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    Our Mutual Friend
    Our Mutual Friend
    Our Mutual Friend
    Ebook1,183 pages28 hours

    Our Mutual Friend

    By Charles Dickens

    4/5

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    When a rich miser dies, his inheritance is to pass to his estranged son John Harmon, who must return from South Africa to claim it, on condition that he marries a woman he has never met, Miss Bella Wilfer. When John Harmon goes missing and is presumed dead, the fortune passes instead to the miser’s faithful employees Mr. and Mrs. Boffin. Rich with psychological and social insight into the effects of money on society, "Our Mutual Friend", the last novel that Charles Dickens completed is considered by many to be one of his most sophisticated works.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2010
    ISBN9781596257023
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and grew up in poverty. This experience influenced ‘Oliver Twist’, the second of his fourteen major novels, which first appeared in 1837. When he died in 1870, he was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey as an indication of his huge popularity as a novelist, which endures to this day.

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    Reviews for Our Mutual Friend

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    • 4/5
      Time has slipped away from me on reviewing this book, so I'll be briefer than I meant.This is very Dickensish Dickens indeed. He delves into the littlest-known professions of London's economic underbelly, makes endless and intricate mock of the empty hearts and minds of the money- and status-obsessed nouveau riche, weaves a terrifically complicated plot, and engages in all the heart-rending melodrama for which you either hate or love him. He makes some amends here -- Riah, a noble Jewish character unable to escape the stereotypes others lay on him seems a clear apologia for Fagin. Jenny Wren's complex and fallible character may comfort a few who find the saintly Tiny Tim, Dickens's most famous disabled child, hard to take. (Jenny Wren has her twee moments as well: troops of angels visiting her in her worst childhood moments, Boz? Really?)The story is sprawling, of course, but its central theme is the corrupting effect of money. I found the central story and the characters of the Boffins effective and surprisingly poignant. The nouveau riche storyline, featuring the Veneerings and Lammles, was the least appealing to me. The descriptions of the Veneerings and their doings were so stylized as to occasionally lose focus, I thought, and I found Georgiana Podsnap frustrating to the point of apathy. This is late Dickens, and while as I say his melodramatic tendencies are in full force, there are more variations in moral fabric, more surprises about people's true natures and capacities, than I feel I find in some of his earlier novels. It's a rich book, full of unhappy love, fierce determination, human folly, and of course startling evocations of Victorian London. It's huge and complicated, but full of memorable images and people. A necessity for Dickens lovers.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      “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.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorites. First read it on a train. Beginning of my love affair with Dickens. Read it this time on my kindle.
    • 5/5
      Wonderfully illustrated. By far the best. Charles Dickens classic written.
    • 5/5
      My favourite dickens. I feel in love with Eugene early on, and his quest to gain Lizze provides one of the two main plots. This is a double love story, as well as a tale of murder, money, greed and hatred. There is no more sinister villian in dickens than Bradley Headstone, and none more piteable. A huge book, but one to savour, its complexities resolve into an ending which is both satisfying and truthful. Dickens never did like to sugar over the realities of a situation and here he does his utmost to be faithful to the time and to give his readers hope for the future.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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).
    • 4/5
      A wealthy miser dies leaving all of his money to his estranged son, John Harmon, with one major stipulation. He can only inherit his fortune if he marries Bella Wilfer, a woman he has never met. But before the will can be executed, John Harmon's body is found floating in the river under suspicious circumstances. The money is now bequeathed to the Boffins, poor kind-hearted servants who helped raise the son. Being both naive and generous, the Boffins decide to take in Bella Wilfer and raise her as their own daughter, giving her the benefit of the fortune that she missed. In their household, Bella transforms from a mercenary and cold young woman to a kind and generous soul. The Boffins also take in a secretary, John Rokesmith, to help Mr. Boffin in handling his new fortune. We quickly discover that John Rokesmith is actually the missing John Harmon who is able to observe and fall in love with Bella.

