The Story of Dickens's Last Complete Novel — a review of Sean Grass's “Charles Dickens's 'Our Mutual Friend': A Publishing History” (2014) [ Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> Charles Dickens —> Our Mutual Friend —> Book reviews ] Henry James , then just a young writer out to make a name for himself, did not like Charles Dickens's last complete novel; as he reported in his 21 December 1865 review for The Nation, he found it too loose, baggy, disorganized, sentimental, and (as Elizabeth Gaskell would say) "Dickensey." It was, he contended, lacking in subtlety of characterization, and relied too heavily on whimsical caricature and superficial analysis of motivation. In short, it was everything that James felt a Dickens tended to be, but what a novel should not be; it is, he unhesitatingly pronounced, "the poorest of Mr. Dickens's works" (786, cited in Grass, 1).

(This comment also encapsulates the somewhat negative sentiments of early reviews in The Saturday and Westminster Reviews, and summarizes the feeling of the reviewer for The New York Times.) Alfred Lammle's self-serving evil, he contends, is as simplistic as Jenny Wren's crusty goodness is unreal. He did not like Our Mutual Friend, and subsequent generations of critics and scholars, says Sean Grass, have (mistakenly) received James's judgment as holy writ. "This is an enormous shame, for Our Mutual Friend is certainly one of Dickens's most profoundly thoughtful and deliberately artistic books" (2), contends Grass in his engaging narrative about the chequered history of one of the most significant novels in the Dickens canon. Cover of Charles Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend": A Publishing History. [Click on image to enlarge it.] Although this review focuses on the introduction and chapter 4, the story of the inception and reception of the novel is worth reading cover to cover, including such appendixed materials on Dickens's separation from his wife of over twenty years, Catherine (from the Times, 7 June 1858, and his involvement in the Staplehurst railway accident in 1865.

It all amounts to a surprisingly good read, the rebuttal of Henry James's thoroughly biased review to numerous contemporary pronouncements on Dickens's last complete novel. Herein is the great good of DICKENS as a popular writer. It is objected by the fastidious that he excels in depicting the vulgar side and scenes of life; that there is a gross relish of the comfortable and convivial in his pictures; that he exalts mere disposition above heroism, and makes good-nature a sublime virtue. In these very objections we find the evidence of his superior claims and his benign mission. ["Literary: Charles Dickens' Last Novel," New York Times, 14 December 1865, pp. 4-5, cited in Grass, 246] The values of the age as reflected in such contemporary reviews exalt a Dickens that became less than fashionable by the end of the century, but recall for us today his incredibly broadly based appeal as a writer of fiction in the early and mid-Victorian periods. This present review cannot do justice to the complex thread of Grass's argument, and so focusses on just a few of the chapters.

Here, then, are the constituents of this interesting "reception" work, mandatory reading for anybody who intends to teach Our Mutual Friend: Introduction: Our Mutual Friend: "The poorest of Mr. Dickens's works" 1 The Man from Somewhere: Ellen Ternan, Staplehurst, and the Remaking of Charles Dickens 2 The Cup and the Lip: Writing Our Mutual Friend 3 Putting a Price upon a Man's Mind: Our Mutual Friend in the Marketplace 4 A Dismal Swamp? Our Mutual Friend and Victorian Critics 5 The Voice of Society: Our Mutual Friend since 1870 Appendix 1: Dickens, Ellen Ternan, and Staplehurst Appendix 2: The Manuscript, the Proof Sheets, and the Berg Copy Appendix 3: Contemporary Reviews of Our Mutual Friend Appendix 4: Selected Bibliography of Editions of Our Mutual Friend. Should we take Chapman and Hall's losing money on the nineteen-month venture as confirmation that, that, in the judgment of the reading public, too, this was "Mr. Dickens's weakest performance to date"?

The author of this new book on the critical and popular reception of the much-maligned Our Mutual Friend in order to counter this misperception has actually examined the balance sheet for Chapman and Hall's bargain with Dickens, as well as contemporary responses other than James's. In fact, given its overall positive reception, Our Mutual Friend is not a 'lesser novel requiring resurrection' because it has never died. As we can see in the 83-page appendix containing forty-one early reviews of the novel, it was received at the time as a worthy addition to the Dickens canon, and evidence that the master had not lost his touch, even though his last outing in the extended part-publication form had been Little Dorrit, published in nineteenth months between 1856 and 1857 — in other words, some eight years before the last number of Our Mutual Friend appeared in November, 1865. A hard bargainer in his later career, Dickens wrung from Chapman and Hall some £6,000 for half-copyright, eventually leaving the firm with a net loss £700 (to which its extensive advertising campaign and overprinting of the opening numbers likely contributed).

