Our Mutual Friend.

A body is pulled from the Thames, an inheritance hangs on the question of whose it is, and the muddy river carries its secrets through every layer of a London obsessed with money.

What it's about

A fortune built on dust heaps is to pass to a young heir on condition that he marry a woman he has never met, but when a corpse is fished from the river and identified as his, the inheritance and everyone's fate are thrown into doubt. Charles Dickens weaves an intricate web from there, drawing together a mercenary young couple, a devoted riverside girl, a sinister schoolmaster, a one-legged balladmonger and the good-hearted Boffins who suddenly find themselves rich. Concealed identities and quiet manipulations ripple outward through a densely peopled city.

Themes

Money and its corrupting power stand at the centre, symbolised by the dust heaps from which the fortune springs. Dickens probes greed, social climbing and the way wealth deforms love and self, while the river runs through the book as an image of death, cleansing and rebirth. Questions of true and false identity are everywhere.

Why it still matters

Darker and more ironic than his earlier work, this last completed novel shows Dickens at the height of his craft, his London a vast and living organism. Its unflinching look at how money warps a society speaks with uncomfortable clarity to our own age.

Who it's for

Readers ready for late, ambitious Dickens, rich in atmosphere and moral complexity. Rewarding for those who already love his work and want its most sophisticated expression, and for anyone drawn to the shadowed side of Victorian London.