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Our Mutual Friend
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{{Short description|1864β1865 novel by Charles Dickens}} {{other uses}} {{EngvarB|date=September 2013}} {{Use dmy dates|date=July 2024}} {{infobox book | <!-- See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Novels or Wikipedia:WikiProject_Books --> | name = Our Mutual Friend | image = Image:OurMutualFriend.jpg | caption = Cover of serial No. 8, December 1864 | author = [[Charles Dickens]] | cover_artist = [[Marcus Stone]] | country = England | language = English | series = | genre = [[Novel]] | publisher = [[Chapman & Hall]] | release_date = Serialised 1864β65; book form 1865 | media_type = Print | pages = | isbn = | preceded_by = [[Great Expectations]] | followed_by = [[The Mystery of Edwin Drood]] | wikisource = Our Mutual Friend }} '''''Our Mutual Friend''''', published in 1864β1865, is the last novel completed by English author [[Charles Dickens]] and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage [[satire]] with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic [[J. Hillis Miller]], quoting the book's character Bella Wilfer, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life".<ref>Joseph Hillis Miller, ''Victorian Subjects''. Duke University Press, 1991, p. 69.</ref> Most reviewers in the 1860s continued to praise Dickens's skill as a writer in general, but did not review this novel in detail. Some found the plot both too complex and not well laid out.<ref name="New Books 1865"/> ''The Times'' of London found the first few chapters did not draw the reader into the characters. In the 20th century, however, reviewers began to find much to approve in the later novels of Dickens, including ''Our Mutual Friend''.<ref name=Wilson2007 /> In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some reviewers suggested that Dickens was, in fact, experimenting with structure,<ref name=Reed200615 /><ref name=Hecimovich1995 /> and that the characters considered somewhat flat and not recognized by the contemporary reviewers<ref name=Nelson1970 /> were meant rather to be true representations of the Victorian working class and the key to understanding the structure of the society depicted by Dickens in the novel.<ref name=Nelson1970 /><ref name=Hecimovich966 />
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