Other editions of book Our Mutual Friend

About Our Mutual Friend by Charles DickensHow is this book unique?E-reader & tablet formatted, Font Adjustments100% Original contentUnabridged EditionAuthor Biography InsideIllustrations includedOur 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.'

Our Mutual Friend, written in the years 1864–65, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining psychological insight with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life", but is also about human values. In the opening chapters a body is found in the Thames and identified as that of John Harmon, a young man recently returned to London to receive his inheritance. Were he alive, his father's will would require him to marry Bella Wilfer, a beautiful, mercenary girl whom he had never met. Instead, the money passes to the working-class Boffins, and the effects spread into various corners of London society.BONUS :• Our Mutual Friend Audiobook.• 12 Illustrations about Charles Dickens.• The 49 Best Charles Dickens Quotes.

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is noneed to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, withtwo figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge whichis of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn eveningwas closing in.The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzledhair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty,sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girlrowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with therudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband,kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he couldnot be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, noinscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope,and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too smallto take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman orriver-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he lookedfor something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, whichhad turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watchedevery little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slighthead-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as hedirected his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his faceas earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her lookthere was a touch of dread or horror.