In Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend to which character does the title refer?
Our Mutual Friend END. Dickens was travelling with his mistress Ellen Ternan and her mother. Sales of "Our Mutual Friend" were 35,000 for the first monthly number, but then dropped, with 5,000 for the second number and 19,000 for the concluding double number. In "Our Mutual Friend" Dickens explores the conflict between doing what society expects and the idea of being true to oneself. With regard to this the influence of the family is important. In many of Dickens's novels, including "Our Mutual Friend" and "Little Dorrit", parents try to force their children into arranged marriages. John Harmon, for example, was supposed to
Our Mutual Friend and beautiful out of the fractured waste land." Some modern critics of "Our Mutual Friend" have been overall more critical of the novel's characters. In her 1970 essay ""Our Mutual Friend": Dickens as the Compleat Angler," Annabel Patterson declares, ""Our Mutual Friend" is not a book which satisfies all of Dickens's admirers. Those who appreciate Dickens mainly for the exuberance of his characterization and his gift for caricature feel a certain flatness in this last novel". Deirdre David claims that "Our Mutual Friend" is a novel through which Dickens "engaged in a fictive improvement of society" that bore little relation