      This story had all the elements of a great Dickens novel - quirky but lovable characters, lots of twists and turns in the plot, and plenty of laugh out loud moments. Unlike some of his other novels, there were really no deep dark elements - more of a feel good happy ending type of book. I didn't find this to be as life changing or memorable as A Tale of Two Cities or Bleak House, but enjoyable from beginning to end. Definitely one of my favorite Dickens novels. I loved the narration performed by Simon Vance!
    • 3/5
      Charles Dickens' penultimate novel, and last complete one, is a compendium of the best and worst of his art. The characters are present, perhaps too many, but they lack the fresh life and spirit of earlier works like Dombey & Son or Bleak House.The metaphors are present, but the waters of Our Mutual Friend are dark and foreboding, ultimately leading to death; while the waters of earlier works, such as Dombey again, hold the promise of life. It seems that Dickens is worn out and it shows in the lack of energy; but in spite of this there remain beautiful passages and complex plotting, perhaps his greatest. His critique of social class and society surrounds the story with the caricature of the Veneerings at its apex. Within the story he uses his theme of false identity as well as he ever has with one of the central characters, John Harmon, the prime specimen. But he fails to provide a central character with whom we can identify as he did so well in David Copperfield, Bleak House and Great Expectations. The Boffins, who are very appealing at first, appear to change their moral character and thus disappoint (at least Mr. Boffin) while the most appealing characters, like Jenny Wren or Lizzie Hexam, are not substantial enough or central enough to carry the novel. So we have a novel that receives a mixed grade from this reader. I finished it longing for the early Dickens humor and the later Dickens greatness but was left with a bit of that but not enough to sustain the 800 pages he had devoted to the story of Our Mutual Friend.
    • 5/5
      Narrator (Robert Whitfield a/k/a Simon Vance) does an excellent job with the many voices. 31 hours makes for a very long book, so I stopped halfway to listen to a completely different book, and came back to this one after that. An awful lot of sub-plots, that are (for the most part) well-resolved by the end.
    • 4/5
      Dickens at his most wonderful and at his most dreadful. The good bits of this book are a very strong reminder of why we should read Dickens and keep on re-reading him at every opportunity; the bad bits help to explain why many of us don't do that. We get some of his most vivid, unexpected sketches of characters and settings, especially the famous characterization of the River Thames that gives the book a kind of Wagnerian Leitmotif. In Headstone we have one of the most striking descriptions of hate and obsession anywhere, the hapless Wegg is a brilliant description of small-minded envy, and the sensitive way Dickens treats his "minority" characters (a mentally-handicapped person, one with a physical disability, an alcoholic, and a Jew) is completely different from what you expect from the mid-Victorian period. Despite the length of the book, one of its most striking features is the economy with which Dickens handles the scene changes. The Veneerings and their friends, who provide a Greek chorus commenting on the action at critical points, would dominate the story if it had been written by Trollope or Thackeray; Dickens barely pencils them in, but we still feel as though we know them all intimately. On the other hand, there is one of the silliest and least plausible plot devices in the whole canon of Victorian fiction, we get two "good deaths" so sentimental they will make you feel physically sick, and there are a couple of father-daughter relationships that are almost as bad. Members of the teaching profession might also be forgiven for feeling a bit hard done by: apparently Dickens had not said all the nasty things he wanted to about education in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and Hard Times, so he thought of a few more for this book...
    • 4/5
      This rivals Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities as my favorite Dickens, though now I want to reread Hard Times and Bleak House to make sure.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Wacky, moving, and generally delightful! This novel has sold me on Dickens.

