Our Mutual Friend Readalong

[Piggywaspushed]

As discussed on the previous Davis Copperfield Readalong, I hope some of us are eager to start Our Mutual Friend!

This is quite a complex one to break up. As usual, Dickens published in 19 monthly instalments but this one has 4 'Books' .

It is split up as follows:

BOOK THE FIRST: THE CUP AND THE LIP
I – May 1864 (chapters 1–4);
II – June 1864 (chapters 5–7);
III – July 1864 (chapters 8–10);
IV – August 1864 (chapters 11–13);
V – September 1864 (chapters 14–17).
BOOK THE SECOND: BIRDS OF A FEATHER
VI – October 1864 (chapters 1–3);
VII – November 1864 (chapters 4–6);
VIII – December 1864 (chapters 7–10);
IX – January 1865 (chapters 11–13);
X – February 1865 (chapters 14–16).
BOOK THE THIRD: A LONG LANE
XI – March 1865 (chapters 1–4);
XII – April 1865 (chapters 5–7);
XIII – May 1865 (chapters 8–10);
XIV – June 1865 (chapters 11–14);
XV – July 1865 (chapters 15–17).
BOOK THE FOURTH: A TURNING
XVI – August 1865 (chapters 1–4);
XVII – September 1865 (chapters 5–7);
XVIII – October 1865 (chapters 8–11);
XIX-XX – November 1865 [chapters 12–17 (Chapter the Last)].

4 instalments is feasible but might be too much for those of us working/ reading other books/child or DP wrangling/ insert other reason.

Therefore, I would suggest 8 instalments, splitting each book in two somehow?

That would take us to March 2021 and then we can pretend 2020 never existed.

Up for it? Thoughts?

Looking forward to it! All usual suspects and newcomers welcome.

Excellent notes and yes to Charley! It is a feature of all the men really : self absorption. Even Rokesmith who is leading Bella on so.

Good old Lizzie.

It's been all about War & Peace this month for me so my notes are shorter you'll be relieved to hear!

Chapter one:
Eugene once again reveals his foolhardiness in taunting the hardened criminal Riderhood, suggesting he is ripe for deportation or the gallows, as he passes his lock. He really does seem to think he is immortal!
We soon discover his real cause for concern however is bringing up the rear, Headstone is hot on his tail.

Chapter 2:
Nice to see the Lammels put firmly in their place by Boffin they make a cool £100 out of their interfering but Boffin wants nothing more to do with them.
How does he know they’re wrong ‘uns? Surely it’s only Twemlow who Mrs Lammel has opened up to?
Does this mark the start of an awakening and rehabilitation of Boffin as a noble and good character?

Chapter 3:
Sloppy puts in another appearance only for Wegg to insist he is sacked and sent away. I hope he gets a happy ever after after being dragged from pillar to post and then summarily dismissed and tossed back onto the streets.
Wegg reveals himself to be thoroughly despicable in his treatment of Boffin, revelling in the power he now has over him. I look forward to him getting his comeuppance!

Chapters 4/5
Bella and Rokesmith are married and in quick order Bella is with child. I enjoy some of the comedic elements of these vignettes but generally find these sentimental chapters to be my least favourite, they’re so twee.

Chapter 6:
Eugene tracks down Lizzie and can sense, despite her protestations, that she is attracted to him. She begs him to leave her alone so he doesn’t weaken her resolve and ruin her reputation.
He leaves saying he’ll do his best, but his musing run along the lines of “Lizzie, Lizzie can’t marry her but really want to screw her! Not sure I can do the decent thing and leave her alone!”
Maybe it’s all for the best then that Headstone appears out of nowhere and batters him before knocking him into the river to meet a watery end.
Luckily Lizzie has superhuman hearing and previous form for rescuing corpses from rivers and is able to drag him to shore and by a feat of superhuman strength manages to get his body, his features so badly mutilated as to be unrecognisable, to the nearest pub where a surgeon is sent for. I doubt it's the last we'll hear of him.
Phew, that was an action packed chapter!

Chapter 7:
In which we find Headstone has not bought himself peace with his actions, nor anything like it.
I really thought Charley Hexham was going to reveal himself to have had a Damascene conversion after he discovered that Eugene was most likely dead at his friend's hand, and realise how wrong he had been to reject and distress his poor sister over her refusal to marry his psychopathic mate. But no, he seems repentant only in so far as he regrets every having got involved with Headstone in the first place because suspicion for the murder may fall on him too. Hexham Junior resolves to have done with both his sister and his erstwhile friend so that he can increase his social standing, make a advantageous, if loveless, marriage and neither Headstone nor Lizzie can 'drag him down'. What a little shite he truly is, is there still time for a reconciliation with the sister who raised him from the gutter?

Your review of Chapter 6 is so funny des!!

They d seem to have a lot of surgeons hanging around pubs.

