Our Mutual Friend

Written by Charles Dickens

Narrated by David Timson

A mysterious boatman on the Thames, a drowned heir, a dustman and his wife, and a host of other Dickens characters populate this novel of relationships between the classes, money, greed and love. The forty-eight characters are presented with remarkable clarity by David Timson in this unabridged recording of one of Dickens’ finest works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
• Release date: Nov 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9789629544966

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was an English writer and social critic. Regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, Dickens had a prolific collection of works including fifteen novels, five novellas, and hundreds of short stories and articles. The term “cliffhanger endings” was created because of his practice of ending his serial short stories with drama and suspense. Dickens’ political and social beliefs heavily shaped his literary work. He argued against capitalist beliefs, and advocated for children’s rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens advocacy for such causes is apparent in his empathetic portrayal of lower classes in his famous works, such as The Christmas Carol and Hard Times.

Reviews for Our Mutual Friend

[Denise Horton · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I have nothing against Our Mutual Friend. This audiobook played the book in a completely random order going from chapter 1 to chapter 3 then 2, then skips way ahead to book 4 and back to book 1. I do not recommend listening to this audiobook version of Our Mutual Friend.

[Gerry Budd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great story!!! Great reader!!! Cannot beat either!!! Classic Dickens novel.

[ciara Bush · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Scribd, this recording has track two as book 2 chapter 1, skipping the majority of book 1.

[theeditrix · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Whew! Epic, amazing, messy book. I'm glad I re-read it, and I'm glad I've finished re-reading it.

LIZZIE EUGENE FOREVER.

[johnjsiefring · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I loved this book, until the ending, which disappointed.

[uncultured · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Many people claim that this novel, Dickens' last completed, was his darkest, or at least one of his darker, works. The story opens with a man and his daughter dredging the Thames for bodies (and plot devices, as we'll see) and among the other characters are included an unrepentant drunk, a crippled girl who does not undergo a sniffly death, and a dishonest poor person (in Dickens, this is sacrilege!). And yet...Dust is a motif used throughout the book--the fortune that everyone is in awe over, that anchors the work, was built on dust collection, dust disposal. I was rather confused about that until I learned that dust is British slang for garbage, then things made much more sense. Anyway, as I was saying: And yet...It's as though Dickens had Cheerful Dust leftover from his happier, more joyous novels (Pickwick, Nickleby, even Copperfield) and sprinkled it over this final work, enchanting the characters with a much-missed joy. The character Bella Wilfer, a poor snobbish girl given the chance to live the high life, has a cheery, tubby father named "Pa". Pa is constantly referred to as cherubic, he laughs and is cheerful...and I couldn't help but glance at my bookshelf and think of Mr. Pickwick. Sloppy, an orphaned, mistreated, mentally disabled (to a small degree) young man who likes to report police news in different voices is reminiscent of Smike, Nicholas Nickleby's constant companion. Mr. and Mrs. Boffer, with their great good nature and penchant for jokes and laughter and modesty, are a version of the Cheeryble Brothers from that same work. Even Twemlow, the dependable chair-filler at high-society dinner parties, who is constantly confused by the ridiculous nouveaux riches all around him, has, in his delightful confusion, has his antecedents (I had one in mind, but it slipped away and I have yet to recover it). And so the book is a wonderful convergence of light and shadow. Of course, being Dickens, the light is occasionally somewhat implausible. SPOILER.....I found the idea that Boffin faked his scroogy-ness to be ridiculous--and agree with G.K. Chesterton, who believed that Dickens had intended for Boffin to have a decline and subsequent rise back to his old cheerful self, but ran out of room/time to portray it well. Chesterton is really Dickens' best critic; he added that Dickens is really not very good at describing change in ANYBODY, he was a portraitist, not an animator--but god, what a portraitist. He walks along the Victorian London he helped create and sows diamonds in his wake. He crosses London Bridge and out springs a crusty old barrowman with a warty nose, a distinct voice, and three young daughters who bring him rum punch when it's cold. He strolls down the Strand and a languorous gentleman with an itchy scalp and a harpy for a mother suddenly blooms into faded glory. But change? Meh, leave it to Henry James, who dismissed Dickens (and Tolstoy) as "loose, baggy monsters". Perhaps James was right. He created works like crystal, faceted and brilliant from every angle, symmetrical and deeply reflective. But the monster is always more fascinating, and a friendly monster--the monster that was Dickens--is far more suitable for a soft chair and a fireplace than Henry James, even at his most prismatic. PS-I'm sure someone out there is thinking, "Scrooge! Scrooge changed! He changed from miser to wonderful man, overnight!" To which I respond1. Why, he's the exception that proves the rule.2. Scrooge's transformation wasn't really a transformation so much as a clearing-off of cobwebs. Scrooge was ALWAYS joyous and happy, though he later switched off that aspect of his personality. Dickens created him whole like that, switch and all. Scrooge doesn't, save for a few phrases of remorse, really evolve. He's shown his grave, and wakes up as from a dream--the dream of his miserliness.

