In the Library
Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens, 1865
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 24 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 67
- Length
- Length 324k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Bleak House does the same thing with a will and a fog-choked London, but trades the Thames for a lawsuit that swallows every character who touches it.
£1.99
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White does the same thing with disguise and stolen identity, but turns its false name into a woman fighting to prove she still exists.
£1.99
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair does the same thing with money and social climbing, but follows a heroine who claws her way up instead of one waiting to be handed a fortune.
£1.99
About the book
A boat works the Thames at low tide, the father at the oars and the daughter peering into the dark water for the bodies of the drowned that will pay their next meal. Charles Dickens published this last completed novel in monthly installments across 1864 and 1865, and built it around a will, a faked death, a corpse misidentified, a fortune in dust heaps. John Harmon returns from abroad under a false name to watch the woman he is supposed to marry. Rogue Riderhood and Bradley Headstone stalk the river with violence in their pockets, and Mr. Boffin, the Golden Dustman, presides over the whole comedy of inheritance. The Thames runs through every page, swallowing some, returning others, indifferent.