Our Mutual Friend

Description

Dickens' last completed novel portraying a dark, macabre London 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 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.

Charles Dickens (1812-70) was a political reporter and journalist whose popularity was established by the phenomenal success of his PICKWICK PAPERS. He held the public imagination over a period of more than thirty years. Adrian Poole is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

'The great poet of the city. He was created by London' Peter AckroydAdrian 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'.