"Our Mutual Friend" (1865), by Charles Dickens

This last complete novel of Charles Dickens, his fourteenth, has a very strong theme, one of his best and most timeless: the Thames river that dominates the lives of those who work on and beside and near it and which symbolises the force and power and also violence of the current of life itself, a theme powerfully developed from the dramatic opening scene right through the book.

The novel has the full 800+ page-length that Dickens seems to have felt best at ease with [1] and within which framework he had the scope to develop his genius for the studies of the multiple secondary characters that are his special trademark. Notably here with perhaps the most remarkable, credible and admirable secondary character of all his œuvre, the quite unforgettable crippled 12-year-old doll-dressmaker Jenny Wren who so effectively and energetically takes charge of her totally inadequate father.

A particularity of Our Mutual Friend is that another of its main secondary characters is a Jewish moneylender with a kind heart and the very best of intentions, a deliberate effort by Dickens to make up for the negative image of a bad Jewish exploiter that he had created in the person of Fagin in his early success Oliver Twist.

With the full set of the 40 original wood-engravings by Frank Stone [2] that appeared in the original publication in illustrated periodicals over a 19-month period from May 1864 to November 1865 [3].

(326,500 words)

An e-book, complete with the original illustrations, is available for downloading below.

Our Mutual Friend (e-book)