But that loss is the beginning rather than the end of the story: "By not haggling over the price, Frederic Chapman kept Dickens happy and so secured his continued cooperation for any new works, the People's edition, and nearly £10,000 of back stock, as well as for the immensely profitable Charles Dickens edition of his works that they brought out beginning in 1867" (75). Chapman and hall lost a little to ensure profits in the long term. During the second half of his thirty-five-year career as a novelist (that is, from The Pickwick Papers of April, 1836, through November, 1837, to the September 1870 number of the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood) Dickens wrote voluminously, but in fact he made more money (thanks, in part, to shrewdly working his American copyrights) and wrote far fewer novels after the mid-point of that career. That is, in addition to the Christmas Book novellas and countless journalistic pieces in Household Words and All the Year Round , only six of his fifteen novels post-date the year 1853.

And far from being "loose" (that is, poorly structured), these later works are highly unified and disciplined, rendered cohesive by unifying imagery and themes. And yet, unlike A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations dating from this same period, Our Mutual Friend languishes, perhaps, as Grass concedes, because its "central marriage plot [is] far too saccharine and unconvincing" (2): Yet if Dickens disappoints us occasionally in his last finished novel, he rewards us richly, too, and in ways that often carry Our Mutual Friend far beyond the achievements of his earlier books. He may never have drawn a character more psychologically credible than Eugene Wrayburn, more menacing than Bradley Headstone, or more compelling than Lizzie Hexam, each of whom is drawn with a subtlety that Dickens rarely approaches in his earlier fiction, and that his detractors often claimed he was simply incapable of.

Likewise, his attack on "Podsnappery" and other upper-class hypocrisies cuts as deeply and cunningly as anything in Little Dorrit (1855-57), just as his portrayal of the dehumanizing power of capitalism broadens and deepens the critique he began in Great Expectations. And, if the Bella/John marriage plot fails finally to move us, we nevertheless hurtle through the novel's closing chapters, propelled by Headstone's mounting rage, his savage attack on Eugene, and the grinding torments he undergoes at the hands of the novel's other consummate villain, Rogue Riderhood.

[3] Grass points out that the number of years between the last number of Little Dorrit (June 1857) and the first (May 1864) number of Our Mutual Friend may explain the amount of thought that Dickens put into the planning of this last complete novel — Dickens's meticulous plotting, manipulation of language, and deeply embedded patterns of imagery to produce a narrative as tight as his shorter efforts in those intervening years, A Tale of Two Cities (1859, in All the Year Round and Great Expectations (1 December 1860-3 August 1861, also in All the Year Round). Those shorter novels Dickens wrote chiefly to preserve the economic viability of his new weekly journal; in contrast, he wrote Our Mutual Friend to demonstrate his continuing mastery of the novel form, to prove to himself as much as to his public that he could still combine commercial and critical success.

And, despite James's carping and an apparent financial loss sustained by Chapman and Hall on the publication of the novel, Grass makes the point that Dickens actually "made more money from Our Mutual Friend than he had ever made from a novel in his life" (84), even though England's mid-sixties recession made it difficult for any publisher of any novelist to make money. But did Dickens's publishers really lose money in their compact with Dickens? After all, had Dickens simply published Our Mutual Friend under the standard terms of his old contracts with Bradbury and Evans, asking for no money up front but granting the house a ¼ share plus 12.5 per cent commission, Chapman and Hall would have made £2,500 and Dickens would still have gotten more than £7,000. It would have been, in other words, a runaway success, particularly compared against other novels published during these same years. . . . [84] Grass makes this point abundantly clear by comparing Our Mutual Friend's runs and profits to those of Dickens best-seller of the 1850s, Bleak House.

