Book description
"Yours is a 'spectable calling. To save your 'spectability,
it's worth your while to pawn every article of clothes you've got,
sell every stick in your house, and beg and borrow every penny you
can get trusted with. When you've done that and handed over, I'll
leave you. Not afore"
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.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
Charles Dickens (1812-70) had his first, astounding success with
his first novel The Pickwick Papers and never looked back. In
an extraordinarily full life he wrote, campaigned and spoke on a huge
range of issues, and was involved in many of the key aspects of
Victorian life, by turns cajoling, moving and irritating. He completed
fourteen full-length novels and volume after volume of journalism.
Our Mutual Friend was his last finished novel.
The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas
Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge,
A Christmas Carol, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and
Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard
Times, Litte Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great
Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood are also
published in the Penguin English Library.