      Similarly to The Mill on the Floss, this novel makes bitter that I cannot go find a Dickens fandom on the Internet. English class is good and all, but there's much less in the way of squeeing. I guess I will simply have to force everyone I know to read it....
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      Too long. Wikipedia descriptions of characters was useful
    • 4/5
      Have tried Dickens before and had a hard time getting through it, but this one was wonderful, I didn't want the story to end.
    • 4/5
      Dickens’ last complete novel. I think that the influence of Wilkie Collins’ success is evident. Dickens’ novel has some of the same elements – a mystery (more than one, actually) and unexpected twists and turns in the plot.It still has Dickens’ exceptional treatment of the characters. There are many scenes in which the reader can revel in the details of character and setting – the first scene in the bone articulator’s shop, for instance.But the part of the novel that exasperated me was the plot to test the moral character of Bella Wilfer carried out by Rokesmith and the Boffins. It borders on lying to the reader. It is an intentional deception, at least. Such a deception should be accompanied by clues and symbolism that allow the reader to have a chance at predicting where the plot will turn. I don’t think there are any clues here. The Harmon/Handford/Rokesmith complication is amply telegraphed to the reader – it does not come across as an unexpected plot surprise. But the deception to fool Bella also fools the reader and leads to a certain amount of disgust – at least for me.I really enjoyed the rest of the novel, though. I think it would be much more popular if the unfortunate deception had been altered by Dickens.
    • 4/5
      An excellent story, though it does drag a bit in parts. I saw the BBC TV production which I loved before reading the book and may have found the written version a little lackluster in terms of character development compared to the TV version. It is a very good story, likely with more elements of surprise if you haven't seen it first.
    • 4/5
      "Our Mutual Friend marks a happy return to the earlier manner of Dickens at the end of Dickens's life. One might call it a sort of Indian summer of his farce. Those who most truly love Dickens love the earlier Dickens; and any return to his farce must be welcomed, like a young man come back from the dead. In this book indeed he does not merely return to his farce; he returns in a manner to his vulgarity. It is the old democratic and even uneducated Dickens who is writing here. The very title is illiterate. Any priggish pupil teacher could tell Dickens that there is no such phrase in English as "our mutual friend." Any one could tell Dickens that "our mutual friend" means "our reciprocal friend," and that "our reciprocal friend" means nothing. If he had only had all the solemn advantages of academic learning (the absence of which in him was lamented by the Quarterly Review), he would have known better. He would have known that the correct phrase for a man known to two people is "our common friend." But if one calls one's friend a common friend, even that phrase is open to misunderstanding.

      I dwell with a gloomy pleasure on this mistake in the very title of the book because I, for one, am not pleased to see Dickens gradually absorbed by modern culture and good manners. Dickens, by class and genius, belonged to the kind of people who do talk about a "mutual friend"; and for that class there is a very great deal to be said. These two things can at least be said -- that this class does understand the meaning of the word "friend" and the meaning of the word "mutual." I know that for some long time before he had been slowly and subtly sucked into the whirlpool of the fashionable views of later England. I know that in Bleak House he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than he treats them in David Copperfield. I know that in A Tale of Two Cities, having come under the influence of Carlyle, he treats revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobbett he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in The Mystery of Edwin Drood he not only praised the Minor Canon of Cloisterham at the expense of the dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I know that he even took the last and most disastrous step in the modern English reaction. While blaming the old Cloisterham monks (who were democratic), he praised the old-world peace that they had left behind them -- an old-world peace which is simply one of the last amusements of aristocracy. The modern rich feel quite at home with the dead monks. They would have felt anything but comfortable with the live ones. I know, in short, how the simple democracy of Dickens was gradually dimmed by the decay and reaction of the middle of the nineteenth century. I know that he fell into some of the bad habits of aristocratic sentimentalism. I know that he used the word "gentleman" as meaning good man. But all this only adds to the unholy joy with which I realise that the very title of one of his best books was a vulgarism. It is pleasant to contemplate this last unconscious knock in the eye for the gentility with which Dickens was half impressed. Dickens is the old self-made man; you may take him or leave him. He has its disadvantages and its merits. No university man would have written the title; no university man could have written the book."

