Charles Dickens Later Novels

About Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) was Charles Dickens's last completed novel and his darkest — a satire of Victorian money-worship organized around the inheritance of a dust-heap fortune. Henry James called it the beginning of modern English fiction, and it is the Dickens novel that most directly anticipates the moral and formal concerns of the twentieth-century novel. For readers who have exhausted the earlier Dickens, it is the final revelation of what he could do at full stretch.