Our Mutual Friend Themes

Aww, the fam. Making our lives miserable and awesomesauce since time began. The bonds of family shape nearly all the action in Our Mutual Friend—after all, the only reason John Harmon has returne...

There is a whole lot of romance and a whole lot of money in Our Mutual Friend. Unfortunately, there's only so much of both to go around, so some characters are bound to get jealous of other ones. T...

Your grandfather's favorite crooner, Frank Sinatra, said that, "Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage." Dickens might amend that to something like "Love and money, and marriage an...

Schemers and liars and blackmailers, oh my! Machiavelli would be super-proud of a bunch of these machinating characters.Most of the plot in Our Mutual Friend revolves around the question of leverag...

It's tough to find a 19th-century book from England that doesn't mention alcohol abuse at some point. More specifically, these books almost always have a character (usually a man) that has ruined h...

Ugh. If we lived in the stifling world of Our Mutual friend, we'd be tempted to fake our own deaths—like John Harmon—rather than deal with all the perpetual status-seeking and social-climbing.T...

Most 19th-century British novels would involve a lot of references to Christianity, but in a bold move, Dickens makes Judaism the main concern of Our Mutual Friend. During Dickens' time, a lot of p...

Folks in Britain in 1865 didn't have the same access to school that many people enjoy today. For that reason, education was a huge marker of social status, and it tended to determine all of your op...