He notes that, although sales slumped a little after the early numbers, which opened strongly with 38,00 and an additional run of 2,500, this was often the way with Dickens's monthly serials, and by September 1853 total sales of monthly parts amounted to 700,000, yielding Dickens a profit of £10,000. For his next novel, a similar falling off after the initial number occurred, so that the last double number of Little Dorrit amounted to just 29,250 copies after total sales of 43,000 for No. 1. But the novel's sales in total still amounted to 650,000 parts, earning Dickens about £11,500. However, the economic climate of the 1860s was very different from that of the roaring 1850s, in part owing to the cotton shortages resulting from the American Civil War.

This was compounded in Britain shortly after by the liquidity crisis of 1866-67 which reached its zenith on 12 May 1866 when the bank lending rate soared to 10 per cent. At the time the United States accounted for one-third of British book exports, and during 1861-64 these plummeted in value from more than £150,000 annually to scarcely £50,000. In January 1863 Sampson Low, who represented Harper & Co. in England, wrote to Wills [Dickens's subeditor] to alert him that Harper, in its financial distress, could not renew its agreement to pay £250 per annum for advance sheets of All the Year Round. [86] Soon after Confederate commander General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his sabre at Appomattox Court House, the American market began a quick rebound, but that, of course, was after the conclusion of the serial run of Our Mutual Friend.

The new illustrated periodicals such as Cornhilland Once a Week had suffered dramatic reversals, so that All the Year Round's retaining its circulation of 100,000 is really an achievement for Dickens and his staff, especially when one considers that the Extra Christmas numbers hit the quarter-million mark consistently in those years, although Grass merely mentions "larger totals." Meanwhile, popular writers such as Anthony Trollope , Wilkie Collins , and George Eliot continued to demand huge sums for new fiction, putting the squeeze on such firms as Smith, Elder and Chapman and Hall. Although they were in no danger of failing, several other publishers did go bankrupt at that time. Ironically, this financial squeeze may explain, argues Grass, for Chapman and Hall's paying so much for Our Mutual Friend in 1863: "trapped in a down market, they were, like other houses, looking around them for sure bet" (88). So, did Chapman and Hall miscalculate, especially since, as Robert L.

Patten contends, part-publication of novels in monthly shilling numbers by 1864 had "pretty well run [its] course" since this method did not lend itself to subsequent publication of a book as a triple-decker, the three-volume format favoured by the new lending libraries. (Dickens, perhaps to meet the demands of this corporate buyer, issued the novel in two volumes, the first appearing half-way through the serial run.) Dickens's competitors in a tight market included Ellen Wood, Thomas Trollope, George Augustus Sala, Percy Fitzgerald, Amelia Edwards, W. M. Thackeray , Wilkie Collins — and Dickens himself. And herein lies the sagacity of Chapman and Hall in compacting with Dickens at this time, for by doing so they were able to make considerable profits on new volumes in the Cheap and Library Editions: From April 1847 to September 1852, Chapman and Hall reissued an old novel roughly every six months, and it may be more than coincidence that the single new novel in parts that Dickens produced during these years, David Copperfield, was one of the worst sellers of his career.

For almost the next twenty years, Chapman and Hall sold between 200,000 and 350,000 of these parts annually, providing Dickens with a steady income of around £175 per year. [90] Just as Our Mutual Friend was entering its fourteenth monthly number, in June 1865, Chapman and Hall issued yet another inexpensive format, the People's Edition, beginning with the ever-popular Pickwick, at just two shillings per volume — that is, for the same price as just two monthly parts of Our Mutual Friend. Profits on sales of 135,000 volumes by the end of 1865 yielded Chapman and Hall profits of £1,358, and during the serial run of the loss leader the publishers "sold some 800,000 weekly and monthly parts, and 170,000 bound volumes, earning gross receipts of more than £15,000" (91).

In other words, Chapman and Hall may have lost money on the novel, but the residuals of their agreement with Dickens more than offset those losses, particularly from the sales of cheaper versions of Pickwick, which had remained Dickens's most popular novel for thirty-five years: "during 1867-70 Chapman and Hall had to print it four times for a total of 76,000 copies" (95). Against that popularity we may compare the sales of Our Mutual Friend: 380,000 monthly parts and 2,700 two-volume editions, generating £2,700 in revenue. Furthermore, in its afterlife the novel sold well, in the 18-volume Charles Dickens edition, beginning in 1867, with half-a-million volumes sold by the time of Dickens's in 1870, thanks in part to sales of Pickwick, amounting to 76,000 volumes.

