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