Henry James didn’t like Our Mutual Friend. And he never would or could have written it. So there! But one day will write a blog on the dishonesty of Henry James, and how he ruined Wings of A Dove through profound evasion.
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?
ROT!!!