SOURCE: “The Education of the Reader in Our Mutual Friend,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 1, June, 1979, pp. 41-58.

In the following essay, Mundhenk maintains that some of the confusing plot elements in Our Mutual Friend are caused by the author's deliberate attempts to manipulate and deceive his readers and thus to educate them about the limitations of individual perception.

The narrator of Our Mutual Friend describes Twemlow as a creature “condemned to a passage through the world by such narrow little dimly-lighted ways, and picking up so few specks or spots on the road.”¹ Vexed by the “insoluble question whether he was Veneering's oldest friend, or newest friend” (I, 2), fooled by Fascination Fledgeby into thinking that Riah is the villain who controls his debts, the Knight of the Simple Heart is confused by appearances in the world of the novel. Although Twemlow's crisis of perception and knowledge is...