[Hello Internet · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I love this book, and the narrator seems wonderful. The audio files are not in order. Chapter 1 is immediately followed by Book 2, 1st chapter, then we get actual chapter 3 next. Nothing is labeled in order to figure out how to listen in order.

[therebelprince · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"There's ever so many people in the river" - Bob Gliddery

A majestic, dark, swirling novel, this. I'm not quite sure it's a Dickensian masterpiece on the level of Great Expectations or Bleak House, nor perhaps is it as dear to my heart as Little Dorrit. Nevertheless, it slots nicely into fourth place for me. Dickens' last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend is a thematically unified treatise on money, death, transformation, and the ways in which humans can never truly know one another. As expected, the novel bursts with memorable characters: the lowlife Rogue Riderhood, the even worse Silas Wegg and his Decline and Fall of the Rooshan Roman Empire, the giddy Boffins and the scheming Lammles, the doll's dressmaker Jenny Wren and the determined septuagenarian Betty Higden, the tormented Bradley Headstone and the great, interminable Mrs. Wilfer. They are all characters at the service of two richly symbolic legacies: the death of John Harmon, Sr, and his fortune founded (quite literally) on piles of dust, and that of Gaffer Hexam, the "waterside character", fisher of dead bodies from the Thames, whose life and death on that swirling, copper river seems to embody Dickens' thoughts on life, regardless of one's "station".

Being a Dickens acolyte sometimes means accepting that his main characters are going to endure external transformations, not internal ones. No shades of Tolstoy here, thankyou very much. And while John Rokesmith is little more than a tormented plaything of the fates, we at least get some satisfying development in the determined, put-upon Lizzie Hexam, the gruff and sometimes pseudo-villainous Eugene Wrayburn, and that devastating creature, the mercenary Bella Wilfer. Readers' tolerance will vary as to how convincing any of the character's transformations are, and the practice of publishing the novel in 20 serialised parts of the same length means that sometimes one feels like Dickens has cut short important moments, while other character moments seem to go on for a few too many pages.

Nevertheless, there's little to complain about here. Like most artists in their old age, Dickens' work is a lot richer here than in the early novels like Nicholas Nickleby although at the same time, his situations have lost some of their carefree pizzazz and even his grotesques are - in order to be more shaded-in - less outright comical. But CD's tongue remains firmly lodged in his cheek here, particularly in his dealings with the Lammles and Mr. Wilfer's thoughts on his home life. The symbolism at play in this book, exemplified by those mounds of dust on which fortunes depend, are particularly interesting given that, just months after the book was completed, Britain would face a financial scandal that would bring down many. Best of all, Dickens' descriptive powers have never been better. The night walks of Wrayburn, and Headstone, and Riderhood along the country river compete with a sequence of death and resurrection in a low-end pub, a children's hospital of great sorrow and compassion, the "bran' new" dinner parties of the Veneerings, and - most unforgettable of all - the darkened rooms of London's most prolific and talented anatomist (to judge from his own opinions), Mr. Venus. As the smile on Venus' alligator seems to say, "All of this was quite familiar knowledge down in the depths of the slime, ages ago."