      Da introdução, de G. K. Chesterton
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      Our Mutual Friend is my new favorite book. This is the last novel Dickens completed before he died, and critics seem to agree it is his most mature. The river Thames plays such a major role in the novel that it is almost a character; it is the scene of many of the novel's major events, including five drownings and one resurrection. There is a dead miser, an expatriated son who apparently drowns in his way to claim his inheritance, and two beautiful women who are sought after by various deserving and undeserving characters. For the panorama of human vice and virtue, Dickens cannot be bested. I read this novel slowly, in part because I really didn't want it to end.
    • 5/5
      Dickens last completed novel still finds the author at the height of his powers, but Our Mutual Friend is a curiously disjointed affair. I selected this for our book club read and as I laboured through the first 150 pages, I feared that many of the club readers would not have gotten even this far. Perhaps my ear was not tuned to the author’s style; after all it was 15 years since I had read any of his novels and I had always thought you can’t rush Dickens you have to take him slowly, but suddenly it all started to click: new characters had been introduced at the start of part 2 and the plot started to unfold. I was gripped and remained so until the rather contrived ending 600 pages later..The novel starts with a powerhouse opening chapter; Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie are out on the river Thames in a rowboat. This is no pleasure cruise they are near the dock area and the half savage man is searching for corpses. The mud, dirt and grime are oppressive but they find a body, which could be the missing John Harmon. Mr Boffin old Harmon’s foreman inherits the fortune following the death of the son John and installs himself in the town house. His former place of business the Bower is home to three large mounds of dust which have also been left to him and which may contain further riches. The kindly Bowers take in Bella Wilfer who was mentioned in old Harmon’s will and sets her up as a lady. Silas Wegg an itinerant peddler is also befriended by Mr Boffin and is placed in the Bower as custodian of the dust heaps, he immediately starts plotting to embezzle his patron. A grand deception is played out on Bella, but she is not the only person to be deceived, as identities are concealed. There is murder, there is blackmail, there are rich society folk intent on squeezing the downtrodden poor for all they are worth. The need for money corrupts most people and even Mr Boffin starts to worship at the feet of mammon; becoming a miser, women are sorely tested as they attempt to take a step up in society, there are love stories; romantic love, obsessive love even homosexual love, but overarching everything is the love of money, and the central mystery as to who will gain control of the Harmon fortune and what role John Rokesmith; Boffins secretary will play in this drama.Avarice and the relentless drive to make money in a society that seems threadbare of human virtues is a major theme and it brought to my mind the well known English aphorism “where there’s muck there’s money”. A juxtaposition that is evident throughout: from Gaffer Hexam picking the pockets of the muddy corpses hauled from the river to Silas Wegg and Mr Venus picking away at the enormous dust mounds in Boffin’s Bower. Dickens continually refers to Boffin as The Golden Dustman. The dirt and the grime of the city where the dark and gloomy counting houses are situated is home to the evil young money man Fascination Fledgely. He delights in using the good Jew Riah as a tool for calling in his debts. Dickens is not content to merely portray the winners and losers on the financial merry-go-round, this is not enough, these are nasty vindictive people and he wants his readers to be appalled by their actions. If money is dirty then so is the city of London and the Thames that flows through it is ugly and full of menace. Dust detritus and gloom is everywhere, everything and everyone is covered by it:”The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and, as it sawed, the sawdust whirled around the saw-pit, every street was a saw-pit, and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding and choking him.That mysterious paper currency, which circulates in London when the wind blows, gyrated here there and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can it go? It hangs on every bush. Flutters in every tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders on every plot of grass, seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails. In Paris, where nothing is wasted, costly and luxurious city though it be, but where wonderful human ants creep out of holes and pick up every scrap, there is no such thing, There, it blows nothing but dust. There sharp eyes and sharp stomachs reap even the east wind, and get something out of it.The wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled. The shrubs wrung their many heads, bemoaning