Close Readings: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

The LRB Podcast

London Review of Books

Society & Culture

4.4 • 579 Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. In this extended extract from Novel Approaches, a Close Readings series from the LRB, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make Our Mutual Friend one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Sponsored link: Find out more about the Royal Literary Fund: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.rlf.org.uk/⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,
0:07.4	Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,
0:12.4	from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works
0:17.2	by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes
0:22.5	for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice
0:28.3	and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with
0:35.5	two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now.
0:39.2	And in the third episode, I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky.
0:43.1	You can find a link in the description or search Close Readings, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:48.9	Hello, and welcome to episode eight of novel approaches, a close readings podcast series from the London Review of Books.
0:56.4	I'm Thomas Jones, a senior editor at the paper, and joining me today to talk about our mutual friend by Charles Dickens are Tom Crewe and Rosemary Hill.
1:06.4	Tom Crewe is a contributing editor at the LRB, his novel The New Life, which won the Allwell Prize for
1:11.9	Political Fiction, among several other awards, is set in late 19th century London. Hello, Tom, and
1:17.9	thank you so much for joining us today. Hello, it's a pleasure. Rosemary Hill is also a
1:22.3	contributing editor at the LRB, and her books include a biography of Pugin, a history of Stonehenge, and most recently
1:29.3	Times Witness history in the age of romanticism. She last appeared on this podcast talking about
1:34.7	Fannity Fair. Hello, Rosemary. It's a real pleasure to welcome you back. Hello, thank you.
1:39.2	Lovely to be back. So our mutual friend, which was published in 19 installments between 1864 and 1865, was Dickens' last
1:48.0	completed novel that he died in 1870, leaving the mystery of Edwin Drood mysteriously unfinished.
1:55.2	Critical opinion of our mutual friend has fluctuated over the years, reviewing it for the nation
2:00.0	in 1865. Henry James wrote that
2:02.7	seldom had we read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known or felt. Tim Parks and the
	...

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