Our Mutual Friend

One of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’

‘The great poet of the city. He was created by London’ Peter Ackroyd

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 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. Dickens’s last completed novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and of the corrupting power of money.

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Adrian Poole