SOURCE: “The ‘Golden Bower’ of Our Mutual Friend,” in ELH, Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring, 1973, pp. 105-30.

In the following essay, Stewart analyzes the character of Jenny Wren; unlike most critics who either ignore or disparage her, Stewart considers the character central to the novel's symbolic meaning.

‘You are talking about Me, good people,’ thought Miss Jenny, sitting in her golden bower, warming her feet. ‘I can't hear what you say, but I know your tricks and your manners!’

Miss Jenny is Fanny Cleaver, alias Jenny Wren, the crippled seamstress in Our Mutual Friend who fashions out of rags and refuse her miniature dresses for dolls and who, almost unheralded, moves gradually to the symbolic center of Dickens's last completed novel. Miss Jenny is not only the book's most brilliant idea, she marks the climax of that Dickensian tradition of fitful and harassed refuge in imagination sought by certain characters...