Recommendations
Books Like Our Mutual Friend
Best books to read after Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Our Mutual Friend is Dickens's darkest and most formally experimental novel — a satire of Victorian money-worship so comprehensive that Henry James called it the beginning of modern English fiction. If the novel's portrait of a society organized around the pursuit of wealth moved you, these books share its conviction that money corrupts everything it touches and its sense of the novel as the appropriate instrument for exposing what society prefers not to see.
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Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
The companion piece to Our Mutual Friend and typically read before it — another panoramic social satire organized around a central symbolic target (the Court of Chancery; the dust-heap economy), with the same double narrative mode and the same cast of representatives from every social class; the natural predecessor and companion to Dickens's final novel
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The Wings of the Dove
by Henry James
James called Our Mutual Friend the beginning of modern English fiction, and The Wings of the Dove — with its portrait of people maneuvering around a dying heiress's fortune, its symbolic use of Venice, and its complex moral structure — is the most direct heir to the themes Dickens introduced there; where Dickens's satire is panoramic and theatrical, James's is intimate and psychological
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The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's satire of financial fraud published a decade after Our Mutual Friend treats the same Victorian obsession with money from a cooler, more analytical perspective; where Dickens's Veneerings are comic grotesques, Trollope's Melmotte is a more psychologically complex study of the society that creates and then destroys him
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald's portrait of the money-obsessed world of the 1920s East Egg is the most famous American heir to the theme of Our Mutual Friend: what does the pursuit of wealth do to the human beings who pursue it? The green light at the end of Daisy's dock is a direct descendant of Dickens's dust-heap — both are symbolic of the corrupt dreams that money enables
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Little Dorrit
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's immediately preceding novel — the Circumlocution Office satire, the Marshalsea prison, the financial speculation plot — is the essential companion to Our Mutual Friend in its portrait of the institutional and economic structures that corrupt individuals; both novels are organized around the damage done by systems that exist to serve money rather than people
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The great Victorian novel about what people do with their lives when they want more than their world will give them — where Dickens's characters in Our Mutual Friend are defined by their relationship to money, Eliot's are defined by their relationship to their own ambitions and ideals; reading them together gives the fullest picture of what the Victorian novel was doing at its most serious
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Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Mann's novel about the decline of a Lübeck merchant family over four generations — the German parallel to Our Mutual Friend in its portrait of what happens when a society organized around commerce loses the capacity to believe in anything else; both are organized around inheritance and the question of what the next generation does with what it receives
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Dombey and Son
by Charles Dickens
The Dickens novel that most directly anticipates Our Mutual Friend in its portrait of a man whose commercial worldview destroys his capacity for human connection; where Our Mutual Friend is panoramic and satirical, Dombey and Son is more focused on the psychology of its central character, making it the natural companion to Dickens's final completed novel
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