Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens

Our Mutual Friend was Charles Dickens’ last completed novel, written between 1864-1865. Overwork and exhaustion would contribute to his early death at the age of 58, while he was a few hundred pages into writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

It’s often commented that Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’ most mature and sophisticated work. This is indisputable. Over an extraordinary 800 pages, Dickens exhibits consummate storytelling, weaving together a rich and complex plot, like a beautifully intricate spider’s web. You often marvel at how on earth it’s done. Into this story a huge cast of all sorts of characters is set loose, capturing the broad range of human qualities, from the noble to the the utterly villianous.

The plot all centres around money, a subject which often gets a satiric treatment. The novel opens with a body being found in the River Thames. The dead man is identified as being John Harmon, recently returned to claim a significant inheritance. His misanthropic father had made his fortune from recycling trash, and upon his death, his will stipulated that John could only claim the inheritance if he married the beautiful yet mercenary Bella Wilfer, someone he had never yet met.

The heir found dead in the Thames, the inheritances move to Harmon senior’s two employees, the Boffins. Nicodemus (Noddy) and his wife Henrietta are working-class people, simple and unaffected. When they inherit the money, they try to spread it around. They virtually adopt Bella Wilfer, having her move in with them. Their feeling is that Bella has a right to some of the inheritance. Despite the Boffins’ good hearted intentions, many complications ensue. A cast of greedy, grasping and unscrupulous chancers and adventurers try grab a slice of the Boffins’ fortune.

There is much piercingly sharp comedy in Our Mutual Friend. Noddy Boffin’s obsession with collecting books on history’s great misers is hilarious. Another brilliant comic invention is the mysterious mounds of rubbish kept on the Harmon property and believed to contain secret fortunes. Dickens has great fun in equating money with trash, and even excrement. Beyond the satire, however, Our Mutual Friend portrays a very dark, brooding, moody, even dreamlike world. It infects the reader with its relentless, eerie strangeness. It unsettles and unnerves. Dickens’ last novel is a challenging masterpiece, but well worth the effort.