Our Mutual Friend

This essay considers the conception of Our Mutual Friend, which marked the return of Dickens to the monthly serial form. It focuses on two central images, to show how the reader never feels comfortable, and is always in danger of heading in the wrong direction: the river connects prosperity and tragedy, life and death, baptism, resurrection, and healing; the dust heaps are emblematic of entropy, waste, and fragmentation, which are all negative aspects of the Victorian capitalist economy. Litvack also analyses Dickens’s innovations of character, in the tormented Bradley Headstone, the benevolent Jew Riah, and the sharp and imaginative Jenny Wren.