Our Mutual Friend Summary: Dickens, Money and the Thames
What Our Mutual Friend is about
Published in parts across 1864 and 1865, Our Mutual Friend is the fourteenth and final novel Charles Dickens completed. It is also one of his most sophisticated, mixing savage satire with close social analysis. The critic J. Hillis Miller, borrowing a line from the character Bella Wilfer, described the subject as "money, money, money, and what money can make of life". That is as good a one-line summary as the book has ever been given.
The engine of the plot is a will. Old Mr Harmon, a miser who made his fortune from London's rubbish collection trade, dies estranged from almost everyone except his employees, Mr and Mrs Boffin. His fortune is to pass to his estranged son, John Harmon, on one condition: John must return from abroad and marry a woman he has never met, Miss Bella Wilfer.
John does not appear. Instead, a body is pulled from the Thames by the waterman Gaffer Hexam, who makes his living retrieving corpses and emptying their pockets before handing them to the authorities. Papers identify the drowned man as Harmon. At the identification, a young man gives his name as Julius Handford, then vanishes.
With the heir apparently dead, the estate falls to the Boffins, who are delighted and determined to share it. They take in Bella Wilfer, whose expected fortune died with John, and treat her as a pampered heiress. They also accept an unusual offer of service from a man calling himself John Rokesmith, who turns out to be the same man who called himself Julius Handford. He works as their confidential secretary without salary for a trial period of two years, and uses the post to watch and learn everything about the Boffins and about Bella.
The main characters
Bella Wilfer is the book's sharpest study. She is disgusted by her lower middle class upbringing and openly determined to marry a rich man. Dickens lets her say so, repeatedly, and then puts her under pressure.
Mr and Mrs Boffin are the accidental rich. Mr Boffin hires the one-legged ballad-seller Silas Wegg to read aloud to him in the evenings, then installs Wegg in the old Harmon house, where Wegg begins hunting for hidden treasure in the building and in the rubbish mounds outside. Later, Mr Boffin appears to be corrupted by his wealth, growing obsessed with biographies of misers and treating Rokesmith with contempt and cruelty.
On the river there is Lizzie Hexam, devoted to her father Gaffer, and her brother Charley, who leaves home to train as a schoolmaster. Rogue Riderhood, cast off as Gaffer's partner, accuses him of Harmon's murder out of bitterness and greed for the reward. Lizzie later lodges with Jenny Wren, a disabled teenage doll's dressmaker who looks after her own alcoholic father as though he were the child.
Two men want Lizzie. Eugene Wrayburn is a work-shy barrister who admits he does not know his own intentions. Bradley Headstone is Charley's schoolmaster, whose proposal Lizzie refuses and whose rage then fixes on Wrayburn as the cause of all his misfortunes. Around the edges circle the Lammles, who married each other for money and found neither had any, and Fledgeby, an extortioner and money-lender who hides behind the kindly old Jewish broker Mr Riah.
The themes
Money is the subject, but the novel is more precise than that. It is about inherited money, found money, money made from other people's waste and other people's corpses. The Harmon fortune literally comes from rubbish. Hexam's living comes from the drowned.
Identity is the second thread. Men travel under false names. Characters are taken for dead, taken for rich, taken for poor. What a person is worth and who a person is get tangled up until it is hard to separate them.
Class runs through everything. Bella wants out of her station. Charley wants out of his. Headstone has climbed and cannot bear to be condescended to. The Lammles are performing a wealth neither possesses. Dickens is unsparing about the social machinery that makes all this striving necessary.
How it unfolds
Riderhood's accusation ruins Gaffer, who is shunned on the river and barred from The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters. Before the reward can be claimed, Gaffer is found drowned. Lizzie, frightened by Headstone's threats and unsure of Wrayburn, flees both men and takes work up-river with Mr Riah's help. Meanwhile Bella, moved by Mr Boffin's cruelty towards Rokesmith, defends the secretary and marries him, and they live happily in relatively poor circumstances. The last stretch of the book belongs to the river again, as Headstone follows Wrayburn upstream.
Why it still matters
Reviewers in the 1860s praised Dickens's skill in general but mostly declined to engage with this novel closely. Some found the plot too complex and poorly laid out. The Times complained that the opening chapters failed to draw the reader in. That verdict did not hold. Twentieth century critics found a great deal to admire in Dickens's late work, and more recent readings argue that the structure was deliberate experiment, and that the characters once dismissed as flat were meant as representations of the Victorian working class and as the key to the social structure Dickens was mapping. It suits readers who want Dickens at his darkest and most analytical rather than his warmest.