Just as Grass in the first three chapters employs the statistics of Dickens's contract with Chapman and Hall and their sales of Dickens's latest and previous novels to demolish the argument that Our Mutual Friend was not a commercial success, so Grass analyses a substantial body of criticism, from the period in which the novel was published and since, to demonstrate that reviewers responded to the new book in a manner much more positive than James's. Grass's narrative of the publishing history, compelling in its evidence, omits only the reception of Marcus Stone 's illustrations, which gave the novel a sixties look — although he discusses the evolution of the monthly wrapper in some depth. Everybody recognized that Dickens had changed illustrators, but no one could determine whether the change was for the better or not, as contemporary reviews tantalizingly reveal considerable ambivalence. The role played by the Marcus Stone wood-engravings (not the old steel-engraved illustrations of Phiz ) in the sales of monthly parts remains to be considered. Whereas both David Copperfield and Great Expectations "enjoyed nearly universal critical acclaim" (101), Our Mutual Friend was not without significant detractors in print.

Grass describes the late 1970s "critical revitalization" (147), the book's new-found popularity with poststructuralist critics, and the proliferation of paperback versions in the mid-70s, a part of its "renaissance since roughly 1970" (7) after a long period of neglect. The resurgence of this novel was a twentieth-century phenomenon: for example, although by 1920 Dickens's works had been adapted for film at least seventy times, only one of these — "Eugene Wrayburn" (1911) — was based on Our Mutual Friend. In this regard, its popularity on the small screen has been an established fact since 1970. The Novel's Reputation, 1865 to the Present In Chapter 4, "A Dismal Swamp?

Our Mutual Friend and Victorian Critics," Grass begins with John Forster's equivocal review in the Examiner for 28 October 1865, in which Forster acknowledges the book's unity of design, "fancy" (Dickens's term for imaginative power), its telling descriptions, and well-wrought characters, but then concludes that Our Mutual Friend "will never rank with his higher efforts . . . [because] it wants freshness and natural development" (p. 681, cited in Grass, 97). Since, however, a modern reader would encounter the Examiner review only in critical editions (it appears, for example, in its entirety between pages 175 and 178 in this book), his remarks in The Life of Charles Dickens, issued by Chapman and Hall not long after Dickens's death, touched far more readers, and were much more significant in shaping the attitudes of posterity.

According to Forster in his chapter on the novel (a passage not fully quoted by Grass), It has not the creative power which crowded his earlier page, and transformed into popular realities the shadows of his fancy; but the observation and humour he excelled in are not wanting to it, nor had there been, in his first completed work, more eloquent or generous pleading for the poor and neglected, than this last completed work contains. Betty Higden finishes what Oliver Twist began. [vol. 2, p. 211] This is a book for which Forster had tremendous respect — but he could not love it. While the bulk of Dickens's work, even the vastly popular Pickwick , Dickens's funniest book, remains in the past, even as it was often a reminiscence of an earlier era already irretrievably of the past at the time of writing, Our Mutual Friend is a post-industrial novel a hundred and fifty years ahead if its time, providing a cogent analysis of the personal and social consequences of capitalism as it was in the mid-sixties of the nineteenth century and as it continues to evolve at the multi-national level today, compelling us to sacrifice environment and even climate for economic viability.

As industrialism runs its course and capitalism matures and evolves, Dickens will become — has become — more and more relevant. And if this so, it may be that Our Mutual Friend, in all the nightmarish glory of its indictment of Veneering and Podsnap, of public welfare that terrifies rather than raises up, of an economic system that depends upon and exults the detritus of the human lives wrecked upon its shores, may yet supplant Bleak House and Great Expectations as the "best" book, the most important book, most read book that Dickens ever wrote. Of how many literary works, even among the most enduring, can we say with confidence that they resonate more strongly 150 years later than they did in their own day? [Grass, 157] Related Material Editions of Dickens's Works and Our Mutual Friend (from ch 5 of the book under review) References Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Volume the Second: 1847-1870. The Charles Dickens Edition. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, originally in 3 vols., 1872-4; rpt. 1895.

