SOURCE: Review of Our Mutual Friend, in Nation, 21 December, 1865, reprinted in Dickens: Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, ed. by Norman Page, Macmillan Press, 1979, pp. 152-56.

In the following review, James asserts that Our Mutual Friend is uninspired and disappointing, filled with implausibly eccentric characters.

Our Mutual Friend is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion. It is wanting in inspiration. For the last ten years it has seemed to us that Mr Dickens has been unmistakably forcing himself. Bleak House was forced; Little Dorrit was labored; the present work is dug out as with a spade and pickaxe. Of course—to anticipate the usual argument—who but Dickens could have written it? Who, indeed? Who else would have established a lady in business in a novel on the...