SOURCE: “The Critics and Our Mutual Friend,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 13, No. 3, July, 1963, pp. 231-40.

[In the following essay, Hobsbaum examines common misreadings of Our Mutual Friend and suggests that they are caused by an overemphasis on character, whereas a study of the novel's central images would yield a greater understanding and appreciation of the work.]

Even the greatest novel can lend itself to misreading if there is some uncertainty in its execution. The misreading may, however, be considerably in excess of the uncertainty.

For example, the young Henry James came out decisively against Our Mutual Friend when it first appeared. He regarded it as an unsuccessful attempt on Dickens's part to carry on his earlier, comic, vein. The view of Dickens as an instinctive eccentric was one characteristically found among Victorian highbrows, as George H. Ford has demonstrated in his valuable study of Dickens's early readers. How mistaken it is was shown recently by Professor Butt and Mrs. Tillotson in their study of Dickens's working methods.

But it is a view which, with less excuse, has its counterpart in serious critics of our own time. Santayana's slighting ascription of the great entertainer has been given a fresh currency in our own time in the strictures of Dr. Leavis. Another Scrutiny critic, R. C. Churchill, suggests that the characters in the book would be more amusing if they had not already occurred, far better done, in earlier works.

This preoccupation with character is a major cause of critical deflection in the reading of Dickens. Tracing parallels between his various personae may, as William de Morgan suggested in his preface to the Waverley Edition, blind us to the effect of these personae in their dramatic context. It may also prevent our comprehending the total effect of the novel.

Hence, perhaps, the remarkable range of valuation of Our Mutual Friend, even in modern times: all the way from K. J. Fielding, who finds it incoherent, to Jack Lindsay, who regards it as one of the greatest prose works ever written.

Much, no doubt, depends on the expectations with which a reader approaches the book. Henry James particularly objects to Dickens's handling of the fine gentleman's pursuit of the boatman's daughter. He says that this gentleman, Wrayburn, is no more than a stock cigar-smoking type. And if Dr. Fielding is more conscious that Wrayburn is a new departure, for him it is only one which anticipates the dandies of Oscar Wilde.

Yet other critics have seen more in Wrayburn than this. Although, like James, George Orwell regarded Our Mutual Friend as an extension of Dickens's earlier manner, he concedes that the episode of Wrayburn and Lizzie is treated very realistically. Wrayburn has too much decency to attempt seducing Lizzie, but not enough to jettison his family by marrying her. G. K. Chesterton goes so far as to say that, in Wrayburn's pursuit of Lizzie, Dickens ‘has marvellously realised the singularly empty obstinacy that drives the whims and pleasures of a leisured class’.

Even if one plays the game of comparing Wrayburn with earlier creations of Dickens, he will be seen to be more than an imitation. Edmund Wilson finds him more sympathetic than Harthouse or Gowan; Humphry House, more interesting than Steerforth. Monroe Engel, in a recent study, has said that, with this character, Dickens added a new dimension to the consideration of class in English fiction: Wrayburn is too careless even to protect himself.

This state of mind has been ably analysed by another recent critic, J. Hillis Miller. ‘The character feels that life is altogether ridiculous because every move in it has been decided beforehand.’

But the realistic presentation of ennui would hardly in itself be impressive if it was not part of a developing moral pattern. Edmund Wilson, among others, has shown how this is so. The conjunction of the upper with the lower class is, in his view, a criticism of the middle-class society satirised elsewhere in the book—this has become dissociated from everything that is admirable in English life. Edgar Johnson has suggested that Wrayburn's scepticism of received values made him an effective instrument for Dickens's criticism of society. And, in his final denial of society, Wrayburn has learned affirmation; in deserving Lizzie's love, ‘he has achieved purpose and respect’.

Both Monroe Engel and Hillis Miller emphasize the importance of the river in this regeneration. Wrayburn's disfigurement and immersion render it possible for him to cast off his old life and begin anew. The enactment may be seen to take place on several planes. For, as Jack Lindsay points out, Dickens never loses hold of the social aspects of this marriage. It transcends the bonds of the society in which Wrayburn has been imprisoned.

This is an example of the way in which a consideration of a Dickens ‘character’ will often prove to be far more than that. Here, it is a way into the symbolic drama of the book.

But there is always some reason for a divergence of opinion. James's strictures on Wrayburn as an original character and on the book's norm of conduct are not without foundation. Wrayburn's moral position may seem equivocal if only because Lizzie, the character with whom he is most closely associated, is (as James said) a conventional figure. Few critics have come to her defence. Edmund Wilson and Jack Lindsay may have accurately diagnosed a social intention on Dickens's part when he took his heroine from the lowest and most illiterate classes. But they do not seem to see that the moral would have more point if her behaviour and accent were less resolutely that of a middle-class heroine. ‘Think of me as belonging to another station and quite cut off from you in honour … if you feel towards me, in one particular, as you might if I was a lady, give me the full claim of a lady upon your generous behaviour.’ (IV, vi.)

