It may seem like a banal observation to say that Our Mutual Friend is a lot of fun. Perhaps in the normal course of things, but in these times it feels like a kind of miracle. Reading Dickens over the past week has been positively medicinal. Take this description of a cherubic man called Wilfer: “So boyish was he in his curves and proportions, that his old schoolmaster meeting him in Cheapside, might have been unable to withstand the temptation of caning him on the spot.”
Or this beautifully awkward exchange:
“How did you get your wooden leg?”
Mr Wegg replied, (tartly to this personal inquiry), “In an accident.”
“Do you like it?”
“Well! I haven’t got to keep it warm,” Mr Wegg made answer, in a sort of desperation occasioned by the singularity of the question.
Or Dickens’s description of newly developing suburbs in south-west London:
They were in a neighbourhood which looked like a toy neighbourhood taken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly incoherent mind, and set up anyhow; here, one side of a new street; there, a large solitary public-house facing nowhere; here, another unfinished street already in ruins; there, a church; here, an immense new warehouse; there, a dilapidated old country villa; then, a medley of black ditch, sparkling cucumber-frame, rank field, richly cultivated kitchen-garden, brick viaduct, arch-spanned canal, and disorder of frowziness and fog. As if the child had given the table a kick, and gone to sleep.
Dickens demands to be quoted at length. Even so, taking these lines out of context reduces some of their impact. The best way to enjoy them is during full immersion, alongside all those other glorious sentences and with the full benefit of Dickens’s exquisite sense of comic timing.
Alongside the hilarious moments, there are equal numbers of gothic horror, of moral indignation, of human absurdity, of dramatic tension. There’s a scene at the end of the second part (that I will not spoil) that is heart-poundingly urgent, in which Dickens manages to generate incredible tension from the question of whether or not someone will close a book that he has been reading. The only reason I’m ashamed to tell you that I punched the air with delight when I got the answer is that it is such a cliche.
Our Mutual Friend is wonderfully entertaining, which is good enough for me and, famously, not good enough for many. John Mullan provided a very telling quotation in his excellent review of the new AN Wilson book, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, in which he shares Philip Larkin’s verdict on Great Expectations: “Say what you like about Dickens as an entertainer, he cannot be considered a real writer at all; not a real novelist.”
Mullan notes that Larkin goes on to say: “However, I much enjoyed GE & may try another soon.”
Others have also taken a seemingly contradictory view. One of my favourite examples is Ford Madox Ford, who wrote in his sadly neglected final book, The March of Literature, that Our Mutual Friend was “a very languid performance”. (As if that’s a criticism when spending extended periods of time in the novel is part of the joy.) “In the matter of form,” Ford wrote, Dickens is “excruciatingly bad” – but then he begins to praise Dickens as an entertainer:
Like Homer, he gave us a world, and his writings were epic because his illustrations of life came from the commonest popular objects. And it is impossible not to see that Anglo-Saxondom was a better double world because he had passed through it. You could not be in the company of Dickens … without becoming more benevolent, without developing some sort of sympathetic imagination as to your fellow men in this tragic world.
Ford ends his appreciation with éclat, holding up the famous opening paragraphs of Great Expectations as the work of a “master stylist”. Ford then just copies out those paragraphs for his readers to admire, vacating the page himself as if speechless in admiration.
This is a trick I am going to use here, to end our first week with Our Mutual Friend. Just consider this masterly opening of the novel’s third part:
It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night-creatures that had no business abroad under the sun; while the sun itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City – which call Saint Mary Axe – it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of land northward, it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome of Saint Paul’s seemed to die hard; but this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.
If you’d like to join this month’s reading group and aren’t sure how to get a copy of the book during lockdown, Our Mutual Friend is available on Project Gutenberg.
