Our Mutual Friend
1865
Money. That's the engine of this dark, glittering masterpiece. When John Harmon's body surfaces in the Thames, his inheritance passes to the Boffins, a humble couple suddenly drowning in gold. But the dead man's money carries a curse: it turns Boffin cruel, Bella mercenary, and every soul who touches it into something uglier than before. Dickens spins his final novel around a dust-heap, literally the trash the rich throw away, and uses it to expose the rot at the heart of Victorian society. The Thames itself becomes a character, dark and greedy, yielding up bodies and secrets with equal indifference. His cast is vast and vicious: the toad-like Silas Wegg scheming for a fortune, the beautiful Lizzie Hexam refusing to sell her honesty, the gentleman Eugene Wrayburner playing dangerous games with a woman's reputation. This is Dickens unbound: his satire sharper than ever, his social critique more savage, his psychological insight more unsettling than in any earlier work. For readers who want their classics dark, complex, and willing to name what money makes of us.
