It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing.
It’s been difficult enough in this age of instant Googlification to wait even 24 hours until the next instalment of Radio Four’s latest Dickens serial, Our Mutual Friend, is given its 15-minute airing. So how did Dickens’s Victorian readers survive a whole month before the next instalment was published and they could at last discover the fate of Eugene Wrayburn? Or the truth about John Rokesmith? Mike Walker’s latest adaptation into 20 compressed episodes is a masterpiece of dramatic tension, casting Lilian and Matt’s wailing on The Archers into the bottomless pit of dud soap storylines.
Dickens knew exactly how to blend lurid tragedy with deadly realism, so that we never quite know which way the story will go.
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