Diane Setterfield's Once Upon A River, I did not realise when read it, seems to take a lot of influence from all these watery rescues/Lazarus moments (if Eugene is indeed resurrected with disfigurement as punishment for vanity)

I lot of cross over with your notes there Ladybird, spot on to point out that this months chapters 4/5 have a lot in common with the Twemlow chapters - I don't like them either. Good point about whether the 'Rokesmith's' marriage is legal!

So true Piggy being a multi millionaire whilst living like a pauper is a pretty big lie to have at the heart of your marriage

Thanks piggy
I've also read Once Upon A River (can't say I was impressed with it) but you're right about the cross overs.

I thought the opening of OUAR was good and I enjoyed the writing but overall it was just OK. There is also that book that goes backwards that is very watery and Waterland, of course!

If this is English literature, I can only imagine what Dutch novels are like!

I ahve noticed my username sometimes has capital p and sometimes not! Now wondering if I sometimes don't show as the OP!!

Rest assured lower case P is not an imposter.

Your last few posts haven’t shown in the same colour as the OP piggy

Oooohhhh... weird.

I have attempted to change this now!

I think this may date back to a Christmas name change!

That’s back to normal now!

Good news!

OK everyone so we are obviously reading to the end of the book by the end of March... it's quite along section bear in mind!

I am expecting revelations!

I’ve just finished watching the BBC adaptation. It does stick pretty closely to the storyline, but I think I would have found it very confusing if I hadn’t already read the book. Lots of well known names in it!

I might watch it after finishing. I need to check in with Katie Lumsden , too Will post that on April 1st!

I must admit a bit about a certain someone's comeuppance (spoiler avoidance!) just made me laugh out loud!

That bit was hilarious Piggy!

To watch when you are done. Our lovely Katie waxing lyrical

She loves it.

So..

Everyone got their comeuppance . I must say Bradley's demise was perfectly done : I thought the bit where he writes his name on the board and then rubs it off was q work of genius and actually very subtle in its tone. My brilliant Wordsworth edition introduction claims some sympathy for Bradley. I didn't feel any at all even though there was some pathos in the name rubbing, because Dickens made him so odious before this. However, the intro focuses on social class and sees Bradley as the social climber who has grafted to get out of the mire and then will never be accepted. He should have just married Miss Peechey I guess in the first place.

I probably wasn't paying enough attention to the metaphor of dust and cleanliness but my intro is also very good on that and how it links to social class. The writer also says that OMF is Dicken's real 'modern novel' and I can see that in its bleakness about social position and its presentation of capitalist opportunists.

Katie loves Jenny Wren so much : I found her deeply irritating and really wasn't sure what her purpose was. Never quite sure who Sloppy was and got Venus/Wegg muddled at times, which didn't help when one was a rotter and one actually a goodie.

The ending with the Boffins was interesting! So, they were lying all along? And Bella was OK with that??
I kind of got the impression that Dickens thought 'shit! How am I going to resolve this giant muddle I have got my plot into ? Oh, I know! Everyone actually knew. There: solved it!'

I did like Twemlow being the good chap at the end who wouldn't join in with the Venering vile sniping about Lizzie.

I can't be as enthused as Katie though. I much preferred Bleak House and David Copperfield. I found this one very tortuous in places. Some great characterisations but I found the female characters very angels by the hearth : I thought they were more complex in both BH and DC , and in the case of DC joyously funny. There was a funny bit in our March section . I loved : ' Mr Fledgeby, in the act of plunging and gambolling all over his bed, like a porpoise or a dolphin in its native element'. Great comic simile!

Katie, I discovered yesterday, did do a readalong, so apologies for not linking those monthly : they might have helped!

Anyone else got any thoughts?

So, all the loose ends got tied up and everyone got their just desserts, which was pretty satisfying.

I thought Dickens did a good job of mis-stepping of the reader - the big reveal was not (as you might have expected) that John Harmon was still alive, because you found that out pretty early on. Rather, the clever twist was that Boffin was in on 'Rokesmith's' identity from early on, was never a miser, never had anything to fear from Wegg, and his main reason for pretending to be a miser was to scare Bella away from marrying for money. It makes sense of why Boffin’s transformation into a miser was never very convincing (turns out Dickens actually did know what he was about). But it was actually a pretty horrible deception/manipulation of Bella to inveigle her into marriage, which felt uncomfortably creepy to me.

I liked the hint that Sloppy and Jennie Wren were going to get together, and I thought that Mr Riah's wise observation that it only takes one Jewish person to do something wrong for the whole race to be condemned was nicely done. Bella was rewarded for her retreat from money-grabbing with domestic bliss, but I found Lizzie's trajectory more interesting, with the implication that the reward for her virtue is not as straightforward - she has made a good match, but society is never going to accept her and Eugene will always be a subject of worldly ridicule for his choice.

Overall, I really enjoyed spending time in this richly-intertwined world being gently amused (and frequently baffled) by Dickens' witty prose. Could have done without the Veneering/Tremlow chapters. If this is one of Dickens' not-so-good ones, I'll definitely be trying out some of the others (I think I read Nicholas Nickleby and possibly DC as a teenager, but its all a bit vague).

I finished it a few weeks ago now but I did make some notes as I knew I would have forgotten most of it by now.

