The Sun.
London, England, 1865-04-03 00:00:00

Charles Dic

'rial Story,

Our Mutual Friend. By Charles Dickens. .No. 12.
Chapman and Hall.

Incredible though Bella's latest hint to Pa at the
close of the March number appeared to us to be, it
nevertheless turns out to have been only too true
after all ! The Golden Dustman (in chap. v. of
vol. falls into Bad Company, (in chap. vi. of
vol. falls into Worse Company. Gets a han-
kering after details of the lives of those abject
wretches—those exemplary persons—the Misers,
whom he apparently meditates emulating. Has a
kind of illegibility stealing over his face—" its old
simplicity of expression," we are told, getting
" masked by a certain craftiness that assimilated
even his good humour to itself." Insomuch that
we read—" His very smile was cunning,
as if he had been studying smiles among
the portraits of his misers." Inimitably good
are the scenes in which this extraordinary transfor-
mation is depicted—to the hidden pain of Bella, to
the exquisite anguish of dear, true-hearted Mrs.
Boffin, to the suppressed scorn, the evident amaze-
ment, and the patiently endured humiliation of the
Golden Dustman's Secretary, John Harmon that
really is, though ostensibly no more than flouted,
insulted, put-upon, undemonstrative Mr. Roke-
smith. The Golden Dustman being, all the
while, so wretchedly deteriorated in character under
the evil influence of the possession of a wealth
that really is not his, that " though his eyes
should twinkle and all his face should laugh, he
would sit holding himself in his own arms as if he
had an inclination to hoard himself up, and
must always grudgingly stand on the defen-
sive." When he gets into Worse Company
it turns out to be the company of Mr. Venus and
Silas Wegg. " The articulator" of his fellow creatures,
crossed in love by the incapability of the object of his
affections (who turns out by the way to be no other
than Pleasant Riderhood) regarding herself, or
allowing herself to be regarded, in that particular
light ! "The literary man with a wooden leg"—whose
chief grievance in life is the subordination, to the up-
start Golden Dustman, of " those eminent creatures
Miss Elizabeth, Master George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle
Parker !" The way in which Mr. Boffin descends,
one while, upon the Bower, about nightfall, "in a
cab with Rollith.l Ancient History," and, upon an-
other occasion, arrives in another cab
with " Plutarch"—whose Lives he finds in the
sequel extremely entertaining, though he hopes
Plutarch " may not expect him to believe them all"
—is delightful. The chief difficulty with Mr. Boffin
in the course of his reading being this—" what to
believe !" " For some time he was divided in his mind
between half, all, or none ; at length, when he de-
cided as a moderate man to compound with half, the
question still remained which half! . And that
stumbling block he never got over."' Almost as
good in their way as the earlier scenes in this number
—where, as already hinted, the Golden Dustman
contrives at one and the same time to cause pain to
Bella, anguish to Mrs. Boffin, and surprise and
humiliation to his Secretary, Rokesmith—almost
as good, we say, as those earlier scenes, are the
later scenes in this No. 12 of Our Mutual Friend,
in which Boffin reveals the deterioration of his
character yet more vividly to " the impostor''
Wegg, the Evil Genius of the House of Boffin, as
he assumes to be by right of having discovered, in
the course of his researches among the giant Dust
Mounds, a will secreted by the old dead and gone
Dust Contractor in a certain old cashbox found hid
away in a long disused pump. There among those
dreary surroundings of the misnamed Bower,

towards the summit of one of those same gigantic
mounds, the Golden Dustman himself is seen by
Wegg 4nd Venus to exhume a mysterious case-

bottle, the contents of which are altogether out of
reach even of our conjectures. Without as yet
seeing the merest glimmering of a way out of the
labyrithine mazes of the plot of Our Mutual Friend
as that tortuous labyrinth has been here elaborately
arranged in all its, as yet, bewildering involutions
—we can nevertheless perceive through the medium
of one apparently slight and casual disclosure, (a dis-
closure already here in this notice of ours distinctly
particularised) the possibility of the seemingly inex-
tricable puzzle of the plot being explained, after all,
to be about the simplest thing in the world, and
to be so explained, moreover, by no more than

one or two touches of the masterhand.

The dii