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| Our Mutual Friend (New Oxford Illustrated Dickens) | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles Dickens
Creator: E.salter Davies
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Category: Book
List Price: £11.99
Buy Used: £2.49
You Save: £9.50 (79%)
New (6) Collectible (3) from £8.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 610451
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Reissue
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 850
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0192545108
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.8
EAN: 9780192545107
ASIN: 0192545108
Publication Date: December 31, 1952
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: This copy is the 1981 reprint with excellent dustwrapper, ex library
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| Customer Reviews:
 Dazzling! April 12, 2007
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I was quite simply dazzled by this book and zoomed my way through it in a few days. I wanted more, even after this race through its nearly 900 pages, taken in by the breathtaking scope not only to be found in the diversity and credibilty of even the most eccentric characterisations, such as Wegg or Podsnap, something only to be expected from Dickens, but by the moral flux of so many situations and in the thoughts of the likes of Mrs. Lammle or Bella Wilfer. The cruel satire encarnated in the figure Mrs. Wilfer alone had me laughing out loud and the Society scenes around the Veneering's table are so marvellously observed that they had me wondering how on earth Dickens could have had a friend left in Victorian 'polite society'! Brilliant. The river-shore scenes are amongst the most wonderfully atmospheric I've come across in his work: one wonders again what manner of 'field work' Dickens did to to depict this strangely amphibious half-world and it's population. The tone of the prose, too, was in marked contrast to the only very slightly earlier Great Expectations; greater in breadth of style and scale, with far sharper social criticism and biting humour. In fact, it's the humour, and its very darkness, which I felt most stood out in this tour-de-force. Yes, it's a whopping great book: yes it might take you time to get through, and yes again, the very wealth of its style, the range of personalities, settings, motives and dilemas will inevitably mean that one's attention becomes selective. Yet this only means the challenge is greater and, for this reader anyway, the rewards higher. I really loved it, and would encouarge anyone who's enjoyed a Dickens to have a bash.
 Well, I got through it. February 23, 2007
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
It has taken me months to read Our Mutual Friend, alternatively gripped by the excellent passages on the river, the hidden identities and the madness of the schoolteacher Headstone, and driven to distraction by the "society" chapters on Veneering and the rest. This is so clearly a book published in parts - what Dickens has here is a brilliant 400 page novel, the problem being that it lasts over 800 pages.
By halfway, I was skim reading the "society" chapters to get anything of substance from them, and I'd urge you to do likewise - you'll miss very little and those characters never become important.
There are many better Dickens books to read, but a completest should turn to Our Mutual Friend eventually, and get a good deal from it.
My final point is that Dickens (in his 50's I think, with a broken marriage) seems here to be moving towards the style of a Thomas Hardy - Our Mutual Friend is frequently dark, often pessimistic, with characters who have little or no chance of redemption. One wonders what an 80 year old Dickens might have written, and whether it would have been as dark and wonderful as Jude the Obscure....
Entertaining January 9, 2003
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
Jenny Wren, the crippled doll's dressmaker, who knows everyone's "tricks and manners", Wegg, the one-legged sheet-music salesman, the Veneerings, who are all veneer, Mr Venus, the anatomical craftsman who makes skeletons and keeps Hindoo babies in jars, Boffin, the upwardly mobile manservant who has come into "dust", Sloppy "who do the policemen in different voices", Fascination Fledgeby and Bradley Headstone, the homicidal schoolteacher; I defy anybody to study the cast of characters and not want to read the book. And with the characters comes a very entertaining and well-worked plot.
I have to say I approached this book with some trepidation, and there were certainly longuers - Lizzie Hexham is unutterably boring and I wondered why Bella Wilfer didn't batter Boffin and divorce her husband for all the deceptions they concocted against her - but it was immensely entertaining, a real relief from the everyday.
 I gave up June 26, 2002
11 out of 24 found this review helpful
Despite being an avid Dickens fan (or so I thought) I have to confess that I gave up about one third of the way through this book, the only Dickens - so far - which I have failed to finish. It lacked the excellent characterisation and plot development of Bleak House, the lightness of his earlier novels like Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby (powerful stories with strong underlying morals, which still move along well with amusing asides) or the gripping historical context in which Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities are set. Instead you are left with overly turgid prose and a rather leaden plot. I probably should have perservered but sometimes feel that life is too short to do so! Try any of the above before you move onto this one, his last completed work, where age and gloom seem to me to have deadened his otherwise incredible talent. Read it, if you must, to complete your knowledge of Dickens and see the way his style changed from Pickwick Papers. Bleak House, is in my opinion, his best and possibly, THE best book ever written.
Gruesome Masterpiece February 15, 2001
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
Dickens at his darkest best. The later books lean dangerously towards gloom and despair with Dicken's basic philanthropy put to the test. The villain of the piece is modern industrial society which reduces humans to body parts (like machines). In a Hieronymous Bosch-like landscape, black and bleak, Dickens' brilliant characters act out (sometimes comic) roles over which they have seemingly no control and the novel is a cliffhanger whose outcome hangs in the balance. Along with Bleak House and Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend is a must-read of classic English Literature.
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