Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
I agree with the old critics of this particular novel that the plot is a shaggy dog that makes little sense. I agree with the newer critics of this novel that the characters, as always, are sharply drawn and generally good. Everybody's keeping secrets and trying to get over on other people, but there's no point in keeping any of the secrets except to get over on the other people. The legal issues were tolerably clear from the get-go, and known to the (good) main characters. The only real purpose of any of it seems to have been to test whether the main female character was a good person or not. One might be disposed to think of this as cruel.
Far more interesting, and not commented upon in the limited range of criticism I have available to me, is Dickens' insistence at the end of the book that it is part of his (ongoing, in other novels) attempt to reform laws around poverty in part by showing plausibly that poor people can be good, too. There's a thread to analyze.
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