Onze Wederzijdsche Vriend

Our Mutual Friend is Dickens at his darkest and most ambitious. The novel opens with a body pulled from the Thames - John Harmon, recently returned to claim his inheritance, drowned on the very eve of his engagement to Bella Wilfer. The fortune remains, waiting for him still, bound by his father's condition: he must marry Bella, a young woman who has been taught that money is the only measure of a man's worth. What unfolds is a masterful web of deception, as Harmon assumes a false identity to test Bella's heart and observe the society that now courts his wealth. Around them swirls a cast of unforgettable grotesques: the Veneerings, who purchase their respectability; the Pompous Podsnaps; the criminal Hexam and his clever sister. Dickens paints a world where the mud of the Thames seems to stain every transaction, every relationship, every soul. This is a novel about what money makes of people and what people will do for money - and it remains devastatingly relevant.