Reading Order
Our Mutual FriendCharles Dickens Later Novels Reading Order
Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) was his last completed novel and his darkest — a satire of Victorian money-worship organized around the inheritance of a dust-heap fortune and the question of what wealth does to the people who pursue it. 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 twentieth-century fiction.
Where to start
Our Mutual Friend
Complete Our Mutual Friend Book List
- 1Buy
Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens·1865·Start here — Dickens's last completed novel and his most formally experimental; the satire of Victorian money-worship and the romance plots centered on the inheritance of a dust-heap fortune mark a new direction in his art. - 2Buy
Bleak House
Charles Dickens·1853·The companion piece to Our Mutual Friend — both are panoramic social satires organized around a specific institution (Chancery; the dust-heap economy) and told with Dickens's full range of character and comedy; Bleak House is typically read before Our Mutual Friend. - 3Buy
The Way We Live Now
Anthony Trollope·1875·Trollope's satire of financial fraud published a decade after Our Mutual Friend treats the same theme — what money does to society — from a cooler, more analytical perspective; the essential Victorian counterpart to Dickens's darkest social satire. - 4Buy
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James·1902·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 — is the most direct heir to the themes Dickens introduced there; the comparison shows how James refined what Dickens discovered. - 5Buy
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens·1861·Dickens's most psychologically sophisticated novel and the natural companion to Our Mutual Friend in its portrait of the moral damage done by money, expectations, and class; the psychological interiority of Pip's first-person narration offers a contrast to the third-person omniscience of Our Mutual Friend.
Our Mutual Friend — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Our Mutual Friend the best Dickens novel?
Some very serious critics argue yes — G.K. Chesterton, Henry James, and Edmund Wilson among them. It is certainly his most formally experimental and his darkest in its moral vision of what money does to human beings. However, it is not typically recommended as a first Dickens: the plot is labyrinthine, the opening section is difficult, and the satirical mode is so relentless that readers who come to it without the warmer Dickens novels behind them can find it exhausting. Great Expectations or David Copperfield are better starting points; Our Mutual Friend rewards readers who already know what Dickens can do.
What is Our Mutual Friend about?
The novel centers on the fortune of the dust-heap magnate John Harmon, who dies leaving his estate to his son John on the condition that he marry a woman he has never met — Bella Wilfer. When John Harmon is apparently drowned before claiming his inheritance, the money passes to the Boffins, Harmon's good-natured former servants, and a man named Rokesmith appears who is not quite what he seems. Around this plot Dickens organizes a panoramic satire of Victorian money-worship: the Veneerings, who buy their social position; Bradley Headstone, the educated working-class man destroyed by social aspiration; the Lammles, who marry each other for money neither of them has.
Why did Henry James praise Our Mutual Friend?
James praised it as the beginning of something new in English fiction — not because it was the best Dickens (James had severe reservations about Dickens's sentimentality and his plotting), but because in Our Mutual Friend Dickens was attempting to organize a complex moral vision through a formal structure that went beyond mere plotting; the attempt to use the dust-heap motif as a symbol running through the whole novel anticipated the kind of structural symbolism that James himself would develop in The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl.
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