Character Clues

Character Analysis

Direct Characterization

As a master of third-person omniscient narration, Dickens likes to tell us directly what some characters are like. Sure, he does plenty of showing, but he also doesn't want his readers missing his point—especially when it comes to which characters we should like and which ones we shouldn't.

He devotes an entire chapter, for example, to describing the personality of the character Mr. Podsnap, if only to tell us "You shouldn't like this guy." Then he barely mentions Podsnap for the rest of the book. He just wants us to be clear that we should try to be as unlike Podsnap as possible.

Family Life

It's nice to think that family is something you can always count on, even when life isn't going so well. But that's not always the case for characters in Our Mutual Friend. Charley Hexam, for example, needs to run away from home to have a better life because his father has forbidden him from getting an education.

Similarly, Charley disowns his sister Lizzie because she refuses to raise herself in society by marrying Mr. Headstone. Sure, family can be a good thing. But in Dickens' eyes, it doesn't always guarantee love and support.

Occupation

You can tell a lot about people from their occupations in this book. For starters, Gaffer Hexam is a guy who makes his living fishing dead bodies out of the river. So yeah: he ain't the most upstanding (or clean) gentleman in the world.

On the other hand, John Harmon gives up his huge inheritance and takes a job as a secretary to test the love of Bella Wilfer, showing how much he cares about love over money. Eugene Wrayburn is a lawyer by profession, but in his three years at a firm he has never done a single hour of work. In other words, he's unmotivated and lazy… until the love of a good woman sets him straight.

Physical Appearances

Lizzie Hexam and Bella Wilfer are both pretty girls, and this outer loveliness is an accurate reflection of their inner beauty. But this doesn't mean that every ugly person is morally bad.

Sure, Gaffer Hexam and Rogue Riderhood are both ugly and mean. But little Jenny Wren has a good heart, even though a birth defect has left her with a hunchback and a bad limp. Dickens doesn't want us to judge a book by its cover, but he sometimes undercuts this message by making good people beautiful and bad people ugly.

Social Status

It wouldn't be a 19th-century novel if characters weren't shaped by their status. But the interesting thing with Dickens is that he's more interested in undercutting the idea of status than in propping it up. Status in this book has no real bearing on a person's character.

A poor person can be either good (like Lizzie) or bad (like Silas Wegg). Similarly, a rich person can be good (like John Harmon) or a total jerk (like Mr. Podsnap). The general lesson in all of this is that we should never judge people by their bank account balance.

Clothing

In many cases, clothing leads to mistaken identity in this book. For example, the whole reason people think John Harmon is dead in the beginning is because a body wearing his clothing has been found in the Thames River. Later in the book, Bradley Headstone also tries to frame Mr. Riderhood for the murder of Eugene Wrayburn by copying Riderhood's clothes.

On top of that, clothing also serves as a clear mark of a person's societal status in this book. But you need to be careful about judging people by their clothing, because people are constantly using clothing to manipulate and fool one another.