Our Mutual Friend

First published in 1864-1865, this novel opens with a body in the Thames and the question of who inherits the Harmon dust-heap fortune. John Harmon is supposed drowned; Bella Wilfer has been willed as the heir's bride; the waterman Gaffer Hexam and the one-legged ballad-seller Silas Wegg move along the river and the mounds of refuse. The Boffins, who rise from servants to inheritors, and the Veneerings' new-money dinner table supply a second social world. The book is a late Dickens novel about money, waste, and assumed identity in London, where the river and the dust heaps set the terms of belonging.

Bound in cream cloth printed with a montage of Keeping’s illustrations from the text, with dark red spine-label. Dark red endleaves. Dark red slipcase, with Dickens’s signature in gold.