Delightful, although I don't think I'd recommend it to newcomers to Dickens. It's a more rarefied example of his work that probably tastes better once the palate has grown accustomed.

[burritapal · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The whole time I was reading this, I felt like I was reading a book that had a prequel to it that I had Missed reading. This was Dicken's intention, as he relates in the postscript. It works well, to keep the reader trying to puzzle out the mystery. A master of characterization, Dickens will have you switching your loyalty back and forth between who you love, who you hate, and who you are holding off judgement, chapter by chapter. In the end, you'll be saying, "I should have known." I like how Dickens used his considerable platform to raise Society's awareness of the plight of those who would be ensnared by Poorhouse laws.

[jbd1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Usually it takes a bit to get into a Dickens novel but once I'm in I enjoy them. That was not the case here. I kept reading, but never really got interested in the characters or the various plots. A miss for me, alas.

[dhinden_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Meera Syal’s narration of this work, complete with a unique voice for each character, is the best performance I’ve heard on Audible and what a story!As Dickens writes in an afterword, there are two major plot twists in this novel (John Rockville is the heir John Hanford and the Boffins were in on the secret all along), one of which is deliberately telegraphed to the reader very early on and the other of which is completely disguised until the very end of the novel. The final plot twist is worthy of the finale of Dallas.And along the way, we see Dickens at his most masterful in creating unforgettable characters and dialogue, skewering society, advocating for the poor and writing some of the finest landscape/riverscape descriptions I have ever had the pleasure to read. This is one of those books the reader savors. I found myself worrying that some particularly wonderful passages were not bound to be bound to my memory.If pressed for what I liked best, I would have to say the characters and the dialogue: Ms. Jenny Wren, the dressmaker of children’s dolls, the Veneerings, Podsnaps and Miss Tiffen, dinner hosts and guests from hell, Betty Hidgins, a poor woman destined to die on the road, Mrs.Wilfer, who wants nothing more than to rise above her station, Mr. Venus the taxidermist and the unparalleled band of villains—Bradley Headstone, the stalking, murderous schoolmaster, the Lammles, the fortune hunters mutually deceived into marriage, Rodger Ridinghood a river rogue, and Fascinating Fledgby, the indolent “gentleman” looking for a scam and hiding his money-lending business behind the Jew, Mr. Riah, and Charley Hexam, a poor boy with brains and ambition.These characters are all much more interesting with richer lives, stories, dialogue, than the main characters driving the plot. With Dickens, the plot is just the structure around which the best parts of the novel are strung. This could be the best Dickens I’ve ever read although Great Expectations will always hold a special place for me. I see that it often ranks among Dickens’ most beloved works, the other one that is frequently mentioned being Bleak House. It’s been at least thirty years since I last visited Bleak House and this experience tells me it’s time for a revisit.

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Dickens last complete novel is a story that looks at social conditions through the story of Harmon who's wealth is a "dust". He dies and his son an heir dies on the way to claim his inheritance. Lacking an heir, the inheritance goes to his servants the Boffins. Harmon was to marry Bella. Bella is a widow before she marries but she is taken in by the Boffins and is living off the inheritance that she would have had as the wife. The story looks at what money does to human nature. There are a plethora of bad guys, a plethora of characters. Bella insists she is going to marry for money therefore she is not a good person. She describes herself thus but when push comes to shove and she observes changes in Mr Boffin, she packs up and leaves. The secretary leaves when he is fired by Boffin. He marries Bella, proving her assessment of herself is not the fact. Lots of plot twists in this story. As with Dickens, so many stories are brought to conclusion and the ending is a satisfying ending. Dredgers are people who search for drown bodies to recovery their valuables. Dustman, a person who looks through people's garbage and repurposes things. And Mr Venus, the articulator of bones". There is the contrast of wealth and waste. There is also characters who are deformed, ill such as Silas Wegg and his wooden leg, the dying toddler Johnny Harmon and the daughter of an alcoholic, the dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren, with her bad back and legs. Dicken's does a wonderful job with the character of Jenny as the daughter of an alcoholic, she becomes the parent of her drunkard father. A great story.

