Thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours and sixteen minutes, to be exact. That's what Dickens asks of you with Our Mutual Friend, and I'm going to be honest - somewhere around hour twelve, while Denise and I were doing our Saturday lakefront walk and she was giving me the look that means "you haven't heard a word I've said," I thought: is this worth it?
It is. But Dickens makes you earn it. And I have complaints.
The Thames Is Basically a Character and It Won't Shut Up
Let me get my grievance out of the way. This novel opens with Gaffer Hexham and his daughter Lizzie pulling a dead body from the Thames - a scene so perfectly grim and atmospheric that it hooks you immediately. And then Dickens, being Dickens, decides you need to meet approximately forty-seven other characters before anything meaningful happens with that body. The Veneerings and their dinner parties full of people who don't actually know each other. The Boffins inheriting a fortune from a dust heap empire. Silas Wegg, who is perhaps the most deliciously awful con man Dickens ever created - a man hired to read aloud to the Boffins who can barely read himself. (I teach teenagers who do the same thing with SparkNotes. The tradition is ancient.)
This is Dickens at his most sprawling, most digressive, most convinced that you have nowhere else to be. And here's the thing my grad school professors never admitted: his last completed novel might actually be his strangest. The plots don't just intertwine - they collide. You've got Bella Wilfer learning what money does to a person's soul, Lizzie Hexham trying to escape the river that defined her father's life, and Bradley Headstone - a schoolteacher, by the way, and I take personal offense at how Dickens writes him - losing his mind with jealous obsession over Lizzie. Headstone is terrifying specifically because he's so controlled on the surface. He's the Victorian equivalent of that colleague who smiles through every faculty meeting and then sends unhinged emails at midnight.
Mil Nicholson and the Art of Not Getting in the Way
This is a LibriVox recording, so let me set expectations properly. You're not getting a full theatrical production with distinct character voices for every member of the Veneering dinner table. What you get with Mil Nicholson is something I've come to value more as I've listened to hundreds of these: clarity, patience, and genuine affection for the text.
Nicholson reads Dickens the way I try to read Dickens to my students - with an understanding that the humor lands when you don't rush it. There's a passage where Mr. Boffin is being flattered by Wegg, and Nicholson gives it just enough warmth that you feel Boffin's innocent pleasure at being treated as a literary man. That restraint matters. A showier narrator would've gone broad, played it for laughs, and lost the tenderness that makes the Boffins so heartbreaking later.
The narrator understands that pause is punctuation. Nicholson's pacing through Dickens' longer sentences - and brother, does Dickens write long sentences - is steady without being monotonous. At 36 hours, monotonous would've been fatal. I listened at 1.0x because the prose deserves to be savored, and Nicholson's reading rewards that patience. Could you bump it to 1.15x during the Veneering dinner scenes without losing much? Probably. But you'd miss the way Dickens layers his social satire, and Nicholson clearly knows it.
Where the single-narrator format strains is in the crowded scenes. When you've got Twemlow and Podsnap and Lady Tippins all trading barbs at dinner, it takes real concentration to track who's speaking. That's partially Dickens' fault - the man loved a crowded room - and partially the limitation of one voice doing everything. I kept a mental map. It helped.
Betty Higden Broke Me at a Faculty Meeting
I need to talk about Betty Higden, because she broke me. This elderly woman, fiercely independent, terrified of the poorhouse, walking herself to death rather than accept charity - Dickens wrote her as a quiet indictment of the Victorian welfare system, and it still cuts. I was supposedly reviewing assessment rubrics when her final scenes played through my earbuds, and I had to pretend I was having an allergy attack. (Principal Martinez, this is why my eyes were red during third period planning.)
This is why we still read the classics. Betty Higden is 150 years old and she's every person I've met at the community center who'd rather starve than ask for help. Dickens knew that. Nicholson knows it too - you can hear it in the careful way the reading slows during her sections.
Who This Is For (and Who Should Run)
If you loved Bleak House, this is its spiritual successor - the same social breadth, the same dark comedy, the same river flowing underneath everything. If you're new to Dickens, do NOT start here. Start with Great Expectations. Come back when you've built up your endurance. Jane Austen is another solid on-ramp for listeners who want nineteenth-century social satire with tighter plots — my review of Complete Novels of Jane Austen Volume 1 gets into why her narrators tend to have an easier job than anyone brave enough to tackle Dickens.
This is a free LibriVox recording, so the production won't match a professional studio release. But Nicholson's reading is genuinely good, and at 36 hours, "free" is a significant factor.
My students would hate this. I love it.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
Our Mutual Friend demands commitment and rewards patience. It's messy, overstuffed, occasionally maddening, and somehow exactly as long as it needs to be. Dickens' last completed novel is him throwing everything he had left at the page - the comedy, the darkness, the sentimentality, the fury at a society that measures people by their bank accounts. Nicholson carries all of it with quiet competence across 36 hours. That's no small thing.
