Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

Jonathan Taylor (The University of Leicester)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.07: English Writing and Culture of the Victorian Period, 1837-1901.
Vol. editors: Gillian Fenwick (University of Toronto), Grace Moore (University of Otago)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1864 - 1865

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Ever since Our Mutual Friend was first published in 1864-5, the fractured and disjointed nature of its narrative structure(s) have been noted by critics, both in terms of criticism and praise. Whether the novel is seen as a mish-mash of Dickensian satire and Eliotesque psychological realism, a proto-modernist narrative of fragmentation, or even a post-modernist experiment, it is surely an example par excellence of what Bakhtin would call a “dialogic” text. As Stephen Gill writes in his “Introduction” to the Penguin edition of the novel (1971), “Our Mutual Friend seems the product of not one but many visions of life, which are embodied in a great range of styles [….] The disparity between these styles is g…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2150 words

Citation: Taylor, Jonathan. "Our Mutual Friend". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 October 2002 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2949, accessed 26 November 2024.]

Save this article