1865. First edition. Fine. 15 22 5. Red leather spine and corners. Red and green marbled paper boards Gilt title, banding and decoration on the spine. Two volumes bound as one. It is the intent of F.B.A. to provide an in-depth photographic presentation of this book offered so to almost stimulate your feel and touch on the book. If requested, more traditional book descriptions are immediately available. First Edition, quality bound and kept Dickens's last completed novel, "Our Mutual Friend had a mixed reception (the young Henry James's harshly dismissive review in The Nation is notorious) but its stock has risen dramatically in recent years, and it is now generally regarded as one of his very greatest works" Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864–1865, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting from the character Bella Wilfer in the book, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life". Most reviewers in the 1860s continued to praise Dickens' skill as a writer in general, but did not review this novel in detail. Some found the plot both too complex and not well laid out. The Times of London found the first few chapters did not draw the reader into the characters. In the 20th century, however, reviewers began to find much to approve in the later novels of Dickens, including Our Mutual Friend. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some reviewers suggested that Dickens was, in fact, experimenting with structure, and that the characters considered somewhat flat and not recognized by the contemporary reviewers were meant rather to be true representations of the Victorian working class and the key to understanding the structure of the society depicted by Dickens in the novel. PLOT Having made his fortune from London's rubbish, a rich misanthropic miser dies, estranged from all except his faithful employees Mr and Mrs Boffin. By his will, his fortune goes to his estranged son John Harmon, who is to return from where he has settled abroad (possibly in South Africa) to claim it, on condition that he marries a woman he has never met, Miss Bella Wilfer. The implementation of the will is in the charge of the solicitor, Mortimer Lightwood, who has no other practice. The son and heir does not appear, though some knew him aboard the ship to London. A body is found in the Thames by Gaffer Hexam, rowed by his daughter Lizzie. He is a waterman who makes his living by retrieving corpses and taking the cash in their pockets, before handing them over to the authorities. Papers in the pockets of the drowned man identify him as Harmon. Present at the identification of the water-soaked corpse is a mysterious young man, who gives his name as Julius Handford and then disappears. The whole estate then devolves upon Mr and Mrs Boffin, naïve and good-hearted people who wish to enjoy it for themselves and to share it with others. The childless couple take Miss Wilfer into their household and treat her as their pampered child and heiress. They also accept an offer from Julius Handford, now going under the name of John Rokesmith, to serve as their confidential secretary and man of business, at no salary for a trial period of two years. Rokesmith uses this position to watch and learn everything about the Boffins, Miss Wilfer, and the aftershock of the drowning of Harmon. Mr Boffin engages a one-legged ballad-seller, Silas Wegg, to read aloud to him in the evenings, and Wegg tries to take advantage of his position and of Mr Boffin's good heart to obtain other advantages from the wealthy dustman. When the Boffins purchase a large home, Wegg is invited to live in the old Harmon home. Wegg hopes to find hidden treasure in the house or in the mounds of trash on the property. Gaffer Hexam, who found the body, is accused of murdering Harmon by a fellow waterman, Roger "Rogue" Riderhood, who is bitter at having been cast off as Hexam's partner, and who covets the large reward offered in relation to the murder. As a result of the accusation, Hexam is shunned by his fellows on the river, and excluded from The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, the public house they frequent. Hexam's young son, the clever but priggish Charley Hexam, leaves his father's house to better himself at school, and to train to be a schoolmaster, encouraged by his sister, the beautiful Lizzie Hexam. Lizzie stays with her father, to whom she is devoted. Before Riderhood can claim the reward for his false allegation, Hexam is found drowned himself. Lizzie Hexam becomes the lodger of a doll's dressmaker, a disabled teenager nicknamed "Jenny Wren". Jenny's alcoholic father lives with them and is treated by Jenny as a child. The work-shy barrister Eugene Wrayburn notices Lizzie when accompanying his friend Lightwood to Gaffer Hexam's home and falls in love with her. However, he soon gains a violent rival in Bradley Headstone, Charley Hexam's schoolmaster. Charley wants his sister to be under obligation to no one but him, and tries to arrange lessons for her with Headstone, only to find that Wrayburn has already engaged a teacher for both Lizzie and Jenny. Headstone quickly develops an unreasonable passion for Lizzie and makes an unsuccessful proposal. Angered by being refused and by Wrayburn's dismissive attitude towards him, Headstone comes to see him as the source of all his misfortunes and takes to following him around the