Grass, Sean. Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History. Burlington, VT, and Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. xiv+ Pp. 274. Cloth. Il. ISBN 978-0-7546-6930-2. Schlicke, Paul, ed. Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Waugh, Arthur. A Hundred Years of Publishing, Being the Story of Chapman & Hall, Ltd. London: Chapman and Hall, 1930. Our Mutual Friend | Charles Dickens Info Charles Dickens Info Our Mutual Friend Our Mutual Friend Our Mutual Friend was the fourteenth and last completed novel of Charles Dickens. He began writing it in 1863. It was initially published in monthly installments that began in May of 1864 and ended in November 1865. Our Mutual Friend – Dickens’s Life At The Time On September 12, 1863 his mother, Elizabeth dies. In November of 1863 Dickens begins to write Our Mutual Friend.

Walter Dickens, his son, dies in India in January of 1864. The first installment of Our Mutual Friend is published in May of 1864. In June of 1865 Charles Dickens is involved in the Staplehurst railway accident . The final chapters of Our Mutual Friend are published in November of 1865. We’ll Never Know In Our Mutual Friend one of the characters is thought to be dead, but really isn’t. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood , Dickens’s last novel, Edwin Drood disappears. Was Drood murdered? People believe so but no body is ever found. Was Dickens planning to use the same plot twist that he’d used in Our Mutual Friend? Perhaps, just like the character in Our Mutual Friend, Edwin Drood wasn’t really dead. We’ll never know. Dickens died before The Mystery of Edwin Drood was completed. Dust Business The dust, or garbage, business plays a large part in Our Mutual Friend. The elder John Harmon made his fortune as a dust contractor. Noddy Boffin becomes the “ Golden Dustman ” while Silas Wegg finds something in a mound of garbage that he thinks could take away Noddy’s wealth.

In the mid-nineteenth century garbage was collected by private contractors. The rubbish was piled into mounds and people sifted through the mounds looking for for things to sell. They might find jewelry or money that was accidentally thrown away. However most of the trash was sold as raw materials for other industries. Soap makers, road builder, paper manufacturers and others bought items from dust contractors. Themes in Our Mutual Friend One of the themes of the novel is the corruption that wealth can bring. Bella Wilfer undergoes great changes during the novel as she deals with this issue. Toward the beginning of the novel she makes a stunning declaration. “I have made up my mind that I must have money, Pa. I feel that I can’t beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.” Later in the book her feelings change. “O Mr. Rokesmith, before you go, if you could but make me poor again! O! Make me poor again, Somebody, I beg and pray, or my heart will break if this goes on! Pa, dear, make me poor again and take me home! I was bad enough there, but I have been so much worse here.

Don’t give me money, Mr. Boffin, I won’t have money. Keep it away from me, and only let me speak to good little Pa, and lay my head upon his shoulder, and tell him all my griefs. Nobody else can understand me, nobody else can comfort me, nobody else knows how unworthy I am, and yet can love me like a little child. I am better with Pa than any one–more innocent, more sorry, more glad!” Our Mutual Friend Information The Top 10 Charles Dickens Books The Top 10 Charles Dickens Books By Robert Gottlieb | Nov 30, 2012 Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens is an outstanding biography of the writer with an eye toward his children, including the scandalous possible existence of an 11th child, born to Dickens's mistress. Robert Gottlieb, former Knopf editor, New Yorker editor, and lifelong Dickens reader, gives us the 10 best books from the master. For more on the book, check out our Q&A with Gottlieb . Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world everyone would read all of them.

(Well, maybe not – Barnaby Rudge is a tired and tiresome historical novel that the young Dickens kept putting off writing until contractual obligations forced him to finish it.) His first published book was Sketches by Boz – a collection of short pieces that brought him considerable attention. By the time he was finished with his second book – The Pickwick Papers, serialized between March, 1836 and October, 1837 – he was, at twenty-five, the best-known writer in England, and such he remained until his death, at fifty-eight, in 1870. The energy, the fun, the power, the compassion of his work is unmatched in English literature, with the obvious. How do you rate works of genius? Partly by personal inclination, partly by accepted wisdom, partly by popularity. Perhaps his most widely known works are A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities, and both are wonderful, but they don’t make my own top ten list. Instead: 1. Great Expectations - With its thrilling story that is also a profound look at the moral education of a boy who has been persecuted and deceived but whose essential goodness of heart eventually rescues him from snobbery and delusion.