I missed the bit about Headstone rubbing out his name. I do agree that Jenny Wren was a pointless character - you could easily take her out and it would make no difference to the overall story.

Having said that, the chapter where the Lammles put pepper up Fledgeby’s nose was hilarious, especially when Jenny Wren then ‘helped’ him and rubbed more pepper in his wounds! So I liked her in that chapter.

There were actually several funny moments in these final chapters. I loved the ‘inexhaustible baby’ that kept turning up to disrupt matters! And the clergy couple the Milveys - when she were talking about everyone seeming to get ill whenever a clergyman goes near them - ‘Frank never makes acquaintance with a new old woman, but she gets the face-ache’.

I also loved the idea of the aviary that Rokesmith created for Bella - ‘they came to a charming aviary, in which a number of tropical birds, more gorgeous in colour than the flowers, were flying about; and among those birds were gold and silver fish, and mosses, and water-lilies, and a fountain, and all manner of wonders.’ I would LOVE this in my house! It wasn’t very clear though whether it was real or just a wall painted to look like that.

Bella didn’t seem too bothered about the fact that everyone had been lying to her for months! I suppose she didn’t really have much choice except to accept it though, did she? Divorce wasn’t a realistic option for women in those days.

I also liked that Twemlow had the last word.

This is my least favourite of the six Dickens novels I’ve read so far. There were bits I struggled with, but there were bits I really enjoyed. I’m glad I’ve read it, but I’m not sure it’s one I will reread in the future whereas I do want to reread the other five.

I also finished the book at the beginning of the month but didn't make any notes so prompted by your insightful comments:

I started out being irritated by Jenny Wren but she grew on me, (with her tricks and manners) I thought the reversal of her referring to her drunken father as though he was her wayward child had a dark humour to it.
I was also delighted to see she was paired up with Sloppy at the end, it really is true that there's someone out there for everyone, at least in Dickens universe.
Interestingly the BBC serial left out the whole Fledgeby subplot but Miss Wren was quite prominent.

The most memorable character for me was the villainous Headstone, and I did have a sneaking sympathy for him, not because he was a self made man who rose above his position in life, but because his actions were completely driven by an obsessive love for Lizzie who sends him quite demented. He does get his just desserts along with Rogue Riderhood, but that horrible little shite Charley Hexham gets off scot free, maybe karma catches up with him in his loveless marriage!

I agree that the female characters are fairly weak and one dimensional, but then I suppose you don't read Dickens for his well rounded depictions of women.

Rokesmith comes across as a bit creepy where Bella is concerned in the book, but even more so in the BBC adaptation, where he is constantly lurking in the shadows, staring and spying on her, I'd have been taking out a restraining order rather than buying a hat if I'd been Bella.

I was amazed that Eugene made a recovery, I was thinking to myself whilst they were reading the last rites and he was marrying Lizzie on his supposed death bed that it's a cliche in fiction that people who are dying seem to have certain knowledge of that fact and never stage a recovery, when blow me down with a feather if he didn't go and do that very thing! Perhaps he had to be seen to have given up all hope of life before Dickens could allow him to make a match with one of such a lowly social class. It's sad that the only way Wrayburn and Lizzie can end up married is that he gets beaten within an inch of his life and she becomes his carer. It seems that's the only way Dickens could bridge the social divide and even then they are the subject of malicious gossip, and she vows to make herself 'worthy' of him, despite the fact that it's been clear all along that she's worth ten of him. Whilst he muses on the idea of moving to the New World as in Australia they may be more accepted as a couple in society.

This wasn't one of my favourite Dickens, I much preferred Great Expectations and David Copperfield, probably Nicholas Nickleby would be ahead of it too, but it's certainly up there with Bleak House and I still fully intend to read all Dickens books eventually, although I am starting to mix up which minor characters are in which novel the more I read!

Just wondering if @FortunaMajor will pop by to let us know her Dickens-y thoughts!

I don't think we resolved whether we want another readalong or not, and whether it should be CD?

I have been very happy to lead the readalongs as part of my goal to read more Dickens, and they suit instalment reading. My preference would be another Dickens but if anyone wants to do summat else it's fine by me! Obviously, someone else is more than welcome to run one!

I'm avoiding it Piggy

I found this a slog and perhaps it wasn't the best book to attempt to get over a Dickens aversion.

I love some of the language of Dickens but find the plots a struggle to follow particularly in the installment format. I find there are too many characters who are not always distinct enough or who don't appear to have a point to the furtherance of the plot.

I do think he evokes a certain feel and covers very valid points about issues in that age, but overall for me the convoluted plots and myriad of characters are too confusing and ultimately not enjoyable.

I've really enjoyed the discussions along the way and have found them invaluable and incredibly interesting. I've really appreciated the thoughtfulness and time that have gone into them, but they sadly have not convinced me that more Dickens would be worth my time.

I’m up for another Dickens read along!

I haven't read :

Hard Times
Nicholas Nickleby
Old Curiosity Shop
Little Dorritt

of the obvious ones...