Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. Book Four: A Turning

I didn’t like the ending. None of them. It can take a while for a big Dickens novel to end.  When you have so many different characters with so many different story lines going, bringing them all to a fitting close can take a couple of hundred pages. This is the case with Our Mutual Friend. There are at least seven endings in Our Mutual Friend … Continue reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. Book Four: A Turning

Our Mutual Friend: Book Three – “A Long Lane”

Book three of Our Mutual Friend is really the story of Mr. Boffin’s fall from grace, but it’s a minor character, Pleasant Riderhood who really got to me, almost made me cry, in fact. Pleasant is the daughter of Rogue Riderhood, one of the main villains in the novel. Rogue Riderhood began the novel rowing his boat along the Thames, fishing from it whatever livelihood … Continue reading Our Mutual Friend: Book Three – “A Long Lane”

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens — Book One: The Cup and the Lip

I read almost all of Our Mutual Friend back in graduate school.  I took a class in Charles Dickens where we read  all of the later novels in a semester from Dombey and Son to Our Mutual Friend.  It was awesome.  But I confess that I only made it halfway through Dombey and Son and I can’t remember if I actually finished Our Mutual Friend.   … Continue reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens — Book One: The Cup and the Lip