Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens

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About Book

Amazon.com
Our Mutual Friend was the last novel Charles Dickens completed and is, arguably, his darkest and most complex. The basic plot is vintage Dickens: an inheritance up for grabs, a murder, a rocky romance or two, plenty of skullduggery, and a host of unforgettable secondary characters. But in this final outing the author's heroes are more flawed, his villains more sympathetic, and the story as a whole more harrowing and less sentimental. The mood is set in the opening scene in which a riverman, Gaffer Hexam, and his daughter Lizzie troll the Thames searching for drowned men whose pockets Gaffer will rifle before turning the body over to the authorities. On this particular night Gaffer finds a corpse that is later identified as that of John Harmon, who was returning from abroad to claim a large fortune when he was apparently murdered and thrown into the river.

Harmon's death is the catalyst for everything else that happens in the novel. It seems the fortune was left to the young man on the condition that he marry a girl he'd never met, Bella Wilfer. His death, however, brings a new heir onto the scene, Nicodemus Boffin, the kind-hearted but low-born assistant to Harmon's father. Boffin and his wife adopt young Bella, who is determined to marry money, and also hire a mysterious young secretary, John Rokesmith, who takes an uncommon interest in their ward. Not content with just one plot, Dickens throws in a secondary love story featuring the riverman's daughter, Lizzie Hexam; a dissolute young upper-class lawyer, Eugene Wrayburn; and his rival, the headmaster Bradley Headstone. Dark as the novel is, Dickens is careful to leaven it with secondary characters who are as funny as they are menacing--blackmailing Silas Wegg and his accomplice Mr. Venus, the avaricious Lammles, and self-centered Charlie Hexam. Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens's most satisfying novels, and a fitting denouement to his prolific career. --Alix Wilber

From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up-With a cast of characters that covers the whole spectrum of London life, Dickens weaves a tapestry of tales that are by turn funny, moving and tragic.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
[Editor's Note--The following is a combined review with DAVID COPPERFIELD, GHOST STORIES, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, HARD TIMES, MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD, NICHOLAS NICKLEBY, OLIVER TWIST, THE PICKWICK PAPERS, and A TALE OF TWO CITIES.]--New Millennium presents the distinguished Academy Award winner Paul Scofield interpreting abridgments of the novels and stories of Charles Dickens. These are excellent readings, sonorous and compelling. However, they lack the verve and character of the old Victorian qualities that have been so wonderfully captured on cassette by Martin Jarvis and Miriam Margolyes, among others. And while few authors benefit more from pruning than the paid-by-the-word Dickens, some of these cuttings are far too drastic. In addition, hurried post-production is evident in numerous audible edits, frequent mouth noises, and occasional overlapping of announcer and narrator. Y.R. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
“The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius.” —George Orwell

Review
?The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius.? ?George Orwell

Book Description
A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap’s expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights “Noddy” Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes “the Golden Dustman.” Charles Dickens’s last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens’s most complex—and satisfying—novels.

Download Description
Charles Dickens's last completed novel tells the story of a young man who must marry a stranger in order to win his inheritance. Wanting to learn the lady's nature, John Harmon fakes his own death and takes on a new identity. As the complexities of the deceit are revealed, Dickens gives us his most profoundly cynical, yet brilliantly funny, insight into the corruption of wealth on human nature. 40 illustrations.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Last completed novel by Charles Dickens, published serially in 1864-65 and in book form in 1865. Sometimes compared to Bleak House because of its subject matter, Our Mutual Friend is essentially a critique of Victorian monetary and class values. London is portrayed as grimmer than ever before, and the corruption, complacency, and superficiality of "respectable" society are fiercely attacked. The novel is also notable owing to Dickens' sympathetic portrayal of a Jewish character named Riah, which some critics have seen as Dickens' attempt to atone for the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist.

From the Publisher
This book is in Electronic Paperback Format. If you view this book on any of the computer systems below, it will look like a book. Simple to run, no program to install. Just put the CD in your CDROM drive and start reading. The simple easy to use interface is child tested at pre-school levels.

Windows 3.11, Windows/95, Windows/98, OS/2 and MacIntosh and Linux with Windows Emulation.

Includes Quiet Vision's Dynamic Index. the abilty to build a index for any set of characters or words.

From the Inside Flap
A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap's expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights "Noddy" Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes "the Golden Dustman." Charles Dickens's last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens's most complex—and satisfying—novels.

From the Back Cover
“The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius.” —George Orwell

About the Author
Richard T. Gaughan received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. from Brown University. He is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas.

Comments

Oliver Twist should not be sold anywhere in its original form. It promotes prejudice against Jewish people in its constant reference to Fagin as "the Jew". It should especially not be used as a school reading book for that reason, unless an abridged version of the book which does not refer to Fagin as "the Jew" is available. The fact that teachers and school systems are distributing and presenting this book as fine literature is a disgrace and is evidence that people are still blatantly antisemitic or at least overtly and blatantly insensitive to the results of distributing such a text which is so full of overt antisemitic references and sentiments. An edited/abridged version of this text would be acceptably portrayed as literature, but otherwise, if you are a teacher providing students with this anti-semitic material, then you are promoting antisemitic feelings among your young, impressionable students and putting your stamp of moral approval on it - saying that that type of sentiment and public expression is perfectly okay.

Mr. Humane, 2009-01-09 04:12:44

When someone objects to a book because of a single phrase that they find offensive to a race or class of people, and cry out for it to be changed or have the book censored from school reading lists, I fear that that person totally misunderstands the value and purpose of literature and the teaching thereof. Literature is writing that appeals to multiple generations, often over hundreds or even thousands of years, because it tells us something universal about human nature, as well as about the times in which it was written--not because it reflects all of the values of the reader and the times in which that reader lives. Nothing we do today can change the fact of PAST discrimination and prejudice, and only by reading about it and its effects can we avoid falling into the same fallacies in the present and future; removing references to it in novels that have withstood the test of time would be a disservice to the very people such censorship is meant to benefit. (Does teaching that the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews teach us to hate Germans? No. It only helps us see the evil of the thinking that led to the Holocaust.) As with Huck Finn, Oliver Twist and other Dickens novels do not promote the behaviors they describe--in fact, in many cases quite the opposite, they did much to expose the horrors and injustices of the Industrial Age in England. They reflect the realities of the time in which they were written; and any teachers worthy of the name--including parents--know that those passages we now find distasteful, rather than being expunged, should be discussed as a reflection of past mores and how society has changed. I know of no one who would take them as a prescription for current behavior; reading that an unpleasant character is called "the Jew" in a book written nearly two hundred years ago does not in any way induce a person to become antisemitic, nor does assigning to students a book containing that reference make a teacher antisemitic. (And how do you know Dickens did not actually experience such a person in his life who was, in fact, a Jew, and is describing an individual, not a type? Are you claiming that no Jew ever engaged in criminal behavior?) Altering the text to fit today's social norms would be small-minded, not to mention destructive of the fabric of the novel. If you object to Dickens because he referred to one criminal character as â��the Jewâ�� then you certainly object to Shakespeare--and anyone who cannot read Shakespeare without clamoring for censorship of his "non-PC" passages--and they are many--must have slept through his own literature classes in school.

R Byrne, Sunnyvale, CA, 2010-04-01 22:08:56

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