Our Mutual Friend

Lizzie Hexam is the most prominent working-class character in Our Mutual Friend and thus embodies many of the class tensions that are explored in the novel. Important to her class identity is her upbringing. Her father was a boatman and a petty thief—someone who frequently took his daughter out at night to help him drag corpses from the River Thames. She loves her father and her brother, the sincerity of her emotion contrasting with the vapid affection shared between many of the middle- and upper-class characters, but she is also ashamed of her father’s actions and consequently of her own background. While she has resigned herself to a life of poverty, corpses, and petty crime, she makes great sacrifices in the hopes that her younger brother, Charley, can escape it. Meanwhile, she continues to demonstrate her loyalty to their father, regarding it as her duty.

Lizzie’s compassion, loyalty, and selflessness also influence her romantic endeavors; she flees her home and friends in London, for example, in large part to protect Eugene from Headstone’s violence. Her continued refusal of Eugene’s affection also stems partly from selflessness that verges on internalized class prejudice: Lizzie confesses to Jenny that she loves Eugene but views any relationship with him as impossible given her lower-class status. However, her avoidance of Eugene is self-protection as much as it is self-denial, as she guesses (correctly, the novel implies) that Eugene has no serious intention of marrying her at this point. She likewise shows her willingness to stand up for herself when rejecting Headstone’s proposal, even under considerable pressure from her brother.

Ironically, it is Headstone’s attack on Eugene that at last enables Lizzie’s happy ending. She agrees to marry Eugene, though even this brief moment of hope is imbued with a sense of sacrifice, as she believes that he is dying. However, much as Lizzie exerts a good moral influence on Eugene, the novel suggests that her love has a near-miraculous power to heal him. Eugene survives and the marriage prospers, even though their future may not be certain. With Eugene on the path to recovery, she is finally able to allow herself to be happy.

Eugene Wrayburn is a young lawyer from a wealthy family. At the beginning of the novel, he has rejected his father’s demands to marry a woman of a similar social standing and is struggling to find any enthusiasm for the career he has ahead of him. Eugene is intelligent and well-educated but has no interest in the law; his career is a function of his social class, as his father, implied to be a member of the landed gentry, wanted a lawyer in the family. Eugene is thus a dislocated product of upper-class alienation: someone who recognizes the vacuous nature of his social group but lacks any motivation to change himself, his peers, or the world around him.

Eugene’s life changes when he meets Lizzie. Typically cynical, he nevertheless falls in love with her at first sight, though their difference in social class means that neither initially entertains the possibility of marriage. This class tension never bothers Eugene, who pursues Lizzie from the moment he meets her. The lack of hesitancy on his part speaks to his privilege. As a wealthy man, he does not feel any compunction about class differences. These matters—which dictate the shape of Lizzie’s world—are a triviality to someone from a wealthy background. Furthermore, for a man, an extramarital affair would be at most mildly scandalous, whereas it could permanently ruin the prospects of a working-class woman like Lizzie. The contrast between the attitudes of Lizzie and Eugene illustrates the way in which the poor are much more beholden to The Rigidity of Social Class than the rich.

Eugene’s dismissive and contemptuous attitude toward Headstone deepens the romantic rivalry that exists between the two men, culminating in an attack that nearly kills Eugene. In an ironic twist, the beating is the best thing to happen to Eugene. Though he nearly died, his near-death experience convinces him to propose to Lizzie, atoning for his former selfishness by attempting to salvage her reputation. By nearly dying, Eugene gains a wife and a purpose.