Everything is in harmony in this almost perfect novel: the character of Pip himself, and his interaction with the immense figures of the convict Magwitch, the embittered and half-mad Miss Havisham, and the beautiful, cold Estella. This is Dickens’s most finely crafted book, and his most moving. 2. Our Mutual Friend - His final complete novel, with its vast panoply of characters, its emotional generosity, its violent drama, its rich humor – and its author’s most likeable (because imperfect) heroine, Bella Wilfer. I’ve actually read this book aloud twice, and still find it irresistible. 3. David Copperfield - Of course – the book closest to Dickens’s heart (it’s not by accident that the hero’s initials reverse Dickens’s own). The first-person narrative sweeps you along, and the characters -- from the wicked Murdstones and conniving Uriah Heep to the warm-hearted if feckless Micawbers, from Aunt Betsey Trotwood, Little Em’ly, and Steerforth, her seducer and betrayer, to the stout-hearted Peggoty and the silly lovable Dora, whom David marries – are indelibly printed on our literary consciousness.

(Among its greatest admirers: Tolstoy, Kafka, and Virginal Woolf.) 4. Bleak House - With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, Bleak House is for many readers Dickens’s greatest novel. An assault on the legal system, a satire on foolish philanthropy, a gripping melodrama, and an interesting use of point of view (told in both the third and first persons), it is a perpetual fascination. 5. Little Dorrit - In some ways Dickens’s most personal if not autobiographical novel, it has an autumnal quality, given its aging hero and quiet, staunch heroine. Its central characters not only prevail but mature, and its situations – even its comedy – resonate for its readers in countless affecting ways. 6. Oliver Twist - With its larger-than-life villainies and its endless excitements, is the perfect book to begin with. Who will ever forget the supremely wicked Fagin who co-opts homeless boys into a life of crime, the murderous Bill Sikes, the brave young Oliver himself, however idealized?

No wonder it had such an immense triumph as successor to the benign and lovable Pickwick! 7. Nicholas Nickleby - Perhaps the most high-spirited of all Dickens’s novels, yet also a grim, devastating attack on the Yorkshire schools to which unwanted children were dispatched. The comically radiant picaresque adventures of young Nicholas with the Crummles traveling theatrical troupe provide a wonderful contrast to the tragedy of the boy Smike, the saddest victim of the Squeers family who run the unspeakable school called Dotheboys Hall. 8. Dombey and Son - A powerful tragedy of a distant, cold businessman who comes to realize too late the value of his worthy daughter, Florence, after the death of his beloved son, Paul – Dickens’s most famous death scene after that of the famous Little Nell of The Old Curiosity Shop. 9.

The Pickwick Papers - And, yes, Pickwick itself – not quite a novel (it started out as a series of sketches to be illustrated) but filled with glorious characters – the benign, naïve Pickwick himself, his cockney valet Sam Weller (who steals the book; the Sancho Panza to Pickwick’s Don Quixote), the rascally Jingle – and hilarious episodes like Pickwick’s trial for breach of promise. The most decisive debut in English fiction. 10. The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens - Finally, not a work of fiction but the recently published The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens, edited by Jenny Hartley from the twelve volumes of the monumental Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s correspondence. Here you find in Dickens the man, all the fun, acuity, sensitivity, and tough realism that characterize Dickens the supreme novelist. ADVERTISEMENT Complete Chronological list of Charles Dickens Last Sentences Pinterest0 A few months ago I posted A list of all Charles Dickens’ opening lines for the simple reason of it not being done before anywhere on the internet and readers voted on their favourite opening line. It seemed appreciated, and showed some interesting correlation between the point in his life when the novels were written and how the sentences were structured.

Some people enjoyed that and requested that I do the same with some Charles Dickens last sentences, so here it is! Apart from the above, there are two obvious uses for this: You can pretend you’ve read every Dickens novel at a pretentious party you’re attending by frequently quoting them. If Mr. Gove successfully forces an English-literature-only curriculum, this may be a useful revision tool. Other than that, reading this would be spoiling all the novels and is an utterly dreadful thing. If you’re now getting cold feet about the morality of what you’re about to read, scroll no further, go buy the complete collection , and read them all. Scroll to the bottom for the last lines poll Charles Dickens’ Last sentences Every year, he repairs to a large family merry-making at Mr. Wardle’s; on this, as on all other occasions, he is invariably attended by the faithful Sam, between whom and his master there exists a steady and reciprocal attachment which nothing but death will terminate. The Pickwick Papers (Monthly serial: April 1836 to November 1837) I believe it none the less because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring.

