Our Mutual Friend - Softcover

Dickens, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140430601 ISBN 13: 9780140430608

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1971

Synopsis

Charles Dickens's last completed novel tells the story of a young man who must marry a stranger in order to win his inheritance. Wanting to learn the lady's nature, John Harmon fakes his own death and takes on a new identity. As the complexities of the deceit are revealed, Dickens gives us his most profoundly cynical, yet brilliantly funny, insight into the corruption of wealth on human nature. 40 illustrations.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Landport, Portsea, England. He died in Kent on June 9, 1870. The second of eight children of a family continually plagued by debt, the young Dickens came to know not only hunger and privation,but also the horror of the infamous debtors’ prison and the evils of child labor. A turn of fortune in the shape of a legacy brought release from the nightmare of prison and “slave” factories and afforded Dickens the opportunity of two years’ formal schooling at Wellington House Academy. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his Sketches by Boz (1836) and The Pickwick Papers (1837) brought him the amazing and instant success that was to be his for the remainder of his life. In later years, the pressure of serial writing, editorial duties, lectures, and social commitments led to his separation from Catherine Hogarth after twenty-three years of marriage. It also hastened his death at the age of fifty-eight, when he was characteristically engaged in a multitude of work.

Stephen Gill is a professor of English literature at Oxford University, a fellow of Lincoln College, and editor of Selected Poems by William Wordsworth

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 1971
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140430601
• ISBN 13: 9780140430608
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 912
• Editor: Gill Stephen