streets of London at night. Lizzie fears Headstone's threats to Wrayburn and is unsure of Wrayburn's intentions toward her. (Wrayburn admits to Lightwood that he does not know his own intentions yet, either.) She flees both men, getting work up-river from London. Mr and Mrs Boffin attempt to adopt a young orphan, in the care of his great-grandmother, Betty Higden, but the boy dies. Mrs Higden minds children for a living, assisted by a foundling known as Sloppy. She has a terror of the workhouse. When Lizzie Hexam finds Mrs Higden dying, she meets the Boffins and Bella Wilfer. In the meantime, Wrayburn has obtained information about Lizzie's whereabouts from Jenny's father and finds the object of his affections. Headstone engages with Riderhood, now working as a lockkeeper, as Headstone is consumed with making good his threats about Wrayburn. After following Wrayburn up river and seeing him with Lizzie, Headstone attacks Wrayburn and leaves him for dead. Lizzie finds him in the river and rescues him. Wrayburn, thinking he will die anyway, marries Lizzie, and suppresses any hint that Headstone was his attacker to save her reputation. When he survives, he is glad that this has brought him into a loving marriage, albeit with a social inferior. He had not cared about the social gulf between them, but Lizzie had and would not otherwise have married him. Rokesmith is in love with Bella Wilfer, but she cannot bear to accept him, having insisted that she will marry only for money. Mr Boffin appears to be corrupted by his wealth and becomes a miser. He also begins to treat his secretary Rokesmith with contempt and cruelty. This arouses Bella Wilfer's sympathy, and she stands up for Rokesmith when Mr Boffin dismisses him for aspiring to marry her. They marry and live happily, though in relatively poor circumstances. Bella soon conceives. Meanwhile, Headstone tries to put the blame for his assault on Wrayburn onto Rogue Riderhood by dressing in similar clothes when doing the deed and then throwing his own clothes in the river. Riderhood fetches the bundle of clothing and attempts to blackmail Headstone. Headstone is overcome with the hopelessness of his situation, as Wrayburn is alive, recovering from the brutal beating, and married to Lizzie. Confronted by Riderhood in his classroom, Headstone is seized with a self-destructive urge and flings himself into the lock, pulling Riderhood with him; both drown. The one-legged parasite Silas Wegg has, with help from Mr Venus, an "articulator of bones", searched the mounds of dust and discovered a later will, which bequeaths the estate to the Crown. Wegg decides to blackmail Boffin with this will, but Venus has second thoughts and reveals all to Boffin. It gradually becomes clear to the reader that John Rokesmith is John Harmon. He had been drugged and dumped in the river by Riderhood, who did the same to Harmon's shipmate. Harmon survived the attempted murder, done to rob him of the proceeds of the sale of his business. The two men had switched clothes because Harmon wanted the opportunity to learn about the girl before claiming his inheritance; the shipmate agreed with the intention of stealing Harmon's money, but Riderhood took it all. Rokesmith/Harmon has been maintaining his alias to try to win Bella Wilfer for himself, not the estate. Now that she has married him, believing him to be poor, he throws off his disguise. It is revealed that Mr Boffin's apparent miserliness and ill-treatment of his secretary were part of a scheme to test Bella's motives. When Wegg attempts to clinch his blackmail on the basis of the later will, Boffin turns the tables by revealing a still later will by which the fortune is granted to Boffin even at young John Harmon's expense. The Boffins are determined to make the Harmons their heirs anyway, so all ends well, except for Wegg, who is carted away by Sloppy. Sloppy himself becomes friendly with Jenny Wren, whose father has died. A sub-plot involves the activities of the devious Mr and Mrs Lammle, a couple who have married each other for money, only to discover that neither has any. They attempt to obtain financial advantage by pairing off their acquaintance, Fledgeby, first with the heiress Georgiana Podsnap and later with Bella Wilfer. Fledgeby is an extortioner and money-lender, who uses the kindly old Jew Riah as his cover, temporarily causing Riah to fall out with his friend and protégée Jenny Wren. Eventually, all attempts at improving their financial situation having failed, the Lammles leave England, Mr Lammle having first administered a sound beating to Fledgeby. Our Mutual Friend, like most Dickens novels, was published in monthly instalments. Each of the 19 instalments cost one shilling (with the exception of the nineteenth, which was double-length and cost two). Each issue featured 32 pages of text and two illustrations by Marcus Stone. Sales of Our Mutual Friend were 35,000 for the first monthly number, but then dropped by 5,000 for the second number. The concluding double number (instalments XIX-XX) sold 19,000. Dickens and Our Mutual Friend Inspiration for Our Mutual Friend, possibly came from Richard Henry Horne's essay "Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed", published in Household Words in 1850, which contains a number of situations and characters that are found in the novel. These include a dust heap, in which a legacy lies buried, a man with a wooden leg, who has an acute interest in the dust heap, Silas Wegg, and another character, Jenny Wren, with "poor withered legs". In 1862 Dickens jotted down in his notebook: "LEADING INCIDENT FOR A STORY. A man—young and eccentric?