Our Mutual Friend centres on an inheritance - Old Harmons profitable dust heaps - and its legatees young John Harmon presumed drowned when a body is pulled out of the River Thames and kindly dustman Mr Boffin to whom the fortune defaults. With brilliant satire Dickens portrays a dark macabre London inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg. The novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames and the corrupting power of money.