Lizzie's moral position is also rather equivocal. Chesterton found her too romantic to be pathetic. Humphry House charged her with being coy—enhancing her attractiveness as well as her virtue by running away. Messrs. Engel and Miller do well to stress that part Lizzie plays in the regeneration of Wrayburn, but both note how powerfully this is reinforced by the river as a motivating symbol.

It is true that the scheme of Our Mutual Friend does not depend for its success on the realism of an individual character. In this way, the book may be said to carry Lizzie. Nevertheless, she cannot be termed a satisfactory dramatic creation. And her social and moral indeterminacy may well, for some readers, put Wrayburn, with whom she is so closely associated, in an equivocal light. This does not justify James's opinion that Wrayburn is a character out of stock. But it may go far towards explaining it.

Preconceptions similar to those which led James to identify the eccentric characters of Our Mutual Friend with earlier efforts in a purely comic vein led him also to the judgement that even so central a character as the dustman, Boffin, is ‘lifeless, forced, mechanical … the letter of his old humour without the spirit. … Humanity is nearer home than the Boffins.’

Once more, we may deduce that ‘character’ is being considered in isolation. James gives something of his case away by recognizing that a distinction, if only of value, must be made between Boffin and other ‘comic’ characters. George Orwell draws no such distinction. For him, Boffin is just the same as other ‘good rich men’ such as the Cheerybles in Nicholas Nickleby. This can, fortunately, be shown to be a misreading not only of the intention of the book but of the effect that it is likely to have on readers who come to it without these preoccupations.

For, on inheriting his mounds of dust, Boffin deteriorates into a miser. Dr. Fielding has called this ‘a fantastic pretence’ but, as Gissing pointed out, in fact the presentation of Boffin's miserdom is convincing. ‘“What!” said Mr. Boffin, gathering himself together in his most suspicious attitude, and wrinkling his face into a very map of curves and corners, “Don't I know what grabs are made at a man with money? If I didn't keep my eyes open and my pockets buttoned, shouldn't I be in the work-house before I knew where I was?”’ (III, xv).

Hillis Miller has pointed out that this is no sudden change. We find the Boffins early on in the book planning to leave their Bower and take a new mansion. ‘Our old selves weren't people of fortune; our new selves are’, says Mr. Boffin in explanation of his changed way of life. His predecessor as custodian of the Mounds was Harmon, also proprietor of ‘Harmony’ Gaol: ‘a tremendous old rascal who … grew rich as a Dust Contractor, and lived in a hollow in a hilly country entirely composed of Dust’. (I, ii.) It seems that Boffin inherits something of Harmon's temperament along with his Mounds. Jack Lindsay says that fortune perverts Boffin's whole character. Humphry House relates, as one should, this degeneration in Boffin to the development of the action—‘everything is corrupted and distorted by money’.

James and Orwell may have been misled by the benevolent aspect Boffin wears in the earlier part of the book. Yet there is more than a hint of criticism in the author's presentation of this. He is shown to be a very odd-looking fellow altogether. ‘Morning, sir! Morning! Morning! Morning, Morning, morning, morning!’ (I, v.) Almost insistently odd, we may feel. He is revealed as being sentimental and tough at the same time in I, viii; snobbish in I, ix; and, in I, xv, the beginnings of real miserdom come. He makes the ‘secretary’ Rokesmith work hard to get him into his new house just for the sake of making him work hard. ‘“Well, it ain't that I'm in a mortal hurry,” said Mr. Boffin, “only when you do pay people for looking alive, it's as well to know that they are looking alive.”’

This is not the benevolence of the characters in the earlier Dickens. However, since Boffin eventually reverts to something like his initial aspect, and the action is, correspondingly, not worked out to its logical conclusion, James and Orwell may have some reason for their belief that Boffin is little more than a lesser Cheeryble; though this, again, need not justify their opinion.

A number of critics—Gissing, Chesterton and House among them—believe that Dickens changed his plot in mid-novel. After nine-tenths of an action showing the corrupting influence of wealth—symbolized by the mounds of dust—the good people of the beginning of the novel end up rich as well.

There have been attempts to justify this change in the action. Mr. Miller, for instance, suggests that, in acting the rôle of a miser, Boffin was defining himself as the refusal to be his situation and appearance. This seems rather far-fetched. Mr. Lindsay has a better point when he says that we fail to believe Boffin's miserdom is assumed. There is, indeed, little playacting in the savage attack on Rokesmith—‘I know this young lady, and we all three know that it's Money she makes a stand for—money, money, money—and that you and your affections and hearts are a Lie, sir!’ (III, xv.)

