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From, David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, v. 4: The Romantics to the present day, ch. 26
Page 11
Our Mutual Friend is the most consistent presentation in all Dickens' work of the effect of financial and social ambition on character; the meaning is achieved both on the literal level and through a complex symbolism. The character of Mr. Boffin, for example, heir to a dustman's fortune and both victim and deus ex machina, has many levels of significance, as has that of the sinister Wegg and the perfectly-named Veneerings. Meanness and generosity are set side by side in a thousand different forms; the Lammles, hoisted with their own petard and determined to get their own back on society; Mr. Twemlow, that almost Jamesian dweller on the borderland of high society; the complacent, bullying Podsnap with his pathetic daughter-these and many others are not only portraits in a brilliant portrait gallery but explorations and illuminations of the various ways in which fortune and character can be related. The heroine, Lizzie Hexham, poor but honest, though she appears in some magnificently rendered scenes, does not sustain adequately her role as a convincing character, and this is true of many of the upper-class "good" characters in the book: virtue combined with social position held no interest for Dickens, nor could he make the contented and virtuous poor interesting; he was more concerned with those realms where aspirations toward social position could affect moral behavior. So Our Mutual Friend himself is of no great interest, nor is Mr. Eugene Wrayburn, nor any of those characters who show pastoral or aristocratic or patriarchal virtue. Dickens had that largeness of genius which enabled him to waste more of his energies in sentimentalities and melodramatics than most other writers had at their disposal altogether.
