By Sean Grass
Even within the context of Charles
Dickens's history as a publishing innovator, Our Mutual Friend is notable for what it reveals about Dickens as
an author and about Victorian publishing. Marking Dickens's return to the
monthly number format after nearly a decade of writing fiction designed for
weekly publication in All the Year Round,
Our Mutual Friend emerged against the
backdrop of his failing health, troubled relationship with Ellen Ternan, and
declining reputation among contemporary critics. In his subtly argued
publishing history, Sean Grass shows how these difficulties combined to make Our Mutual Friend an extraordinarily odd
novel, no less in its contents and unusually heavy revisions than in its
marketing by Chapman and Hall, its transformation from a serial into British
and U.S. book editions, its contemporary reception by readers and reviewers,
and its delightfully uneven reputation among critics in the 150 years since
Dickens’s death.
Enhanced by four appendices that offer contemporary accounts of the Staplehurst railway accident, information on archival materials, transcripts of all of the contemporary reviews, and a select bibliography of editions, Grass’s book shows why this last of Dickens’s finished novels continues to intrigue its readers and critics.
“This book represents an impressive
scholarly achievement and will be the authoritative critical work on the novel
for years to come. The background, reception, textual history and afterlives of
this most sophisticated of Dickens novels are analyzed with both rigor and
gusto. An appendix reprinting all known reviews of the text is indispensable.
Our Mutual Friend and its fortunes are brought alive in these pages with
devotion and detail; Grass has done a great service to Dickens's last finished
novel and to Dickens studies more generally.”--Juliet John, Royal Holloway,
University of London, UK and author of Dickens
and Mass Culture
Available from Ashgate
