Our mutual friend
Our Mutual Friend , Original title: Our Mutual Friend , (created 1864-65) is Charles Dickens 's last completed novel. It is laid out around a center, which the figure Bella Wilfer describes in the words of J. Hillis Miller as "money, money, money and what money can make of life". In this novel, money forms the social cement of society and is the goal of almost all characters. This also applies to the main character named in the title, their mutual friend John Harmon. He came to London to investigate the possibility of an inheritance due to him. Towards the end of the plot, he marries Bella Wilfer, who initially stated the pursuit of money up to the money marriage as her motive for life.
action
The plot of the novel has a prehistory that can only be reconstructed from the actual narrative: a stingy misanthropist made a fortune with the waste trade. When he dies, he makes a will that his fortune goes to his son John Harmon, who has to travel to Great Britain from abroad to take on the inheritance. However, one condition for the inheritance is listed in the will: John Harmon must marry Bella Wilfer, whom he has never seen before. Until the inheritance takes place, the property is managed by the loyal and devoted Mr. Boffin. When John Harmon arrives in London, he barely escapes an assassination attempt and, close to death, is thrown into the Thames .
The story begins on the River Thames, where corpse bats pull a dead body out of the water, which - as it turns out later - is mistakenly identified as the corpse of John Harmon. Shortly thereafter, John Harmon was hired under the false name of John Rokesmith as secretary by the Boffins, who, at the will of the late Harmon, managed the estate. The Boffins also take in Bella Wilfer, mentioned in the will as the future bride of John Harmons. In addition, Boffin hires the ballad seller Silas Wegg as a reader, since Boffin himself is illiterate . John Harmon alias Rokesmith actually falls in love with Bella Wilfer, who rejects him, however, because she wants to get married rich and subordinates all her longings and desires to this goal.
Rokesmith reveals himself to the Boffins as John Harmon, believed to be dead. In order to demonstrate to Bella Wilfer the consequences of concentrating on money, Harmon and the Boffins arrange an agreed play: Boffin mimes the transformation from the good-natured person he is to a suspicious and imperious miser who lets money determine his thoughts and actions. In doing so he begins to treat his secretary Rokesmith badly and from above, which brings him the sympathy of Bella Wilfer. They are expelled from the Boffin household and get married. However, Rokesmith wants to test his wife Bella to see if she can withstand wealth, and only years later reveals his true identity to her, that of John Harmon, whereupon they move into a luxurious house.
perspective
From the reader's point of view, the identity of John Rokesmith and John Harmon and a stranger appearing at the beginning of the book does not become clear until the middle of the book, when Harmon remembers his arrival in London and the murder attack. Boffin's change to the curmudgeon is also only revealed towards the end of the plot. The sole purpose of his evil acting was to show Bella Wilfer the consequences of pursuit of money and to test her for her motives and affections. Both covert operations, the false name Harmons and Boffin's acting, are, like many other actions and motives, tied to money. Since John Harmon and Bella Wilfer get married and finally inherit, the inherited fortune is not only the prerequisite, but also the guiding motive and the conclusion of the plot.
expenditure
- Our Mutual Friend . Chapman and Hall, London May 1864-November 1865. 629 pp.
- Our Mutual Friend . 2 vols. Chapman and Hall, London, February and November 1865. 629 pp.
- Our Mutual Friend . Copyright Edition for Continental Circulation. 4 vols. Collection of British Authors, vols. 730, 760, 780, 800. Bernhard Tauchnitz , Leipzig 1864/5. 1252 pp.
- Our Mutual Friend . Harper's New Monthly Magazine , June 1864-December 1865.
- Our Mutual Friend . Cheap Edition. Chapman and Hall, London 1868, 514 pp.
- Our Mutual Friend . Library Edition. 2 vols. Chapman and Hall, London 1869. 853 pp.
- Our Mutual Friend . (Dickens Edition) Chapman and Hall, London 1868. 525 pp.
Film adaptations
Our mutual friend has been filmed several times:
- the 1958 British television series Our Mutual Friend starring Paul Daneman and Zena Walker ;
- as a 7-part British television miniseries Our Common Friend - The Dead man from the Thames from 1976 with Jane Seymour and Leo McKern , directed by Peter Hammond and
- as a 6-part British television miniseries Our Mutual Friend from 1998 with Anna Friel and Paul McGann and directed by Julian Farino .
literature
- John Carey: The Violent Effigy. A Study of Dickens' Imagination . Faber & Faber, London 1991, ISBN 0-571-16377-7 (reprint of the London 1979 edition).
- Peter Ackroyd : The life and times of Charles Dickens . Hydra Publ. New York 2002, ISBN 1-59258-002-5 .
- Björn Oellers: Crisis and Integration of Civil Society in Novels by Charles Dickens . Kovacs, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8300-5128-2 .
- Michael Slater: Charles Dickens: [a life defined by writing]. Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, Conn. [u. a.] 2009, ISBN 978-0-300-11207-8 .
Web links
- Online versions
- Our Mutual Friend on Archive.org .
- Our Mutual Friend with audio version, translation into different languages.
- Our Mutual Friend - full edition in HTML with one page per chapter.
- Our Mutual Friend - easy to read HTML version.
- Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages . The Dickens Project.
- background
- Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend Clarendon Edition , background of Clarendon Edition, Queen's University Belfast (Engl.)
- Leon Litvack: Images of the River in Our Mutual Friend . In: Dickens Quarterly 20.1 (2003), pp. 34–55 (PDF; 2.7 MB)
- Rhonda Crockett: The Monthly Wrapper of Our Mutal Friend and the Wheel of Fortune
- Detailed summary of the novel on literaturen.net
- criticism
- "Our Mutual Friend" from Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens by GK Chesterton .
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.qub.ac.uk/ourmutfr/witnesses/monthly-parts/monthly-parts.htm
- ↑ http://www.qub.ac.uk/ourmutfr/witnesses/2-vol-ed/2-vol-ed.htm
- ↑ http://www.qub.ac.uk/ourmutfr/witnesses/Tauchnitz/Tauchnitz.htm
- ↑ http://www.qub.ac.uk/ourmutfr/witnesses/Harpers/Harpers.htm
- ↑ http://www.qub.ac.uk/ourmutfr/witnesses/Cheap-ed/Cheap-ed.htm
- ↑ http://www.qub.ac.uk/ourmutfr/witnesses/Library-ed/Library-ed.htm
- ↑ http://www.qub.ac.uk/ourmutfr/witnesses/CD-ed/CD-edition.htm