that they had been over-persuaded by the sun to bud, the young leaves pined; the sparrows repented of their early marriages, like men and women; the colours of the rainbow were discernible, not in floral spring, but in the faces of the people whom it nibbled and pinched. And ever the wind sawed and the sawdust whirled.” This is typical of the some of the writing especially in the first half of the book. Dickens takes much delight in repeating a word or phrase to emphasise his point. Money would appear to be the root of most of the evil in this book and Dickens lashes out at the unfettered capitalism that drove the society he saw around him. This is Dickens though and there are good people who will shine through the gloom. Our Mutual Friend has two people with the moral fibre to assert themselves in this rapacious world. Betty Higden and Lizzie Hexam two of the poorest characters in the novel are prepared to make sacrifices for what they believe is right. There are other characters that have good qualities but they are slightly bent out of shape by the world in which they live. I am thinking of John Rokesmith who continues to test the worth of his wife beyond reasonableness, Bella Wilfer and Jenny Wren good characters but both have curious father child relationships a sort of role reversal which feels very odd indeed. There are the two solicitors Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn that are content to drift through life and finally Riah who finds himself blackmailed by Fledgely.While Dickens is able to tie the greedy money men and women into his plot and uses their machinations to move the story along he is not so successful with his attack on the society of the nouveau riche. The second chapter after the excitement of the river scene with the Hexams takes the reader into the rather too stately world of the Veneerings. These are newly rich people who are buying their way into society. They gather around them like minded people who are selfish and snobbish in the extreme. Their conversation and their ideas are all based on how much people are worth and where they are placed in society. Mr Veneering manages to buy his way into parliament and while we can feel Dickens grievance about the corrupt way things are done, their actions add nothing to the development of the novel. Most of the characters around the Veneerings table remain a sideshow, but Dickens spends so much time with them in the first half of the novel that they are a drag on the story element. Dickens at this stage of his life had become bored with such society dinners and his wish to expose them for what they were threatens to sink his novel.I do hope that my fellow book club members were able to grit their teeth and plough on through the less than vibrant story telling of the first part of Our Mutual Friend as there are rich rewards to come. Some wonderful characters are introduced: Mr Sloppy with his buttons and his mangling, Jenny Wren the little doll maker whose stock phrase “I know his tricks and his manners” is aimed at all the men she meets. The aptly named Bradley Headstone obsessed with Lizzie Hexam, Rogue Riderhood, Betty Higden who is terrified of the workhouse, and of course The Golden Dustman. There are also some brilliantly written dramatic scenes; Lizzie Hexams refusal to marry Bradley, The recovery of Rogue Riderhood in the Six Jolly Fellowships and the attempted murder of Eugene Wrayburn. Dickens takes his readers into the world of greed corruption and desperate times in Victorian London. It is a dark world indeed almost becoming supernatural at times, but there are always people who can shine on through. Despite its imbalance in some parts this remains a great novel: there is so much to enjoy, a 4.5 star read
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Moody, dense look at Dickens's London characters. The city and river as wonderful characters.
    • 4/5
      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!
    • 4/5
      As an obsessed viewer of the television show "Lost," I had long been meaning to read Charles Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" thanks to the show's references to it. And I am ever so glad I finally did. I never knew Dickens good be this good!Dickens presents fabulous characters that lurk in the shadows of London's seedier sections and mixes in a few from the upper crust along with some social climbers too. He paints such vivid pictures of the characters that they draw you into the story very quickly. The plot is complex and sprawling and mainly revolves around the murder of John Harmon, a young man who was returning to London to collect and inheritance and a wife. There are plenty of side stories in the wide ranging novel, but it is all woven together skillfully enough that it keeps the story entertaining. The only thing I didn't like was the final plot turn involving the Boffins at the end of the book, which seemed rather contrived and sudden. But I had enjoyed the rest so much, that's really just a minor complaint.

    Book preview

    Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens

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