Editing Our Mutual Friend (section)

===Jews===
The Jewish characters in ''Our Mutual Friend'' are more sympathetic than [[Fagin]] in ''[[Oliver Twist]]''. In 1854, ''[[The Jewish Chronicle]]'' had asked why "Jews alone should be excluded from the 'sympathizing heart' of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed." Dickens (who had extensive knowledge of London street life and child exploitation) explained that he had made Fagin Jewish because "it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew".<ref name="Oliver Twist intro">{{Cite news|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=R63Gk3ntfFkC&pg=PR19|title=Oliver Twist – introduction |last=Howe|first=Irving |publisher=Random House Publishing Group |year=2005 |isbn=9780553901566}}</ref> Dickens commented that by calling Fagin a Jew he had meant no imputation against the Jewish faith, saying in a letter, "I have no feeling towards the Jews but a friendly one. I always speak well of them, whether in public or private, and bear my testimony (as I ought to do) to their perfect good faith in such transactions as I have ever had with them".<ref name="dickens-johnson">{{Cite book|last=Johnson|first=Edgar|title=Charles Dickens His Tragedy And Triumph|publisher=Simon & Schuster Inc|date=1 January 1952|chapter=4 – Intimations of Mortality|chapter-url=http://dickens.ucsc.edu/OMF/johnson.html|access-date=8 February 2009}}</ref> Eliza Davis, whose husband had purchased Dickens's home in 1860 when he had put it up for sale, wrote to Dickens in June 1863 urging that "Charles Dickens the large hearted, whose works please so eloquently and so nobly for the oppressed of his country ... has encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew." Dickens responded that he had always spoken well of Jews and held no prejudice against them. Replying, Mrs Davis asked Dickens to "examine more closely into the manners and character of the British Jews and to represent them as they really are."<ref name=Stone1959>{{cite journal |jstor=3825878 |last=Stone |first=Harry |title=Dickens and the Jews |journal=  Victorian Studies|volume=2 |number=3 |date=March 1959 |pages=245–247 }}</ref>

In his article, "Dickens and the Jews," Harry Stone claims that this "incident apparently brought home to Dickens the irrationality of some of his feelings about Jews; at any rate, it helped, along with the changing times, to move him more swiftly in the direction of active sympathy for them."<ref name=Stone1959 /> Riah in ''Our Mutual Friend'' is a Jewish moneylender yet (contrary to stereotype) a profoundly sympathetic character, as can be seen especially in his relationship with Lizzie and Jenny Wren; Jenny calls him her "fairy godmother" and Lizzie refers to Riah as her "protector", after he finds her a job in the country and risks his own welfare to keep her whereabouts a secret from Fledgeby (his rapacious—and Christian—master).<ref>{{cite book |last=Dickens |first=Charles |title=Our Mutual Friend |location=New York |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=1989 |pages=434, 405 |isbn=978-0192817952}}</ref>