Oliver Twist (Monthly serial: February 1837 to April 1839) Through all the spring and summer-time, garlands of fresh flowers, wreathed by infant hands, rested on the stone; and, when the children came thereto change them lest they should wither and be pleasant to him no longer, their eyes filled with tears, and they spoke low and softly of their poor dead cousin. Nicholas Nickelby (Monthly serial: April 1838 to October 1839) Such are the changes which a few years bring about, and so do things pass away, like a tale that is told! The Old Curiosity Shop (Weekly serial: April 1840 to February 1841) From that period (although he was supposed to be much affected by the death of Mr. Willet senior), he constantly practised and improved himself in the vulgar tongue; and, as he was a mere infant for a raven when Barnaby was grey, he has very probably gone on talking to the present time.

Barnaby Rudge (Weekly Serial: February 1841 to November 1841) And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One! A Christmas Carol (1843) As it resounds within thee and without, the noble music, rolling around ye both, shuts out the grosser prospect of an earthly parting, and uplifts ye both to Heaven! Martin Chuzzlewit (Monthly serial: January 1843 to July 1844) So may each year be happier than the last, and not the meanest of our brethren or sisterhood debarred their rightful share, in what our Great Creator formed them to enjoy. The Chimes (1844) A Cricket sings upon the Hearth; a broken child’s-toy lies upon the ground; and nothing else remains. The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) But, as I have observed that time confuses facts occasionally, I hardly know what weight to give to his authority. The Battle of Life (1846) LORD KEEP MY MEMORY GREEN. The Haunted Man (1848) He only answers ‘Little Florence!

Little Florence!’ and smooths away the curls that shade her earnest eyes. Dombey and Son (Monthly serial: October 1846 to April 1848) Oh Agnes, oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward! David Copperfield (Monthly serial: May 1849 to November 1850) But I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me-even supposing- Bleak House (Monthly serial: March 1852 to September 1853) We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn grey and cold.

Hard Times (Weekly serial: April 1854 to August 1854) They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar. Little Dorrit (Monthly serial: December 1855 to June 1857) ‘It is a far far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ A Tale of two Cities (Weekly serial: April 1859 to November 1859 I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

Great Expectations (Weekly serial:December 1860 to August 1861) When the company disperse- by which time Mr. and Mrs. Veneering have had quite as much as they want of the honour, and the guests have had quite as much as they want of the other honour- Mortimer sees Twemlow home, shakes hands with him cordially at parting, and fares to the Temple, gaily. Our Mutual Friend (Monthly serial: May 1864 to November 1865) Before sitting down to it, he opens his corner cupboard door; takes his bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score, extending from the top of the cupboard door to the bottom; and then falls to with an appetite. The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Monthly serial: April 1870 to September 1870. Incomplete.) That’s it. I hope you enjoyed them. Please vote on your favourite last sentence below, so when people ask what his best novel was I can tell them while occasionally quoting last lines, which I know because I’ve read all of his books.

Charles Dickens Last Lines Poll Best Charles Dickens last Sentence Which Dickens novel has the best last sentence? The Pickwick Papers The Cricket on the Heath The Battle of Life A Tale of Two Cities Great Expectations The Mystery of Edwin Drood Other Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens · OverDrive: eBooks, audiobooks and videos for libraries Drama Fiction Charles Dickens' classic novel stars Alex Jennings as Charles Dickens and Pauline Quirke as Mrs Boffin. Adapted by Mike Walker. Following his father's death, John Harmon returns to London to claim his inheritance. But he finds he is only eligible if he marries Bella Wilfer. To observe her character he assumes another identity and secures work with his father's foreman, Mr Boffin, who is also Bella's guardian. Our Mutual Friend was Charles Dickens' last complete novel and is a satiric masterpiece about money. This complete Woman's Hour Drama, which contains all 20 episodes, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2009.

