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Title details for Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens - Available

Our Mutual Friend

by Charles Dickens
ebook
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Our Mutual Friend is a satiric masterpiece about money. The last novel Dickens completed, and perhaps his most angry, it sounds all the great themes of his later work: the innocence and venality of the aspiring poor, the hollow pretensions of the nouveau riche, the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt everyone it touches. Among those caught up in the ruthless forces of change in Dickens's London are the archetypal innocent Noddy Boffin, who 'inherits' a dustheap where the trash of the rich is thrown; Silas Wegg, a grotesque, one-legged man with unlimited fantasies of grandeur and power; Mr. Veneering, Member of Parliament, whose house, furnishings, servants, carriage, and baby are all 'bran-new'; and Alfred and Sophronia Lammle, who marry one another because each wrongly believes the other is rich. The social themes of Our Mutual Friend—having to do with the treatment of the poor, education, representative government, even the inheritance laws—are informed and brought into coherence by the underlying presence of the Thames, signifying the perpetual flow of life into death, and acting as agent of retribution and regeneration too, as a kind of river god in fact, in a novel in which no other god is very present.
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Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

Kindle Book

  • Release date: November 1, 2000

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9780679641353
  • Release date: November 1, 2000

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9780679641353
  • File size: 1055 KB
  • Release date: November 1, 2000
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Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Classic Literature Fiction Literature

Languages

English

Levels

Lexile® Measure:1090
Text Difficulty:7-9

Our Mutual Friend is a satiric masterpiece about money. The last novel Dickens completed, and perhaps his most angry, it sounds all the great themes of his later work: the innocence and venality of the aspiring poor, the hollow pretensions of the nouveau riche, the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt everyone it touches. Among those caught up in the ruthless forces of change in Dickens's London are the archetypal innocent Noddy Boffin, who 'inherits' a dustheap where the trash of the rich is thrown; Silas Wegg, a grotesque, one-legged man with unlimited fantasies of grandeur and power; Mr. Veneering, Member of Parliament, whose house, furnishings, servants, carriage, and baby are all 'bran-new'; and Alfred and Sophronia Lammle, who marry one another because each wrongly believes the other is rich. The social themes of Our Mutual Friend—having to do with the treatment of the poor, education, representative government, even the inheritance laws—are informed and brought into coherence by the underlying presence of the Thames, signifying the perpetual flow of life into death, and acting as agent of retribution and regeneration too, as a kind of river god in fact, in a novel in which no other god is very present.
Expand title description text
Classic Literature Fiction Literature
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