[farrhon · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Really hard to read

[threadnsong · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, it's Dickens, and I truly wonder after reading this last book in his corpus, what his writing could have been had he not been writing as a serialist. This book is deeper than most, and includes biting satire of the wealthy who inherit their monies as a matter of course. And it delves again into the role that poverty plays in family dysfunction. I guess Dickens saw these two extremes from his personal life and brought their realities to his vast group of readers. Some of the more interesting characters are Betty Higden and poor Johnny, whose close and cloying relationship, well, Betty Higden describes why she has been withholding Johnny from an infirmary better than I ever will. And Dickens introduces the Jewish Mr. Riah as a battered but ultimately good man. And Jenny Wren is a smart, resourceful young woman who shields those whom she loves and scolds her drunkard father as only a daughter can.While there are elements of the plot that are a bit far-fetched, even for the times in which they were written, the character drawing that Dickens does here is still first-rate. But it's still a serialized novel that really would have benefitted from editing had that been available.

[jonfaith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The white face of the winter day came sluggishly on, veiled in a frosty mist; and the shadowy ships in the river slowly changed to black substances; and the sun, blood-red on the eastern marshes behind dark masts and yards, seemed filled with the ruins of a forest it had set on fire.

Seven months of nibbles, most of these clusters, all braced with serious efforts to remember characters, enlisting wikipedia and rereading, rather often, entire chapters. I'm glad I read such, though I felt most of the characters lived on plotlines like so many pigeons perched above the interstate. Maybe I am being greedy, but i wanted some tension between the molar and molecular, maybe like my instincts I prefer the argumentative quantity, a murder of crows assuming control on the deserted football pitch. Maybe I want more struggle and uncertainty. That said, Our Mutual Friend does have the example of Bradley Headstone; there is an example of actualized potential. Well, the plot certainly benefited. His plausibility should be left for the fore-mentioned crows. Such fare would be a diversion.

[hardlyhardy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Here, conveniently and healthfully elevated above the level of the living, were the dead, and the tombstones; some of the latter droopingly inclined from the perpendicular, as if they were ashamed of the lies they told.” — Charles Dickens, “Our Mutual Friend”“Our Mutual Friend” is a thick novel about thin lines. Throughout its (in my paperback edition) 800 pages of small print, Charles Dickens ponders those narrow lines that separate the living from the dead and people of different stations and conditions.His main plot involves the supposed drowning death of John Harmon, a wealthy young man returning home to claim his late father's estate. He was also to claim the hand of the beautiful Bella Wilfer as required by the terms of his father's will. Not wanting a bride who might marry him only for his money, Harmon fakes his death and returns as John Rokesmith, becoming secretary to Mr. Boffin, a man of modest means who inherits the house and the fortune in his place and then invites Bella to live with him and his wife.So already we can what Dickens has on his mind. Harmon is dead, but not really. Will Bella love him and consent to marry him when he is a poor man? Will she be changed by living in that great house and wearing the finest clothes? Will the fortune change the Boffins?These concerns are echoed in the novel's various subplots and in the lives of its many characters. Other men are dragged from the Thames presumably dead, yet they survive. Other characters seemingly die only to come back to life. There are even dolls treated as living persons and living persons treated as if dolls. References to death and tombstones return again and again in this novel that celebrates life.Another young couple consists of a man and woman of different social classes, and that difference threatens to keep them apart. Another couple, the opposite of John Harmon, pretends to be wealthy when they are impoverished. One boy, raised in poverty, struggles to rise in the world, yet as he rises his character lowers. Another poor boy finds contentment in his situation and maintains his strong character as that situation improves.This novel, the last one Dickens would complete (1865), is not a favorite of many readers because of its length, complexity and contrived plot. Yet there is much to admire here and much to think about. It makes a reader realize that those tombstones, even when not lying, do not tell the whole truth about those who lie below.

