Charles Dickens: Our Mutual Friend

Some critics of British 19th century novels place Dickens’s final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, alongside other great novels of that era: Middlemarch, by George Eliot; Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray; The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope; and Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte.

This novel is darker, more brooding, than any of those. Rather than years or decades in his past to create a feeling of nostalgia, at the end of his 40th year as a published writer and most of the time the most famous and popular writer in the English language, Dickens turns his pen onto a satiric look London’s pursuit of Money and Society, and a bitter on at the state of the poor and those whose living are derived from the great and polluted River Thames, the powerful controlling symbol that unites many of the characters and plots in the novel.

In this six-week Delve we will discuss those issues, the novel’s place in Dickens’s development as an artist, and experience a novel filled with death, deceit, riverside dives, and disguises.

Texts:
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Note the Penguin Classics edition, with notes and introduction by Adrian Poole is the preferred edition for this seminar
(ISBN-13: 978-0-140-43497-2)

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