in the novel." Reed maintains that Dickens's establishment of "an incredibly elaborate structure" for
Our Mutual Friend was an extension of Dickens's quarrel with realism. In creating a highly formal structure for his novel, which called attention to the novel's own language, Dickens embraced taboos of realism. Reed also argues that Dickens's employment of his characteristic technique of offering his reader what might be seen as a surplus of information within the novel, in the form of a pattern of references, exists as a way for Dickens to guarantee that the meaning of his novel might be transmitted to his reader. Reed cites Dickens's multiple descriptions of the River Thames and repetitive likening of Gaffer to "a roused bird of prey" in the novel's first chapter as evidence of Dickens's use of redundancy to establish two of the novel's fundamental themes: preying/scavenging and the transformative powers of water. According to Reed, to notice and interpret the clues representing the novel's central themes that Dickens gives his reader, the reader must have a surplus of these clues. Echoing Reed's sentiments, in her 1979 article "The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in
Our Mutual Friend," Nancy Aycock Metz claims, "The reader is thrown back upon his own resources. He must suffer, along with the characters of the novel, from the climate of chaos and confusion, and like them, he must begin to make connections and impose order on the details he observes." In his 1995 article "The Cup and the Lip and the Riddle of
Our Mutual Friend", Gregg A. Hecimovich reaffirms Metz's notion of reading the novel as a process of connection and focuses on what he sees as one of the main aspects of Dickens's narrative: "a complex working out of the mysteries and idiosyncrasies presented in the novel." Unlike Dickens's contemporary critics, Hecimovich commends Dickens for
Our Mutual Friend's disjunctive, riddle-like structure and manipulation of plots, declaring, "In a tale about conundrums and questions of identity, divergence of plots is desirable." Hecimovich goes on to say that in structuring his last novel as a riddle-game, Dickens challenges conventions of nineteenth-century Victorian England and that the "sickness" infecting Dickens's composition of
Our Mutual Friend is that of Victorian society generally, not Dickens himself.
Characters Harland S. Nelson's 1973 article "Dickens's
Our Mutual Friend and
Henry Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor" examines Dickens's inspiration for two of the novel's working class characters. Nelson asserts that Gaffer Hexam and Betty Higden were potentially modelled after real members of London's working class whom Mayhew interviewed in the 1840s for his nonfiction work
London Labour and the London Poor. Unlike some of Dickens's contemporaries, who regarded the characters in
Our Mutual Friend as unrealistic representations of actual Victorian people, Nelson maintains that London's nineteenth-century working class is authentically depicted through characters such as Gaffer Hexam and Betty Higden. While novelist
Henry James dismissed the minor characters Jenny Wren, Mr Wegg, and Mr Venus as "pathetic characters" in his 1865 review of the novel, Gregg Hecimovich in 1989 refers to them as "important riddlers and riddlees." Hecimovich suggests that, "Through the example of his minor characters, Dickens directs his readers to seek, with the chief characters, order and structure out of the apparent disjunctive 'rubbish' in the novel, to analyze and articulate what ails a fallen London ... Only then can the reader, mimicking the action of certain characters, create something 'harmonious' and beautiful out of the fractured waste land." Some modern critics of
Our Mutual Friend have been overall more critical of the novel's characters. In her 1970 essay "
Our Mutual Friend: Dickens as the Compleat Angler," Annabel Patterson declares, "
Our Mutual Friend is not a book which satisfies all of Dickens's admirers. Those who appreciate Dickens mainly for the exuberance of his characterization and his gift for caricature feel a certain flatness in this last novel". Deirdre David claims that
Our Mutual Friend is a novel through which Dickens "engaged in a fictive improvement of society" that bore little relation to reality, especially regarding the character of Lizzie Hexam, whom David describes as a myth of purity among the desperate lower-classes. David criticises Dickens for his "fable of regenerated bourgeois culture" and maintains that the character Eugene Wrayburn's realistic counterpart would have been far more likely to offer Lizzie money for sex than to offer her money for education. ==Adaptations and influence==