[santhony_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It was a happy day when I, for whatever reason, elected to sample Charles Dickens. Having read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, I digressed to more popular fiction (Michener, Clavell, McMurtry, King, Grisham), as well as periods of science fiction and even non-fiction (Ambrose, McCollough for example), before making an effort to upgrade my reading list.I read some Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Steinbeck and Hemingway with mixed success before reading Great Expectations. I liked it enough to read David Copperfield, and I was hooked. A Tale of Two Cities followed and then Oliver Twist (not my favorite), Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son and Little Dorritt before taking on this door stop of a novel.Much of Dickens’s work tends to be lengthy and excessively wordy, perhaps due to their nature of having been serialized prior to being printed in a single volume. Truth be told, after having read Great Expectations, David Copperfield and Tale of Two Cities I confess to being disappointed with several of the following Dickens novels, particularly Bleak House, Martin Chuzzlewit and Dombey and Son. I was therefore very pleasantly surprised with Little Dorritt, and this novel, while not the equal of some of the best, is only a notch below. While Dickens is certainly famous for character development, and I’ve found no one better, the novels that I’ve truly enjoyed have been those that also feature an advancement of story line and this one is no different in that regard. It is simply an excellent story, with several divergent threads that come together nicely in the end. It also boasts the kind of outrageous characters that you’ve come to expect in any Dickens work. As in other Dickens works, a period of acclimation is required to become comfortable with the vocabulary and social conventions of the era. For some reason, perhaps the length of time since my last Dickens novel, it took me a little longer this time. Having read almost all of Dickens’s work, I place this novel just behind David Copperfield, Tale of Two Cities and Little Dorritt, roughly on a par with Great Expectations.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How I avoided reading so many Dickens novels as an English major in college I do not understand, but I am grateful to whoever donated a set of Dickens novels to the free bin at my local library, because thanks to that donation I managed to read Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby and now Our Mutual Friend. The last is a superb novel, even though one thinks one knows the plot twist early on. Well, it is a plot twist but Dickens has much more in store. A wonderful, surprising novel.

[gbelik_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A darker story than earlier Dickens (This was his last completed novel). A body is fished out of the Thames and that starts the tale, but it spins off in many directions before, of course, coming back to that original body.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was Dickens’s last completed novel, originally published in serial form in twenty episodes during 1864 and 1865. Though not as long as Bleak House, it contains more complexities of plot and is peopled by a vast cast of characters: perhaps rather too many for even a novelist of Dickens’s calibre to choreograph capably.The opening scene shows Dickens at his best, with Gaffer Hexham, a waterman from Rotherhithe, out in his small boat on the Thames with his beautiful daughter Lizzie, retrieving a corpse form the water. We soon learn that this is not as unusual an occurrence as might be supposed, and that Hexham is known as a finder of corpses. Papers on this particular corpse suggest that it is John Harmon, heir to the estate of his father, ‘the Golden Dustman’, who had made a fortune out of marshalling and removing the capital’s rubbish. John Harmon had been estranged from his father who had, as a consequence, attached some unconventional conditions to his will, including the unexplained requirement that, to inherit his legacy John Harmon would have to marry Miss Bella Wilfer, daughter of a nearby clerk. In the apparent absence of John Harmon, the whole estate reverts to Mr and Mrs Boffin, former servants of the Golden DustmanInterleaved with the developing story of the corpse in the river is an account of the Veneerings, a wealthy family with a complacent circle of acquaintances. Dickens uses the Veneering sand their circle to lampoon social mores among the caste of newly prosperous businessmen and their families, and also to compare the comfort and ostentation of their existence with the poverty rife around the city. They indulge in prurient discussion about the disposition of the estate of the Golden Dustman, and enjoy a good laugh at the prospect of the Boffins struggling to adjust to their new found wealth. In fact, the Boffins seem surprisingly unaffected by their good fortune, and are principally concerned at how they might help Miss Wilfer, and what other good works they might undertake.Dickens always tries to provide hefty doses of light relief (most notably to my mind in the person of Jerry Cruncher in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’). In ‘Our Mutual Friend, the comedy derives from Silas Wegg, a one-legged purveyor of fancy goods, whom Mr Boffin, recognising his own lack of education, commissions to read Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ to him. Wegg is a great opportunist, and drives a hard bargain, eager as he is to earn sufficient money to buy back his missing leg which has been preserved by Mr Venus, a prolific taxidermist.The plot is far too complex for me to attempt a synopsis here. There are, however, some of Dickens’s more common themes such as the gulf between the rich and poor, social pretension, the redeeming power of education and also rebirth and reinvention. I feel that Dickens let the gravity of his themes overwhelm him to the extent that he lost control of the plot. There are more unresolved threads than is usual for Dickens, and a lack of coherence within some of his principal characters. I enjoyed the book over all but felt that this was Dickens slightly overreaching himself.

