Our Mutual Friend
Aside from examining the novel's form and characters, modern critics of "Our Mutual Friend" have focused on identifying and analysing what they perceive as the main themes of the novel. Although Stanley Friedman's 1973 essay "The Motif of Reading in "Our Mutual Friend"" emphasises references to literacy and illiteracy in the novel, Friedman states, "Money, the dust-heaps, and the river have been seen as the main symbols, features, that help develop such themes as avarice, predation, death and rebirth, the quest for identity and pride. To these images and ideas, we may add what Monroe Engel calls the 'social themes of "Our Mutual Friend"—having to do with money-dust, and relatedly with the treatment of the poor, education, representative government, even the inheritance laws.'"