Our Mutual Friend : With original illustrations

by Charles Dickens

Overview

Dickens's last completed novel is a marvel of play-acting and posturing, of taking on roles through delusion, calculation and ambition. I've come to think of it as a sort of late-period masque, where the roles and disguises that John Harmon and Boffin consciously assume exaggerate the more ordinary play-acting and pretence that we all engage in. The Veneerings' awful dinner parties, or the love affairs where both participants wonder whether they are quite up to the mark, or the Lammles' getting married in the misguided belief that the other has money – these are all wonderful, extreme examples of what the sociologist Erving Goffman was later to call "the presentation of self in everyday life".uess it's the Dickens novel I love best, and come back to most frequently. It's said to be highly artificial – Henry James remarked, on its first publication, that he had never read a novel "so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt". The details of the plot, it's true, are elaborately implausible. But the individual characters are shockingly recognisable – the scenes between Mrs Wilfer striking postures and her debunking daughters, for instance. There are a hundred Podsnaps who will explain climate change over London dinner tables tonight, with a sweeping gesture of the arm. Dickens's genius for human observation at its quickest reaches a kind of pinnacle with the young man who tries to exercise his French and says "Esker" at a Veneering dinner, says nothing more and never reappears. But he will live forever, and we all know someone just like him.

It's so full of the river, and the sense of the city, and a huge stretch of London society, and so grand in its vision that perhaps we forget how gloriously funny it is – the Boffins deciding to go in for history, and buying a big book ("His name is Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire") or the captivating Lady Tippins ("You wretch!"), or Mrs Wilfer, after placing Bella in the magnificent coach of the Boffins, continuing to "air herself ... in a kind of splendidly serene trance on the top step" for the benefit of the neighbours.

I love the bold sentiment, the pathos and the drama; I even love the kid who dies whispering "A kiss for the boofer lady", because you might as well swallow this magnificent novel whole. And best of all is the exuberant, light-hearted moral conviction of the last page, as Twemlow at the very end shows his steel. Wagner said that the whole spirit of the English people was contained in the first rocketing eight notes of "Rule Britannia". But then he probably hadn't read Our Mutual Friend.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940161104361
Publisher:	Freeday Shop
Publication date:	09/19/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Charles Dickens was born in a house in Mile End Terrace on the edge of Portsmouth on 7 February 1812. (It was given the name Mile End because it was about a mile from the gate in the wall around Portsmouth). At that time Portsmouth was dominated by the dockyard. His father John Dickens worked as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. Charles Dickens was one of six children. He had an older sister Frances (Fanny) born in 1810 (she died in 1810), another sister Letitia was born in 1816 (she died in 1893), a sister named Harriet was born in 1819 but she died in childhood. A brother Alfred was born in 1822 (he died in 1860). Dickens had another brother, Augustus who was born in 1827 (he died in 1866).

In 1815 the family moved away to London. In 1817 Dickens and his family moved to Chatham in Kent. However in 1823 they moved to Camden in London.

However John Dickens spent beyond his means and he was sent to Marshalsea debtors prison when Charles was 12. (In those days people in debt could be imprisoned until their debts were paid off). Charles was found a job in a boot blacking factory. Fortunately after a few months a relative of John Dickens died and left him some money so he was able to pay his debts. Charles was eventually able to leave the blacking factory and return to school. However Charles never forgot this horrid experience.

Charles Dickens left school at the age of 15 and he started work in a solicitors office. However when he was 16 Charles became a journalist. Then in 1833 Dickens had his first story published. It was called A Dinner at Poplar Walk and it was published in a periodical called Monthly Magazine. Then in 1836-37 the first novel by Dickens, The Pickwick Papers was published as a serial. Meanwhile Dickens married a woman named Catherine Hogarth in Chelsea on 2 April 1836. They had 10 children but the marriage was not a happy one. Charles and Catherine separated in 1858.

Date of Birth:

February 7, 1812

Date of Death:

June 18, 1870

Place of Birth:

Portsmouth, England

Place of Death:

Gad's Hill, Kent, England

Education:

Home-schooling; attended Dame School at Chatham briefly and Wellington