My favourite Dickens: Our Mutual Friend | Books | The Guardian My favourite Dickens: Our Mutual Friend by Philip Hensher Friday 23 September 2011 17.56 EDT First published on Friday 23 September 2011 17.56 EDT Close Our Mutual Friend (monthly serial, May 1864-November 1865) Dickens's last completed novel is a marvel of play-acting and posturing, of taking on roles through delusion, calculation and ambition. I've come to think of it as a sort of late-period masque, where the roles and disguises that John Harmon and Boffin consciously assume exaggerate the more ordinary play-acting and pretence that we all engage in. The Veneerings' awful dinner parties, or the love affairs where both participants wonder whether they are quite up to the mark, or the Lammles' getting married in the misguided belief that the other has money – these are all wonderful, extreme examples of what the sociologist Erving Goffman was later to call "the presentation of self in everyday life".

It's a novel commonly described as flawed, but I guess it's the Dickens novel I love best, and come back to most frequently. It's said to be highly artificial – Henry James remarked, on its first publication, that he had never read a novel "so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt". The details of the plot, it's true, are elaborately implausible. But the individual characters are shockingly recognisable – the scenes between Mrs Wilfer striking postures and her debunking daughters, for instance. There are a hundred Podsnaps who will explain climate change over London dinner tables tonight, with a sweeping gesture of the arm. Dickens's genius for human observation at its quickest reaches a kind of pinnacle with the young man who tries to exercise his French and says "Esker" at a Veneering dinner, says nothing more and never reappears. But he will live forever, and we all know someone just like him.

It's so full of the river, and the sense of the city, and a huge stretch of London society, and so grand in its vision that perhaps we forget how gloriously funny it is – the Boffins deciding to go in for history, and buying a big book ("His name is Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan-Empire") or the captivating Lady Tippins ("You wretch!"), or Mrs Wilfer, after placing Bella in the magnificent coach of the Boffins, continuing to "air herself … in a kind of splendidly serene trance on the top step" for the benefit of the neighbours. I love the bold sentiment, the pathos and the drama; I even love the kid who dies whispering "A kiss for the boofer lady", because you might as well swallow this magnificent novel whole. And best of all is the exuberant, light-hearted moral conviction of the last page, as Twemlow at the very end shows his steel. Wagner said that the whole spirit of the English people was contained in the first rocketing eight notes of "Rule Britannia". But then he probably hadn't read Our Mutual Friend.

Digital Dickens Notes Project – exploring serial novel form About the Project T he Digital Dickens Notes Project (DDNP) is digitizing and exploring Charles Dickens’s working notes for his novels. Currently under construction, this project aims to interactively demonstrate how Victorian readers experienced serial novels as forms-in-process rather than as complete texts. Manuscripts of the working notes survive in whole or in part for ten of Dickens novels: The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Edwin Drood. Beginning with his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, the DDNP will gradually digitize and annotate all of these notes and place them alongside, and in the context of, the serial parts of his novels, some of which were published in weekly and some in monthly parts. This project is produced by Anna Gibson, assistant professor of English at Duquesne University. Funding and support for this project has generously provided by Duquesne University, the Wimmer Family Foundation, Duquesne’s NEH Endowment fund, the Duke Ph.D. Lab, and NINES funding for DHSI.

My thanks also go to the Pierpont Morgan Library, home of the Our Mutual Friend manuscript. u News and Updates Update! As of late October, 2015, all the Our Mutual Friend working notes images from the Pierpont Morgan Library have been uploaded to the prototype with JuxtaEditions. Transcriptions and introductions are still in the works, but you can look at the manuscripts here . Update! Thanks to an NEH Endowment Grant from Duquesne University and the assistance of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, we now have high resolution digital images of the working notes for Our Mutual Friend. I have uploaded and transcribed the first installment using Juxta Editions here . Update! Digital Dickens Notes now has a Twitter Feed! Find us at @DickensNotes Update! Take a look at the progress — an xml markup and screenshots of the working prototype for the second installment. Details here . Screenshot of the early prototype. Click to read and see more. An earlier digital abstract for the project is available here: c Contact For more information about this project, please contact Anna Gibson, Department of English, Duquesne University via her website , via email at gibsona at duq dot edu

Question: What was Charles Dickens final completed novel?
Answer: Our Mutual Friend