[librisissimo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked the story, although it moves slowly as all Dickens's serials do, and it has his trademark witticisms and off-beat characters in abundance, but I just couldn't make it past page 163 (of 850) and have no real incentive to continue. This is his last completed novel, and he pulls out all the stops in his satirical treatment of money, greed, snobbery, rigid class distinctions, and miserliness; while greatly sympathizing with those forced to live in poverty (especially those who might have fared better if not for the evil o others.The plot (in its basics) is transparent, and the endless machinations that keep boy from getting girl make up most of the story, with numerous sub-plots, of course.The foreword does indicate that the book still has "a quality of joy and optimism" that represents the quality most beloved in Dickens.Cover blurb claims it was dramatized on television.NOTES: p. 105 "And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it; but Good, never." (perhaps a tad over-optimistic, but basically sound).

[lylee-2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Too long. Wikipedia descriptions of characters was useful

[idiotgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my favorites. First read it on a train. Beginning of my love affair with Dickens. Read it this time on my kindle.

[leslie398 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I would have given this 5 stars except that there were certain passages (too many in my opinion) which were too obviously Dickens getting on his soapbox and not really relevant to the story. Dickens does this in most (all?) of his novels and I have often enjoyed the sarcastic wit in these asides but for some reason, I found them less funny and more bitter in this novel & therefore less enjoyable. (I will try to track down some examples to include here later)The plot itself I loved. It had all the twists and turns and branches that I appreciate so much in Dickens as well as the wonderful cast of characters. The only thing missing was one or two "light relief" eccentric but harmless characters such as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield although I suppose Jenny Wren & Mr. Tremlow do fulfill that function to some extent. I was pleased to find that Mr. Boffin hadn't been corrupted by wealth after all. One of my favorite chapters in the last book was the one where the truth is revealed to Bella and then to Silas Wegg. And I loved the happy endings all around with even Eugene Wraeburn surviving and turning over a new leaf once he was married to Lizzie.

[pgchuis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took me a good 100 pages to get into this book, but then I was hooked. I enjoyed certain characters more than others: the scenes involving the Veneerings, Lammles and poor Mr Twemlowe were very entertaining, also those involving Mrs Wilfer.. On the other hand, I struggled with the Wegg/Venus and Riderhood/Gaffer chapters, especially as their speech was often rendered phonetically. Miss Jenny Wren did not appeal to me AT ALL and the way she treated her father was very disturbing, but I am pleased to say that I saw the romance with Sloppy coming a mile off. This was, of course, cleverly plotted - the reader believes he is in on the Harmon/Rokesmith secret, only to find there are more layers of plotting to be revealed at the end. Bella seemed to have to wait in the dark unnecessarily long for everything to be explained to her and seemed more accepting than I would have been of what her husband and the Boffins had been up to. Also, was she even legally married and was their baby legitimate, given that John married her under a false name?This may just be my stupidity, but did we ever really find out why John was attacked and left for dead and by whom? Was it connected to the fact that he was the heir to a fortune or just bad luck? Some of the aspects of the novel were very "Victorian" - the saintly toddler Johnny, the way Bella spoke to her father, the way every single person in the novel was connected to all the others by a series of coincidences etc.

