The Soul of the Plot: Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend begins on the river, with Lizzie Hexam and her father, Gaffer, trawling the waves for valuables. Lizzie is possessed of some horror of a stain she imagines in the centre of the boat from some previous haul. Was it a body? Is the stain blood? Was there violence or murder done? Is her father complicit?

The scene shifts to a dinner party at which a mysterious history is put forth to the company by the lawyer Lightwood about the Harmon family and its fortune, the sole remaining heir to a very unusual will now traveling in parts unknown. No sooner has the tale been told than Lightwood is called upon to attend a body that the Gaffer has dragged in from the river, identified as the long lost heir to that very same family’s fortune: John Harmon.

So begins a tale of mistaken identities, multiple wills, and marriage plots, at the heart of every one a mercenary scoundrel who will stick at nothing to cop their fortune.

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Reading through this novel with a book club was a different experience for me, but I enjoyed it and definitely learned more from what others noticed than I would have on my own. For instance, the makings of the Harmon family fortune lies in dust, heaped in great piles over miles of land. What does that mean? What is the “dust”? How does it get heaped there? How many valuables could reasonably be expected to be hidden in it, so much so that it provides a “fortune” to its owners? These and other questions were brought up and discussed with more curiosity than I would have had reading it by myself.

I’m there for the descriptions, and the characters, and, boy, does this Dickens’ novel have those in spades.

Significantly, of course, we have the Hexams, Gaffer and his children, Lizzie and Charlie. Then we have the young lawyer Lightwood, Christian name Mortimer, and his partner in the firm, also young, Eugene Wrayburn.

Then there is the Harmon family interest, represented by the late appearance of its last surviving member (now not surviving, clearly). This family interest or fortune, dust heaps and all, defaults to the elder Harmon’s sole employees, the Boffins, Mister and Missus.

These Boffinses take it upon themselves to show an interest in one Bella Wilfer, whose marriage to John Harmon was made a condition for him to have inherited the fortune, prior to his death, and would since never come to pass. Now that Bella is out a future husband and the fortune attached, despite never having seen hide nor hair of either, she accepts the gracious patronage of the well-meaning but uneducated Boffins and becomes like their god-child.

Is the plot thick enough yet? One last summary incident, encompassing about three important plot points, and then I will move on to more of my general thoughts and proper review.

In an effort to determine more about the circumstances surrounding his client’s death, Lightwood takes Wrayburn down to the river to try and speak to Gaffer. While there watching for Gaffer to return, they glimpse Lizzie waiting by the fire in her home, and Wrayburn is struck with a peculiar feeling. Lightwood never gets to speak to Gaffer as soon after, Gaffer is found, tangled in his own lines and drowned.

Lightwood is left where he started with only the word of the man who identified John Harmon’s body. But that man, who gave the name Julian Handford, is now nowhere to be found for follow-up questioning.

About this time, a new lodger takes up residence at the Wilfer’s house, name of John Rokesmith, and subsequently finds a job as secretary to Bella Wilfer’s new godparents, the newly wealthy Boffins.

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Would you believe it if I told you that I have left out about half the cast of characters and more plots accompanying each one, unfolding and refracting upon the others? It would be the truth. Dickens has woven a tale so dense with plots that one has barely started before another is picked up. Throughout the entire first part, as new characters and schemes came to light, I could barely imagine how messy everything would get and how Dickens would be able to manage straightening them all out.

Well, it turns out, he manages without great difficulty. The plot conveniences abound and by the time the third book has come to a close, many of the promised threats to our heroes’ happiness have fizzled into nothing of substance. Misunderstandings that lead to mischief are momentary, resolved in the next few chapters before real harm can be done. Miscreants bent on malice meditate far too long before taking action, letting chance or caution give their targets defences against them in the meantime, with only one notable exception.

Dickens as usual has a cast of characters replete with villains, connivers, and virtuous folk. Sometimes, the categories overlap. I found a lot of the characters, even secondary ones, to be more nuanced by and large than in some other of Dickens works. Characters who are mainly “good” have conflict and crises of conscience, glimmers of humanity make appearances in “bad” characters, and the way they intersect with the events and play off of one another is very compelling.

Maybe it’s unsurprising that Dickens takes more time with his character development in parts of this work, seeing as one of the significant themes that comes up throughout is identity and the various masks people wear to disguise or misrepresent their true nature. Characters ascribe their own misdeeds to others or impersonate others in order to avoid being taken to account for crimes themselves. On the more positive side, they might hide their identity for safety or pretend to be worse than they are in order to show another character the error of their ways.

Our Mutual Friend has the distinction among Dickens novels of having one of the most morally grey heroes in Eugene Wrayburn. Perhaps Sydney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities rivals that status, but he would be the only one I can think of. Our Mutual Friend also contains one of the most brutal scenes of violence I ever read in Dickens, also connected with Eugene. Perhaps the murder of Nancy from Oliver Twist comes close, but I don’t recall that being as much described as it was implied. I may be wrong and if so, someone feel free to refresh my memory.

In general, despite some tedious sections in which Dickens spent far too much time dedicated to characters we already knew and were getting tired of (Simon Wegg, I’m looking at you), the character building and agency exhibited throughout is phenomenal. Where one person is a bit too good to be very interesting, the question of their true identity creates enough uncertainty to make them intriguing. (One character in particular goes through enough names throughout the story to rival Túrin, of Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin, or Jace Herondale-Wayland-Morgenstern of The Mortal Instruments.) Others are just bad enough to make their development into a better or a worse person worth investing in, some spiralling into madness with unsettling and fear-inducing intensity.

It is, after all, Dickens, so “the poor ye have with you always” in the form of angelic orphans, too pure for this world to live long in it, or plain-speaking, common-sense elders who rail against the government’s excesses, callousness, and mismanagement with all the rhetoric of Dickens’ own activist speeches.

And, it is, after all, Dickens, so the descriptions are evocative and memorable as they are at times hilarious. The situational comedy, as well as the dialogue and witty banter, is superb.

There is a timely joke to be made about Mr. Boffins’ “Roman Empire,” which is literally Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the subtly titled characters the Veneerings and their superficiality remind me of the attention called recently to the spate of celebrities getting veneers done. I guess obsession with the Roman Empire is not new, nor is the pressure on public figures to make themselves more uniform, palatable, and apparently perfect to fit some sort of ideal.

But people remain enamored with genuineness, even while they themselves walk the line between appearances and truth. Identity is an ever-changing mark to seek, in ourselves as much as in others. It may also change with different relationships, as explored throughout Our Mutual Friend: fathers and children, husbands and wives, employers and employees, conspirators and co-conspirators, benefactors and benificiaries, teachers and pupils, hosts and guests, lenders and borrowers, waylayers and waylaid.

In any combination of interactions, identities and roles may be taken up, laid aside, or even reversed, and Dickens finds ways to explore all of these and more throughout Our Mutual Friend.

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This has been my twelfth Classics Club book review! Check out the rest of my list here.