Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dikens

Dickens shows that though the communication between the two parties is rarely shown, the classes are connected with each other and would collapse without one another. "By revealing the real links between people and classes that suspect have no connection at all, Dickens shows that these two worlds, separated from each other in thought, are physically close, each involved with the other" (Magill 4797). Multiple accounts throughout the novel show the relations in which classes survive with the help of each other. The upper-class is in control due to their power over the lower class, but without the proletariats, the aristocrats cannot survive. "the essential ties between wealth are also figured in the hypocrisy and amorality of a fashionable set" (Holmes 1). Throughout the novel, Dickens constantly connects the lower class and upper class in order to display the fact that no matter the distaste for each other, without one another, society would collapse. An example of this would be that it is through watermen, who are poor, uneducated, and unskillful men who search the river in order to find goods such as junk, wood, and any valuable item to sell. Within the first few chapters of the novel, the waterman "Gaffer" Hexam finds a body of an aristocrat, calling for aid sending more upper-class figures to investigate the body. The two classes separated by thought are constantly in collision with each other. Through the intermarriage of Lizzie Hexam and Eugene Wrayburn, another connection between the upper and lower class develops. Their marriage is a metaphor for the association two castes have with each other. Though at first their relation is not fully visible and can easily be ignored and denied due to social differences, but when Wray...

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...ions of society through his mockery of the obsessive desire for wealth, the way both halves of civilization live, and the negative impact of wealth that corrupts and destroys humanity.

Works Cited

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. London: Penguin,1997. Print.

Hardy, Barabara. British Writers, Article: Charles Dickens. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982. Print

Holmes, Martha Stoddard. "Dickens, Charles: Our Mutual Friend." Literature, Arts, and Medical Database. NYU School of Medicine, September 09, 1999. Web. March 29, 2014.

Leone, Bruno. Readings on Charles Dickens. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998. Print.

Magill, Frank N. Masterplots Revised Second Edition Volume 8. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1996. Print.

Yancey, Diane. Life in Charles Dickens's England. San Diego: Lucent Books, 1999. Print.