The scene is at once consonant with the general pattern of the book and, in itself, a powerful projection of greed and suspicion. The fact that Boffin turns out to be a faithful custodian after all does not remove the impression it leaves. And it certainly does not make the book an imitation Nicholas Nickleby or Boffin another Cheeryble. What we most clearly remember in Our Mutual Friend is not the universal panacea of individual kindliness but the corruption of Boffin and the relentless struggle for possession of the mounds of dust.

This symbol in action is a moral condemnation. It attracts to itself the anti-social attitudes criticized in the book. This is why it is not germane to say, as Dr. Fielding does, that the symbol is used ambiguously. The only deduction he draws from the Mounds is ‘that there is no objection to inheriting wealth without working for it, and that it is only wrong for a man like Harmon to build it up by providing an honest service to the community’. Even as a political point, this is highly arguable. In any case, it is contradicted by Dr. Fielding's own account of the plot: he says that it is the ‘golden-hearted’ Boffin who has built the Mounds up.

Yet it cannot be denied that the ending of the book permits such misreading. Dickens was not the thoroughgoing socialist that Jack Lindsay, for example, would have us believe. Orwell makes a good point about his liberal idealism. ‘It was beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils cannot be remedied.’ Dickens's criticism of society was, of course, a moral one. He attacks, not the existence of private property, but some of the uses to which it is put.

However, this very idealism saves the end of the book from being the failure it might have been. Hillis Miller has called this a fable. ‘When one has recognized that gold is dust, one can go on to make gold of dust.’ Bella's rejection of her old self and of Boffin's miserdom makes the Harmon gold, in Dickens's own words, ‘turn bright again after a long long rust in the dark’. (IV, v.) This is not the stern resolution that might have been desired, but neither is it a gross inconsistency.

Neither is it true to say that the dust-heaps themselves are inconclusive as a symbol. Yet one can see how such a judgement could come about. The position of Dickens with regard to criticism has been very similar to that of Shakespeare before the work of Wilson Knight. Many of Dickens's earlier critics have abstracted the characters from the total pattern of the book. There is a poetic application of symbolism in Dickens's greatest novels which would do very much to explain the currency he has had in spite of the very incomplete attempts to explicate his work. Explication is not the same as appreciation. It may be that critics have lacked tools with which to approach the problems raised by a reading of Dickens. All the same, it is more than a coincidence that the critics who have a low opinion of Our Mutual Friend—James, Orwell, Chesterton, Gissing—do not seem to be aware of it offering anything more to a reader than the plot-and-character appeal with which the minor Victorian novel has so familiarized us. It was in these terms that G. H. Lewes attacked Dickens and in these same terms that Gissing replied to him. Naturally the reply was inadequate. George H. Ford, comparing the two, said ‘The effort of nineteenth century critics to set up criteria which would consistently differentiate the novel from poetry was a necessary effort, but one which has now spent its force.’

It is not impertinent to say that by such criteria many of these adverse critics were judging Dickens's work. And with them one may link Dr. Fielding, who has attempted to hold their position against the more radical interpretation of Dickens initiated by Edmund Wilson and carried on largely by American critics. We can point to no such landmark of Dickens criticism as Wilson Knight's discussion of Measure for Measure which began a new phase in the reading of Shakespeare. Nevertheless, a good deal can be shown to be going on in Our Mutual Friend which was not accounted for in the aesthetic of Henry James, or even of George Orwell. And it can be done through a consideration of the striking consensus of views among critics who regard the book as a dramatic poem.

One of the points Edmund Wilson made was about the predominance of the dust in Our Mutual Friend—it blows through the book, in Dickens's own phrase, like some mysterious currency. Humphry House has shown how the dust collected from the streets came to have great value. The dust-heaps may be filth but, as Mr. Engel says, they are nevertheless money. And from this recognition it is a short step to the working out of a metaphor in which dust and money are equated. Money, the ascription of nominal value to what has no value in itself is, as Hillis Miller says, the central symbol in Our Mutual Friend of the successful humanization of the world.

Professor Johnson has shown how society in relation to Boffin is compared with the buzzing and creeping creatures attracted by a dung-hill. Mr. Lindsay, too, links the image with political values: the dust-heap is the one great prize for which everyone is fighting.

The Mounds are also the débris of history. In Mr. Miller's sense of the ruins of an ancient city, certainly, but also in the sense of the past. John Rokesmith in his sleepless nights buries his old identity deeper and deeper beneath imaginary piles of dust.