[jimnicol-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Moody, dense look at Dickens's London characters. The city and river as wonderful characters.

[aliceanna-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very difficult to get into and several extraneous characters who did little to move the plot forward. But the many threads came together nicely and happy endings were in store for most. As this was the last completed novel of Dickens, it struck me that he was yearning for a happy ending for himself at that point in his life.

[lit_chick_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

2007, Naxos Audiobooks, Read by David TimsonIn the opening chapters of Our Mutual Friend, a body is fished from the Thames and wrongly identified as that of John Harmon, a young man recently returned to London to claim his inheritance. According to the terms of his father’s will, John is required to marry Bella Wilfer, a beautiful mercenary girl whom he has never met, in order to inherit his enormous fortune. Fearing (no doubt correctly) that Miss Wilfer would marry him solely for his money, John takes advantage of the misidentification and assumes the alias, John Rokesmith. Can he get the lovely Bella fall in love with him without the lure of his great wealth? In the meantime, Harmon’s inheritance passes to the working-class Boffins, a decision which has wide-ranging consequences for various corners of London society. The parallel love story of another young couple has much in common with that of John and Bella: handsome society lawyer Eugene Wrayburn falls in love with Lizzie Hexam, the daughter of a corpse robber. Eugene, previously world-weary, comes alive when he meets Lizze for the first time. Of course, such a marriage is impossible. Isn’t it?Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’ last complete novel, is replete with his usual social criticism: mainly the power of money to impact people’s lives for good or ill, mostly the latter. Expect a Dickens-size cast of eclectic characters, including various villains, the pair of young couples aforementioned, and a pint-size doll’s dressmaker who will completely win your heart. Recommended: Highly! Particularly, of course, for lovers of the classics. This audio narration performance by David Timson is extraordinary!

[britt84 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quite a typical Dickens; full of humour, satirical, and a great read.I very much enjoyed it and liked the story a lot; I enjoyed the different characters, who are all in a way charicatures of the type of people they represent. I found it a bit hard at the beginning, especially because there are a lot of different characters introduced, but I really got drawn into it. It's a book that really makes you feel for the people in it, it gives you a sense that you are close to them and makes you wish for the best for all of the nice people, and wish for something dreadful to happen to the bad people...With a twist at the end, Dickens manages to do just that: the bad people are punished, the good are rewarded and live happily ever after. Though I found the ending somewhat unlikely, it did make for a nice twist to the story, and it was certainly unexpected.

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dickens's last completed novel is not one of his best in my view, but it does contain some interesting themes on the effects of money on individuals at different levels of society, and a range of colourful and interesting characters, interspersed with some more tedious ones. The more interesting characters were Silas Wegg, the Boffins, the Hexams (but what happened to Charley?), the dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren, and the Wilfers, especially the depiction of the inverted relationship between Bella and her father (matched by that between Jenny Wren and her father), and the imperious attitude of her mother Mrs Wilfer. Rather less interesting were the title character himself John Rokesmith/Harmon, and more especially the rich and/or upwardly mobile Twemlow, the Veneerings, the Podsnaps and Fledgeby; my interest waned appreciably in the chapters based around their lives. More ambiguous was Mr Riah, a character whose only function seems to be to provide a positive Jewish character to counterbalance the negative stereotype of Fagin in Oliver Twist (albeit nearly 30 years earlier); the insertion doesn't really work as Riah is a very minor character and is very two dimensional. There is also a brace of moving deaths that Dickens does so well, those of little Johnny in a children's home and of the elderly Betty Higden, who has run away to avoid going into the workhouse. Overall I found the plot too rambling to be as effective as it might be and, as so often, the best descriptive passages are those around the lives of the poor, in those case often based on and around the river Thames and its environs.