This is the in-person registration option for this course.

Our Mutual Friend (OMF) was deemed “the poorest of Mr. Dickens’s works” by a young Henry James, who characterized it, along with the works of Tolstoy, Melville, and other 19th century literary giants, as a “long, loose, baggy monster.” In fact, the 800-page OMF comprises two major love stories, at least a half-dozen marriages, numerous imposters, dutiful daughters, orphans, a lovelorn taxidermist, a very noble Jew, and an inheritance imbroglio as deep and winding as the Thames, itself a critical feature in Dickens’s topography of mid-Victorian London.

Throughout the novel, the Voice of Society—sacred and profane—comments on and imbricates itself into a plot that coheres—however loosely—on “money, money, money, and what money can make of life.” Serialized in 1864-1865, OMF was the last novel Dickens completed in full. It brings together his life-long concern with the treatment of the poor, education, representative government, public health, and even the inheritance laws. The most urban of all his novels, OMF provides a sweeping look at London as a multi-layered global financial center and its emergence as a modern world city. Reading comprises 200 pages of the novel each week.

This course combines lectures, PowerPoints, and class discussions.