The objects are dead, but still have power to dominate the lives that are lived in their midst. So says Mr. Miller, and, indeed, the struggle for the dust shows that they do.

The action of the Mounds is to decay and to corrupt. Mr. Engel has shown how Harmon is the ruined victim of his own money, and how it begins to corrupt Boffin and his ward, Bella. In other words, the symbolism is integral to the action of the book, and can no more be effectively separated from it than can the characters. Thus, the weight of matter in the world of the Podsnaps and the Veneerings is related to the Mounds. Mr. Miller reminds us of the scene where the heavy articles of Podsnap's table are weighed and assessed, like so much scrap. (I, xi.)

In the discussion of the dust symbolism there is, as we have seen, a remarkable consensus of opinion among the critics, although there have been some notable absences from the discussion. Clearly, something of the same experience has been shared by a number of different readers. It may be that a critical explication of the book would be best managed through a consideration of its central images. As Mr. Miller has pointed out, the drama of the novel derives from the central opposition between the death that is represented by the Harmon Mounds and death by water.

The river cannot, any more than the Mounds, be equated with a simple property. If it could, there would be little point in using it as a symbol at all. It includes far more than any one summary of its effect can convey. One needs to aggregate the accounts critics have given to suggest its complexity. The river regenerates the good and drags down those who are evil (Edmund Wilson). Immersion can be drowning but also spiritual rebirth (Edmund Wilson, Edgar Johnson) and the reaffirmation of life (J. Hillis Miller). The river is an agent of retribution in the deaths of Radfoot, Hexam, Riderhood and Headstone, and of regeneration for Harmon, Wrayburn and Lizzie (Monroe Engel). It cuts through social distinctions (Monroe Engel) and is the great stream of life (Jack Lindsay) as well as the waters of suffering (Edgar Johnson). It is the otherness of nature, the movement of life, a more intense reality (J. Hillis Miller, Monroe Engel).

It would be easy to demonstrate the variation in these accounts, taken individually. But they do not contradict each other. Each fills in a necessary aspect of the whole. And each can be related to the text and found relevant to it. Drowned corpses, struggling bodies, float through the book. The symbolism is the action, not a convenient summary of it. ‘Thus, like the tides on which it had been borne to the knowledge of men, the Harmon Murder—as it came to be popularly called—went up and down, and ebbed and flowed, now in the town, now in the country, now among palaces, now among hovels, now among lords and ladies and gentlefolks, now among labourers and hammerers and ballast-heavers, until at last, after a long interval of slack water, it got out to sea and drifted away.’ (I, iii.)

Enough has been said to indicate that Our Mutual Friend will yield little to a reader who sees it only as the sum of its disparate characters. It is true that the novel has not the formal perfection of, say, Emma or Victory. Its weaknesses may give rise to misunderstanding: the eccentricities of Wegg, the wanderings of Betty Higden, the indeterminate dialect of Lizzie, the rather too liberal conclusion. Around such weaknesses all of the basic divergences of opinion have occurred. It is a pity that they have led to such diverse valuations of the novel in the past.

However, since the publication of Edmund Wilson's pioneer essay, there has been an increasing recognition of the novel's strength. The exceptions have been K. J. Fielding, who is an anologist for Dickens, and the Scrutiny critics, who are not. That the latter should give so severe an account of Dickens is a matter for some surprise. For to them we owe the critical concept of the Novel as Dramatic Poem. And, more than any other work in the language, except perhaps Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights and Women in Love, does Our Mutual Friend live up to and justify this concept.

Works Cited

Henry James, Our Mutual Friend (1865), reprinted in The House of Fiction (ed. Edel), 1957.

G. H. Lewes, Dickens in Relation to Criticism, Fortnightly Review, XVII, 1872.

George Gissing, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898).

G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (1906).

G. B. Shaw, Introduction to Hard Times (Waverley Edition, 1912).

George Santayana, Charles Dickens (1921), rep. Soliloquies in England (1922).

George Orwell, Charles Dickens (1939), rep. Critical Essays (1954).

Edmund Wilson, Dickens: The Two Scrooges (1939), rep. The Wound and the Bow (1941).

Humphry House, The Dickens World (1941).

F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, Chapter 1 (1948).

R. C. Churchill, Dickens, Drama and Tradition, Scrutiny, Vol. X no. 4, revised for the Pelican Guide to Literature, Vol. VI.

Jack Lindsay, Charles Dickens (1950).

Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens, His Tragedy and Triumph (1953).

George H. Ford, Dickens and his Readers (1955).

John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (1957).

K. J. Fielding, Charles Dickens: A Critical Introduction (1958).

J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens, The World of his Novels (1958).

Monroe Engel, The Maturity of Dickens (1959).