ABSTRACT
Charles Dickens had been working on a new painting showing an arrested man being marched down a public thoroughfare, and he had wanted to introduce into the composition a begging dog. It is hard to imagine Our Mutual Friend without Mr. Venus. Arthur Waugh remarked phlegmatically in 1937 that "the 'Venus' business generally is a superfluous excrescence on the plot," but probably very few critics of the present day would agree. Our Mutual Friend first appeared in England from Chapman and Hall in 20 numbers, published as 19, from May 1864–November 1865, each one in a green paper wrapper bearing Stone's cover design and accompanied by two of his illustrations. The manuscript that Dickens left behind when he departed for France in September 1865 is, for obvious reasons, the most significant resource available to scholars who want to study Dickens's creative processes and writing practices in Our Mutual Friend.