—feigns to be dead, and is dead to all intents and purposes, and ... for years retains that singular view of life and character". Additionally, Dickens's longtime friend John Forster was a possible model for the wealthy, pompous John Podsnap. Our Mutual Friend was published in nineteen monthly numbers, in the fashion of many earlier Dickens novels, for the first time since Little Dorrit (1855–57). A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Great Expectations (1860–61) had been serialised in Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. Dickens remarked to Wilkie Collins that he was "quite dazed" at the prospect of putting out twenty monthly parts after more recent weekly serials. Our Mutual Friend was the first of Dickens's novels not illustrated by Hablot Browne, with whom he had collaborated since The Pickwick Papers (1836–37). Dickens chose instead the younger Marcus Stone and, uncharacteristically, left much of the illustrating process to Stone's discretion. After suggesting only a few slight alterations for the cover, for instance, Dickens wrote to Stone: "All perfectly right. Alterations quite satisfactory. Everything very pretty". Stone's encounter with a taxidermist named Willis provided the basis for Dickens' Mr Venus, after Dickens had indicated he was searching for an uncommon occupation ("it must be something very striking and unusual") for the novel. Dickens, who was aware that it was now taking him longer than before to write, made sure he had built up a safety net of five serial numbers before the first went to publication for May 1864. He was at work on number sixteen when he was involved in the traumatic Staplehurst rail crash. Following the crash, and while tending to the injured among the "dead and dying," Dickens went back to the carriage to rescue the manuscript from his overcoat. With the resulting stress, from which Dickens would never fully recover, he came up two and a half pages short for the sixteenth serial, published in August 1865. Dickens acknowledged this close brush with death, that nearly cut short the composition of Our Mutual Friend, in the novel's postscript: On Friday the Ninth of June in the present year, Mr, and Mrs Boffin (in their manuscript dress of receiving Mr and Mrs Lammle at breakfast) were on the South-Eastern Railway with me, in a terribly destructive accident. When I had done what I could to help others, I climbed back into my carriage—nearly turned over a viaduct and caught aslant upon the turn—to extricate the worthy couple. They were much soiled, but otherwise unhurt. [...] I remember with devout thankfulness that I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book: —THE END. Dickens was travelling with his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother. Marriage In Our Mutual Friend Dickens explores the conflict between doing what society expects and the idea of being true to oneself. With regard to this the influence of the family is important. In many of Dickens's novels, including Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit, parents try to force their children into arranged marriages. John Harmon, for example, was supposed to marry Bella to suit the conditions of his father's will, and though initially, he refused to marry her for that reason. However, he later married her for love. Harmon goes against his father's wishes in another way by taking the alias of John Rokesmith he refuses his inheritance. Bella is also swayed by the influence of her parents. Her mother wishes her to marry for money to better the fortunes of the entire family, although her father is happy with her marrying John Rokesmith for love. Bella's marriage to Rokesmith goes against what is expected of her by her mother, but eventually her mother accepts the fact that Bella has at least married someone who will make her happy. However, later on in the novel, Bella accepts the everyday duties of a wife, and seemingly gives up her independence. Yet she refuses to be the "doll in the doll's house"; and is not content with being a wife who rarely leaves her home without her husband. Furthermore, Bella reads up on the current events so that she can discuss them with her husband and is actively involved in all of the couple's important decisions. Lizzie Hexam also objects to the expectation of marriage to Eugene Wrayburn, because she sees the difference in their social class status. Without marriage, their connection risks her reputation. She does not aspire to marrying Wrayburn even though she loves him and would be elevated in society simply by marrying him, which almost any woman would have done at the time. Lizzie feels that she is unworthy of him. Wrayburn, however, feels that he is unworthy of such a good woman. He also knows that his father would disapprove of her low social status. She goes against expectations when she refuses to marry Bradley Headstone. He would have been an excellent match for her by social class, according to norms of the time, however, Lizzie does not love him. She unselfishly does what others expect of her, like helping Charley escape their father to go to school, and living with Jenny