dennisfischman 's review for:

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

4.0

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Dickens may be my favorite author of all times, and yet I read this book for the first time last year. I would have given it five stars on first reading. It's a mature work, with many subplots (including a murder mystery) and the combination of humor and grim realism that distinguishes Dickens. It offers the added depth that comes from exploring the effects of wealth and poverty in a far more nuanced way than he does in, say, Oliver Twist. I felt that in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens wrote like Dickens, Austen, and Thackeray combined. Watching the BBC adaptation did nothing to lessen my admiration.

On re-reading it, however, I can't help feeling that Bella Wilfer (who is really the center of the book, much more than the title character) has been poorly used. Yes, the novel gets all its dramatic force from her, as she discovers that she is not so mercenary as she has believed herself to be and truly is capable of love. But

Spoiler

the man she eventually marries, John Rokesmith ne Harmon, deceives her in order to test her, and keeps on deceiving her well past the point where she has proved herself. His old retainers, the Boffins, who apparently cherish both John and Bella, side with him in the deception. And when she is finally enlightened as to whom she has really married and how he has been deceived, her reaction is basically, "Well, I deserved it, and it was all for my own good." This is true in context. It is also the kind of thing a battered wife would say, and it makes me intensely uncomfortable.

I have to regard the book as a masterpiece for its time, but not a story I would want to pass on to the children of the 21st century.