This was the author's last great work: the defects in it are as nearly imperceptible as spots on the sun or shadows on a sunlit sea. His last long story, Our Mutual Friend, superior as it is in harmony and animation to Little Dorrit or Dombey and Son, belongs to the same class of piebald or rather skewbald fiction. As in the first great prose work of the one greater and far greater genius then working in the world [where] the cathedral of Notre Dame is the one prevailing and dominating presence, the supreme and silent witness of life and action and passion and death, so in this last of its writer's completed novels the real protagonist -- for the part it plays is rather active than passive -- is the river. Of a play attributed on the obviously worthless authority of all who knew or could have known anything about the matter to William Shakespeare, but now ascribed on the joint authority of Bedlam and Hanwell to the joint authorship of Francis Bacon and John Fletcher, assisted by the fraternal collaboration of their fellow-poet Sir Walter Raleigh and King James I, it was very unjustly said by Dr. Johnson that "the genius of the author comes in and goes out with Queen Katherine." Of this book it might more justly be said that the genius of the author ebbs and flows with the disappearance and the reappearance of the Thames.

That unfragrant and insanitary waif of its rottenest refuse, the incomparable Rogue Riderhood, must always hold a chosen place among the choicest villains of our selectest acquaintance. When the genius of his immortal creator said, "Let there be Riderhood," and there was Riderhood, a figure of coequal immortality rose reeking and skulking into sight. The deliciously amphibious nature of the venomous human reptile is so wonderfully preserved in his transference from Southwark Bridge to Plashwater Weir Mill Lockhouse that we feel it impossible for imagination to detach the water-snake from the water, the water-rat from the mud. There is a horrible harmony, a hellish consistency, in the hideous part he takes in the martyrdom of Betty Higden -- the most nearly intolerable tragedy in all the tragic work of Dickens. Even the unsurpassed and unsurpassable grandeur and beauty of the martyred old heroine's character can hardly make the wonderful record of her heroic agony endurable by those who have been so tenderly and so powerfully compelled to love and to revere her. The divine scene in the children's hospital is something that could only have been conceived and that could only have been realised by two of the greatest among writers and creators: it is a curious and memorable thing that they should have shone upon our sight together. We can only guess what manner of tribute Victor Hugo might have paid to Dickens on reading how Johnny "bequeathed all he had to dispose of, and arranged his affairs in this world."

But a more incomparable scene than this is the resurrection of Rogue Riderhood. That is one of the very greatest works of any creator who ever revealed himself as a master of fiction: a word, it should be unnecessary to repeat, synonymous with the word creation. The terrible humour of it holds the reader entranced alike at the first and the hundredth reading. And the blatant boobies who deny truthfulness and realism to the imagination or the genius of Dickens, because it never condescended or aspired to wallow in metaphysics or in filth, may be fearlessly challenged to match this scene for tragi-comic and everlasting truth in the work of Sardou or Ibsen, of the bisexual George Eliot or the masculine "Miss Maevia Mannish." M. Zola, had he imagined, as undoubtedly his potent and indisputable genius might have done, must have added a flavour of blood and a savour of ordure which would hardly have gratified or tickled the nostrils and the palate of Dickens: but it is possible that this insular delicacy or prudery of relish and of sense may not be altogether a pitiable infirmity or a derisible defect. Every scene in which Mr. Inspector or Miss Abbey Potterson figures is as lifelike as it could be if it were foul instead of fair -- if it were as fetid with the reek of malodorous realism as it is fragrant with the breath of kindly and homely nature. The ideal inspiration of the butcher and the scavenger is really not more real, because certain self-styled naturalists may naturally assume and may noisily aver that it is, than that of a Fielding or a Scott, a Thackeray or a Dickens.