Wren. Marrying Wrayburn is the only truly selfish act Lizzie commits in Our Mutual Friend, out of her love for him, when he made up his mind to ask her. Status of women Because of the rapid increase in wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution, women gained power through their households and class positions. It was up to the women in Victorian society to display their family's rank by decorating their households. This directly influenced the man's business and class status. Upper-class homes were ornate, as well as packed full of materials, so that "A lack of clutter was to be considered in bad taste." Through handcrafts and home improvement, women asserted their power over the household: "The making of a true home is really our peculiar and inalienable right: a right, which no man can take from us; for a man can no more make a home than a drone can make a hive" (Frances Cobbe). Jews The Jewish characters in Our Mutual Friend are more sympathetic than Fagin in Oliver Twist. In 1854, The Jewish Chronicle had asked why "Jews alone should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed." Dickens (who had extensive knowledge of London street life and child exploitation) explained that he had made Fagin Jewish because "it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew". Dickens commented that by calling Fagin a Jew he had meant no imputation against the Jewish faith, saying in a letter, "I have no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public or private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them". Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in June 1863 urging that "Charles Dickens the large hearted, whose works please so eloquently and so nobly for the oppressed of his country ... has encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew." Dickens responded that he had always spoken well of Jews and held no prejudice against them. Replying, Mrs Davis asked Dickens to "examine more closely into the manners and character of the British Jews and to represent them as they really are." In his article, "Dickens and the Jews," Harry Stone claims that this "incident apparently brought home to Dickens the irrationality of some of his feelings about Jews; at any rate, it helped, along with the changing times, to move him more swiftly in the direction of active sympathy for them." Riah in Our Mutual Friend is a Jewish moneylender yet (contrary to stereotype) a profoundly sympathetic character, as can be seen especially in his relationship with Lizzie and Jenny Wren; Jenny calls him her "fairy godmother" and Lizzie refers to Riah as her "protector", after he finds her a job in the country and risks his own welfare to keep her whereabouts a secret from Fledgeby (his rapacious—and Christian—master). Etiquette In the middle of the Victorian Era, the earlier conduct books, which covered topics such as "honesty, fortitude, and fidelity," were replaced with more modern etiquette books. These manuals served as another method to distinguish oneself by social class. Etiquette books specifically targeted members of the middle and upper classes, and it was not until 1897 that a manual, specifically Book of the Household, by Cassell, addressed all the classes. Not only did the readership of etiquette manuals show class differences, but the practices prescribed within them became a way by which a member of the lower class could be identified. Most etiquette manuals addressed such things as calling cards, the duration of the call, and what was acceptable to say and do during a visit. One of the most popular etiquette books was Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, which was published in 1861. In this book, Beeton claims that a call of fifteen to twenty minutes is "quite sufficient" and states, "A lady paying a visit may remove her boa or neckerchief; but neither her shawl nor bonnet." Beeton goes on to write, "Of course no absorbed subject was ever spoken about. We kept ourselves to short sentences of small talk and were punctual to our time." Etiquette books were constantly changing themes and ideas, so this also distinguished who was an "insider" and who was an "outsider." Water imagery A major symbol is the River Thames, which is linked to the major theme of rebirth and renewal. Water is seen as a sign of new life and associated with the Christian sacrament of Baptism. Characters like John Harmon and Eugene Wrayburn end up in the river and come out reborn. Wrayburn emerges from the river close to death, but is ready to marry Lizzie, and to avoid naming his attacker to save her reputation. He surprises everyone, including himself, when he survives and goes on to have a loving marriage with Lizzie. John Harmon also appears to end up in the river through no fault of his own, and when Gaffer pulls a body dressed like Harmon out of the waters, Harmon adopts the alias of John Rokesmith. This alias is for his own safety and peace of mind; he wants to know that he can do things on his own and does not need his father's name or money to make a good life for himself. Dickens uses many images that relate to water. Phrases such as the "depths and shallows of Podsnappery," and the "time had come for flushing and flourishing this man down for good", are examples of such imagery. Some critics see this as being used excessively
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