A few thoughts on Our Mutual Friend

Over the weekend I finished rereading Our Mutual Friend. I have been making notes to myself on the dining room whiteboard about the things that struck me this time through, and probably the biggest one is craft. That could be a really negative thing -- I hate reading books in which the writer seems to say "Look at me being a Talented Writer!" -- but I was delighted by the blend of joy and skill that bubbles through the book. 

I've posted before about the webs of connections that characterize Dickens' longer novels, but I found it especially striking in Our Mutual Friend. Toward the end I was thinking, "Wait, when did Mortimer Lightwood meet Mr. Riah? Oh, I remember! Yet another clever thing for Dickens to arrange!" He is sometimes criticized for creating one-note characters, but in the longer novels with their giant casts it's a help to have an identifying feature. It's like rosy-fingered Dawn, only more exuberant: Sloppy's buttons are like eyes, Sloppy's buttons are watching you, Sloppy is a veritable Argus of buttons. When Sloppy reappeared at the end of OMF I sighed an unwitting sigh so emphatic that my 13yo asked me what was going on. "This is perfect," I said. "Absolutely perfect." Dickens uses an emblem of Sloppy's poverty and misery to turn him into the jubilant agent of a well-deserved comeuppance.

Somewhere around 2008 I got annoyed with Dickens' female characters. They tend to take the identifying feature thing too far for my taste: there's Ditzy But Sweet (Exhibit A: Dora in David Copperfield) and Noble Despite Circumstances (Esther in Bleak House). But Bella Wilfer is genuinely interesting. I sympathized with her even when I cringed a little at her, and her transformation is persuasive. In the scenes where she chats with the Inexhaustible Baby I wanted to invite her over for tea; I can hear her laughter in my imagination.

Another bit of novel-craft that stood out to me was the Bella-Lizzie contrast. (If you're reading this book (I'm looking at you, Kerry!), maybe skip to the next paragraph.) Early on we're introduced to two very different father-daughter relationships. Over the course of the book we see their entanglement with the mutual friend of the book's title, their meeting and becoming friends midway through, and their eventual marriages. Another thing I love about Dickens is his certainty that life is full of unexpected good gifts, and that comes through clearly in his portrayal of these two.

Last time I didn't notice, or at least I don't recall noticing, the thwarted malice of the old man whose will sets the book's events in motion. He intended to cause his son suffering that would endure for years after his death. What actually unfolds puts me in mind of Joseph's comment to his brothers: you meant this for evil, but God meant it for good. The same idea is more explicit in Bradley Headstone's turmoil (when Dickens names a character Headstone, you have a pretty good idea from the get-go that doom attends him): love transforms even the most evil intent. Love can bring good out of any circumstance.

Comments

[Melanie]

I really want to jump in on this, but it's evidently been too long since I read Our Mutual Friend. Alas. I do remember loving Bella, though. Perhaps she's even one of the reasons my Bella is named as she is. And the Baby. I do need to re-read it soon.

Oh but I do have to put in a word for Esther Summerville. I love her too. And I need to re-read Bleak House, too. I need some more Fog in my life.

[Jody]

I am not reading Dickens this summer (I am trying to know my own limits before I set goals) but by chance, I link-followed to this critique by George Eliot:

"We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character -- their conceptions of life, and their emotions -- with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shakespeare's mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his humour, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtezans, would be as noxious as Eugène Sue's idealized proletaires in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else, and no one for himself."

The url is http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~jfec/ge/eliot.html

Thoughts?