Charles Dickens - Our Mutual Friend - 1865

"Our Mutual Friend" by Charles Dickens - Chapman & Hall, London - 1865 first UK edition (with postscript at rear of Vol II) - complete in 2 volumes - 18cmx15cm - condition: rebound in half leather bindings, retaining original boards, rubbing and wear to boards and spines, all 40 plates by Marcus Stone present, page foxing and some soiling, corner of title page of Vol II cut.

Our Mutual Friend, published in 1864–1865, is the fourteenth and final novel completed by English author Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting the book's character Bella Wilfer, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life".[1]

Most reviewers in the 1860s continued to praise Dickens's skill as a writer in general, but did not review this novel in detail. Some found the plot both too complex and not well laid out.[2] The Times of London found the first few chapters did not draw the reader into the characters. In the 20th century, however, reviewers began to find much to approve in the later novels of Dickens, including Our Mutual Friend.[3] In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some reviewers suggested that Dickens was, in fact, experimenting with structure,[4][5] and that the characters considered somewhat flat and not recognized by the contemporary reviewers[6] were meant rather to be true representations of the Victorian working class and the key to understanding the structure of the society depicted by Dickens in the novel