Our Mutual Friend was published in twenty monthly parts by Chapman and Hall from May 1864 to November 1865 and is Dickens’s last completed novel — The Mystery of Edwin Drood was left unfinished at his death in 1870. It is also his strangest and most symbolically charged: a novel built around dust heaps (enormous mounds of refuse that were valuable for their content of cinders, rags, bones, and other recyclable material), the Thames (as a source of wealth — the dredging of dead bodies for the valuables in their pockets — and death), and the question of what money does to the human soul.
The Novel
John Harmon, heir to a fortune built on dust heaps, is believed drowned in the Thames. He assumes a false identity to observe his intended bride, Bella Wilfer, before revealing himself. Meanwhile, the fortune passes to the Boffins — the old man who managed the dust heaps and his wife — who use it with a generosity that contrasts sharply with the novel’s gallery of fortune-hunters, swindlers, and social climbers.
The novel’s two great creations are Mr. Venus, the taxidermist who preserves bodies and sells articulated skeletons (“I’m the boy, sir, that has the misfortune to be born to the art of preserving”), and Eugene Wrayburn, a bored, cynical barrister whose near-murder and subsequent marriage to the working-class Lizzie Hexam constitutes the novel’s most powerful narrative line.
The Dust Heaps
The dust heaps — enormous mounds of refuse accumulated over decades — were real features of Victorian London. They were valuable: contractors sifted them for cinders (sold for brick-making), bones (ground into fertiliser), rags (sold to paper mills), and coins or jewellery. The fortune built on dust is Dickens’s most powerful metaphor for the relationship between wealth and waste: all money, the novel implies, is ultimately derived from what other people throw away.
Eliot and the Modernists
T.S. Eliot quoted Our Mutual Friend in the notes to The Waste Land (1922), and the connection is not accidental. The novel’s Thames — choked with refuse, yielding up drowned bodies, simultaneously a source of life and death — anticipates Eliot’s waste-land imagery directly. Modern critics have argued that Our Mutual Friend is Dickens’s most modernist novel: its fragmented structure, its symbolic density, and its refusal of conventional resolution all look forward to the experiments of the twentieth century.
Collecting Our Mutual Friend
First edition in parts (Chapman and Hall, London, 1864–1865): Twenty monthly parts in green wrappers. Illustrated by Marcus Stone with 40 plates.
Approximate market values:
- Complete in original parts, fine: $5,000–$15,000
- Very good: $2,000–$5,000
- First edition in book form (2 vols., 1865): $1,500–$4,000
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Steady appreciation.
Projected values (2026–2036): Fine sets in parts should reach $15,000–$30,000.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is this Dickens’s “last completed novel”? Dickens died on June 9, 1870, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood half-finished. Our Mutual Friend, completed in 1865, was his final complete work. The five years between its completion and his death were occupied by exhausting reading tours that contributed to his fatal stroke.
Is this a good place to start with Dickens? Not for beginners — it is his most complex and least immediately accessible novel. But for readers who already appreciate Dickens, it is often the novel they come to love most: richer, stranger, and more symbolically resonant than the better-known works.