Our Mutual Friend

A boatman, Gaffer Hexam, and his daughter Lizzie row on the Thames at night searching for drowned bodies, and they find one identified as John Harmon, heir to a fortune made from London's mountains of rubbish. Harmon was to inherit on condition of marrying Bella Wilfer, a pretty, money-minded girl he had never met. With him apparently dead, the money goes to the kind, simple dustman Mr Boffin and his wife, who take Bella into their home, while a reserved young man named John Rokesmith becomes Boffin's secretary.

Dickens's last completed novel, published in monthly parts in 1864 and 1865, is a dark, rich satire of a society obsessed with money, full of memorable characters such as the social-climbing Veneerings and Jenny Wren, the doll's dressmaker. While writing it Dickens survived a terrible railway crash at Staplehurst, with part of the manuscript in his coat. See his life.

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.

Published in instalments, books such as A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol mixed comedy and social protest.