Our Mutual Friend

Charles Dickens's last completed novel tells the story of a young man who must marry a stranger in order to win his inheritance. Wanting to learn the lady's nature, John Harmon fakes his own death and takes on a new identity. As the complexities of the deceit are revealed, Dickens gives us his most profoundly cynical, yet brilliantly funny, insight into the corruption of wealth on human nature. 40 illustrations. Charles Dickens's last complete novel and a glorious satire spanning all levels of Victorian society Our Mutual Friend centres on an inheritance - Old Harmon's profitable dust heaps - and its legatees, young John Harmon, presumed drowned when a body is pulled out of the River Thames, and kindly dustman Mr Boffin, to whom the fortune defaults. With brilliant satire, Dickens portrays a dark, macabre London, inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam, scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting, mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social-climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg. The novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and the corrupting power of money. Our Mutual Friend uses text of the first volume edition of 1865 and includes original illustrations, a chronology and revised further reading. As Adrian Poole writes in his introduction to this new edition, 'In its vast scope and perilous ambitions it has much in common with Bleak House and Little Dorrit, but its manner is more stealthy, on edge, enigmatic.'

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