Our Mutual Friend
Some modern critics of "Our Mutual Friend" have been overall more critical of the novel's characters. In her 1970 essay ""Our Mutual Friend": Dickens as the Compleat Angler," Annabel Patterson declares, ""Our Mutual Friend" is not a book which satisfies all of Dickens's admirers. Those who appreciate Dickens mainly for the exuberance of his characterization and his gift for caricature feel a certain flatness in this last novel". Deirdre David claims that "Our Mutual Friend" is a novel through which Dickens "engaged in a fictive improvement of society" that bore little relation to reality, especially regarding the character of Lizzie Hexam, whom David describes as a myth of purity among the desperate lower-classes. David criticises Dickens for his "fable of regenerated bourgeois culture"and maintains that the character Eugene Wrayburn's realistic counterpart would have been far more likely to offer Lizzie money for sex than to offer her money for education.