Our Mutual Friend

by Charles Dickens

Category: Fiction

Status: Available

Source: Public Domain — Project Gutenberg

About This Book

"Our Mutual Friend" by Charles Dickens is a novel published in 1864–1865. Dickens's final completed work centers on money and its power to shape lives. When heir John Harmon is presumed dead, beautiful Bella Wilfer loses her arranged marriage and fortune. Meanwhile, the illiterate Boffins suddenly inherit wealth, and the Hexam siblings struggle to escape poverty. Through interconnected lives spanning London's social classes, Dickens delivers savage satire and sharp social analysis, exploring themes of identity, greed, and moral transformation in Victorian society. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

About the Author

English · 1812–1870

One of the most loved English writers of all time. His stories show the hard lives of poor people in Victorian London.

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Preview

OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

Charles Dickens

CONTENTS

Book the First—THE CUP AND THE LIP

Book the Second—BIRDS OF A FEATHER

Book the Third—A LONG LANE

Book the Fourth—A TURNING

POSTSCRIPT, IN LIEU OF PREFACE

BOOK THE FIRST — THE CUP AND THE LIP

Chapter 1

ON THE LOOK OUT

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, su

... (scroll to read more)

About This Edition

This edition of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens is catalogued on Libreya under Fiction and runs approximately 324,756 words — about 1624 minutes of reading at an average pace. It is sourced from Project Gutenberg, the world's oldest digital library of public domain literature, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and every text on Libreya has been verified to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. You can view the original Project Gutenberg edition here.

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About Classic Fiction

Classic fiction represents the highest achievements of literary imagination. The novels in this genre have shaped how generations of readers understand human nature, society, and the fundamental questions of existence. Reading 19th and early 20th-century novels offers far more than historical interest: these stories explore love, ambition, morality, and identity with an insight that remains startlingly relevant today. Authors like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Hardy, and Dickens wrote for readers much like us — people trying to make sense of a complicated world — and their observations on class, relationships, power, and conscience carry across centuries with barely diminished force. Classic fiction is also where the novel as an art form reached some of its greatest heights: innovative narrative structures, deeply realized characters, and prose styles that reward slow, attentive reading. These are not museum pieces. They are living works that continue to be discussed, adapted, and argued over because they capture something essential and enduring about human experience.