Our Mutual Friend

A body is pulled from the Thames and named as John Harmon, the heir who was to inherit a miser’s fortune — built out of vast heaps of city dust — on the condition that he marry a girl he has never met. With the heir presumed drowned, the money passes to the kindly Boffins, the old miser’s servants, while a stranger with a hidden name moves quietly among the living to learn who can be trusted and what he is truly worth.

Around that secret turn a dozen lives: the mercenary Bella Wilfer, schooled out of her hunger for money; the river-girl Lizzie Hexam and the two men who love her — the idle gentleman Eugene Wrayburn and the obsessive schoolmaster Bradley Headstone; the bran-new Veneerings and their glittering, empty “Society”; and the one-legged schemer Silas Wegg, clawing toward the dust-heaps and the fortune buried in them.

Serialized from 1864 to 1865, Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’s great late meditation on money as refuse and worth as something money cannot measure — held together by two unforgettable symbols, the drowning river and the mounds of dust, and closed by the famous Postscript in which Dickens recalls surviving the Staplehurst railway crash with the manuscript in his coat. Once thought too dark, it is now ranked among his finest novels.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition and lasting power, a biographical note on Dickens, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.