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Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend: A Publishing History, by Sean Grass; pp. xiv + 274. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014, £70.00, $114.95.
Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.' A Publishing History will be a useful resource to anyone studying or teaching Dickens's late novels. In a carefully researched and methodical study of the novel's publication history, Sean Grass counters commonly accepted narratives about the novel's commercial failure and unpopularity and defends the novel with an almost proselytizing zeal.
The book's greatest contribution is its careful examination of the novel's original manuscript at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and other materials in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Grass's research allows for a more comprehensive understanding of Dickens's labor in writing the novel and its contemporary reception. Examining the manuscript, the novel's proof sheets, and what he calls the Berg copy of Our Mutual Friend (1865), Grass argues that the novel evolved out of Dickens's adaptation to the changing demands of the literary marketplace and the pressures of serial publication. For Grass, these materials show that Dickens's contingent and practical revisions actually intensified the novel's "imaginative and creative aims" (56). Scenes and characters were introduced simply to correct overwritten monthly installments. For instance, Dickens...