Our Mutual Friend
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.
Author: Charles Dickens
Format: Paperback, 928 pages, 129mm x 198mm, 628 g
Published: 1997, Penguin Books Ltd, United Kingdom
Genre: General & Literary Fiction
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.