Of Daughters and Ducats

Our Mutual Friend and Dickens's Anti-Shylock

Abstract

The character of Mr. Riah, the saintly and honorable Jew in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864), has long been assumed to constitute the author's apology for his portrait of the nefarious Fagin in Oliver Twist (1837), a portrait that drew upon the most insidious of anti-Semitic stereotypes. I argue that these assumptions neglect the wider context of the novel's engagement with The Merchant of Venice, and that rather than simply serving as an apology for Fagin, Riah functions explicitly as an anti-Shylock. The question of Dickens's anti-Semitism does not concern me here; his attitudes toward actual Jews reflect the typical complexity of liberal Victorians. Our Mutual Friend's engagement with Shakespeare's archetypical representation of the evil Jew, however, does allow Dickens to expose the uses and abuses of such representations in the English tradition. If the ambiguities of Shylock's character implicitly point out the faultlines in the social project of demonizing the Jews, Dickens's adaptation of the play, in which a character in effect performs the role of Shylock, makes such faultlines explicit: Dickens uses his anti-Shylock to critique his own society's depiction of the stage Jew.