Our Mutual Friend ends with Mortimer Lightwood, who feels that, like Dickens, he has "the eyes of Europe upon him" as he tells his stories at the Veneerings’ dinner parties, seeking the true voice of society while he reports the story of Eugene and Lizzie. He discovers it in Twemlow, who knows what it means to act nobly. Dickens must himself have been wondering about the voice of society with regard to his personal situation, and probably with Mortimer’s perspective. Neither Dickens nor Mortimer participates directly in the happiness of those they tell stories about. But they share the vision and take joy in seeing the results of the stories and the effects those stories have on their audiences. (Ackroyd 195)
Dickens, our greatest storyteller, may not have discovered the personal happiness in his own marriage that Eugene and John Harmon, the Pip and David of his last completed novel, achieve, but in the end he achieves personal fulfillment through his art. David realizes, in the life of his novel, what Dickens saw represented in Mary Hogarth, and what was not attainable in his own life. That Dickens’s own fulfillment is in creating the vision rather than attaining it here may be explained in part by the fact that Dickens is an artist and in part by the kind of artist he is. According to Forster, Not his genius only, but his whole nature, was too exclusively made up of sympathy for, and with, the real in its most intense form, to be sufficiently provided against failure in the realities around him. There was for him no ‘city of the mind’ against outward ills, for inner consolation and shelter. It was in and from the actual he still stretched forward to find the freedom and satisfaction of an ideal, and by his very attempts to escape the world he was driven back into the thick of it. But what he would have sought there, it supplies to none; and to get the infinite out of anything so finite, has broken many a stout heart.
Dickens has shown us how the real can more nearly approximate his vision of the ideal through his novels. In his later years he told those stories in brilliant public readings from his novels in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and in America, where people stood all night in lines one half mile long to purchase tickets to see him perform.
His last novel, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood , was to be issued in twelve monthly numbers from April, 1870, but he died in June, having completed half the mystery. In this novel, Dickens extends his vision beyond England to include the empire itself. It appears as if he would continue to make yet another advance in his artistic development in this unfinished novel. (World Book 156)
Dickens died June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In a letter to Forster, Carlyle sends his condolences: "I am profoundly sorry for you and indeed for myself and for us all. It is an event world-wide; a unique of talents suddenly extinct; and has "eclipsed," we too may say, "the harmless gaiety of nations.’ No death since 1866 [the year of Carlyle's wife's death] has fallen on me with such a stroke. No literary man’s hitherto ever did. The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens, — every inch of him an Honest Man." ( Ackroyd 215)