SOURCE: “Prospecting for Meaning in Our Mutual Friend,” in Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 19, 1990, pp. 231-46.

In the following essay, Gaughan explores the various characters in Our Mutual Friend and the different strategies they employ to negotiate their way around the roles each has been assigned by a rigid social system.

So many of Dickens' characters in Our Mutual Friend are so entrapped and mutilated by the roles they are forced to play and by the rules and values of their society that meaningful action seems all but impossible. Characters like Lizzie Hexam and John Harmon are forced to live stories they did not author and cannot rewrite. Jenny Wren, the attenuated and battered symbol of imagination in the novel and a parody of childhood and all that childhood means to Dickens, is a reminder of the irreversible damage the social world has already done to the hopes of...