Other editions of book Our Mutual Friend

Murder, a bitter love triangle and a mysterious inheritance. In the last of Dickens's completed novels, the power of money ultimately motivates both character and action. One night Hexam, who makes his living pulling bodies from the Thames, pulls out a body bearing the identification of John Harmon, heir to the fortune of a 'dust-collector'. In fact, Harmon has swapped clothes and identities with a sailor, John Rokesmith. 'Rokesmith' gets a job as secretary to Noddy Boffin and falls in love with Bella Wilfer. However Bella is intent on marrying money until events cause her to change her mind

1865 edition, illustrated.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. 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.

First published serially between 1864 and 1865, “Our Mutual Friend” is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens. The death of a wealthy miser, who is estranged from all except his trusted employees, Nicodemus and Henrietta Boffin, brings his son John Harmon back to London in order to claim his inheritance. The patrimony carries with it one condition, that he marries a woman he has never met, Miss Bella Wilfer. When a body is found floating in the Thames, it is presumed to be John, and the inheritance instead passes to the Boffins. The kind-hearted working class Boffins take into their household the disappointed bride to be Miss Wilfer and treat her as their own daughter, pampering her with their newfound wealth. They also accept the generous offer of John Rokesmith to attend to their financial affairs for free. Rokesmith, who also goes by the alias of Julius Handford, is in fact the heir John Harmon, presumed to be dead. Dickens’s novel is a thematically rich one, addressing the struggle of man between societal expectations and the desire to follow one’s heart. Rich with a symbolism of rebirth, “Our Mutual Friend” brilliantly dramatizes the impact that wealth plays upon society. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper and includes an introduction by Edwin Percy Whipple.

Charles John Huffham, DICKENS (1812-1870), son of a clerk in the Navy pays office. His father was imprisoned for debt and this was followed by a period of intense misery which deeply affected him. When he was 12 year old worked in a blacking warehouse. This painful period inspired much of his fiction. Then he worked as an office boy, studied shorthand and became reporter of debates in the Commons for the “Morning Chronicle”, collaborating later with other newspapers. These attracted much attention and led to an approach from Chapman and Hall which resulted in the creation of Mr. Pickwick, and the publication in twenty monthly numbers of “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club”. Dickens captured the popular imagination as no other novelist had done and was admired by contemporaries as varied as Queen Victoria and Dostoevsky. Later criticism has tended to praise the complexity of the sombre late works at the expense of the high spirited humour and genius for caricature. “Our Mutual Friend” (1865). John Harmon returns home. He expects to receive the inheritance to which his father has attached the condition that he shall marry Bella Wilfer, unknown to him. John confides to a mate of the ship his intention of concealing his identity until he has formed some judgement of his allotted wife. The destiny will realize such an intention sooner than expected.

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"In these times of ours," are the opening words of this book, which was published in England in 1864-65. The scene is laid in London and its immediate neighborhood. All the elaborate machinery dear to Dickens's heart is here introduced. There is the central story of Our Mutual Friend, himself the young heir to the vast Harmon estate, who buries his identity and assumes the name of John Rokesmith, that he may form his own judgment of the young woman whom he must marry in order to claim his fortune; there is the other story of the poor bargeman's daughter, and her love for reckless Eugene Wrayburn, the idol of society; and uniting these two threads is the history of Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, the ignorant, kindhearted couple, whose innocent ambitions, and benevolent use of the money intrusted to their care, afford the author opportunity for the humor and pathos of which he was a master. Among the characters which this story has made famous are Miss Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker, a little, crippled creature whose love for Lizzie Hexam transforms her miserable life; Bradley Headstone, the schoolmaster, suffering torments because of his jealousy of Eugene Wrayburn, and helpless under the careless contempt of that trained adversary— dying at last in an agony of defeat at his failure to kill Eugene; and the triumph of Lizzie's love over the social difference between her and her lover; Bella Wilfer, "the boofer lady," cured of her longing for riches and made John Harmon's happy wife by the plots and plans of the Golden Dustman ...

A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap’s expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights “Noddy” Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes “the Golden Dustman.” Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens’s most complex—and satisfying—novels.

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in. The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-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 could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, 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 small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight head-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror.