“There is poetry here, the poetry of absence. Sublimity and comedy mixed. Contradictions. Dust. Ashes. Rebirth”
– Peter Ackroyd, Dickens
About Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages
In 1998 the BBC approached the Dickens Project about creating an electornic archival resource that would complement the BBC’s recent film adaptation of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. The adaptation, directed by Julian Farino with a script by Sandy Welch, was a lush portrayal of the mid-Victorian era, and won four out of the seven BAFTA awards for which it was nominated, including Best Serial Drama.
Publication
Dickens published Our Mutual Friend in twenty monthly parts from May 1864 to November 1865. It was the fourteenth and final novel in his vast corpus of novels, only to be followed by The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), which remained unfinished at the time of his death.
This section of the Scholary Pages provides a repository of information about the history, composition, publication, and reception of Our Mutual Friend, including scans of the manuscript and number plans, a gallery of Marcus Stone’s forty original illustrations, and rare digitizations of 19th-century advertisements that were included with the novel during its serial publication.
Photo courtesy of Raptis Rare Books
Scholarship
There have been well over 100 articles, books, and book chapters published on Our Mutual Friend since the initial 1998 launch of the Scholarly Pages—a true testament to the book’s longevity, and appeal to the world of Victorian scholarship.
This section of the site provides a collection of articles originally written for the Scholarly Pages, a bibliography of classic and recent criticism, and an interview with Dickens Project faculty member Helena Michie on what Our Mutual Friend means for readers today.
London 1865
“The narrative of Dickens’s novels takes us on a tour through this city of contradictions, their intricate plots the engines driving us on this journey. His prose moves us rapidly between London scenes at once pastoral and intensely urban . . . In bringing these contradictions together, Dickens’s prose is magical in its realism . . . The city is chaotic; the city is ordered; personal vision is juxtaposed against the panoramic . . . And Dickens’s prose, like his city, like his own life, is always dynamic, always moving us through change.”
— Murray Baumgarten
Charles Dickens
Dickens was fifty-two years old when he began publishing Our Mutual Friend in May of 1864. It was the last novel he completed before his death in 1870. (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which was being published in serial form during 1870, remained unfinished when he died in June.) Some think Our Mutual Friend one of Dickens’s greatest novels; others, like Henry James, thought it his worst. Wherever you side, it is hard to deny that Our Mutual Friend is a huge and powerful achievement in the enormous body of Dickens’s work.