Our Mutual Friend - by Charles Dickens (Hardcover)

About the Book

A magnificent novel about love, greed and hidden identity with an introduction by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley.

Book Synopsis

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This edition has an introduction by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley and original illustrations by Marcus Stone.

A dead body is dredged from the Thames, presumed to be the son of wealthy miser John Harmon, in Dickens' final novel, Our Mutual Friend.

John Harmon made his fortune collecting 'dust', and on his death his estranged son is due to inherit his wealth on the condition that he marry Bella Wilfer, a young woman who he has never even met. But when his son is presumed dead, John's riches pass to his servants Mr and Mrs Boffin and they in turn take Bella into their own home. They hire a secretive young man, John Rokesmith, to be Mr Boffin's secretary - but what is this man's real identity and what is his interest in Bella?

In his last complete novel with its expansive cast of characters and interweaving plots, Dickens exposes the corrupting power of money.

About the Author

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 near Portsmouth, where his father worked as a clerk. Living in London in 1824, Dickens was sent by his family to work in a blacking-warehouse, and his father was arrested and imprisoned for debt. Fortunes improved and Dickens returned to school, eventually becoming a parliamentary reporter. His first piece of fiction was published by a magazine in December 1832, and by 1836 he had begun his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. He focused his career on writing, completing fourteen highly successful novels including Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and Bleak House, as well as penning journalism, shorter fiction and travel books. He died in 1870.