Our Mutual Friend

A body is pulled from the Thames, identified as John Harmon, the estranged son and heir to a fortune built on dust — literal heaps of London's refuse, sifted for anything worth salvaging. His father's will leaves it all to him on one condition: he must marry Bella Wilfer, a woman he has never met. Since Harmon is presumed dead before the novel has properly started, the money passes instead to his father's illiterate, warm-hearted servants, Mr and Mrs Boffin, who take Bella in — while a lodger calling himself John Rokesmith quietly moves into their house. Around this inheritance plot Dickens builds one of his widest casts: Lizzie Hexam, who fishes bodies from the river with her father for the reward money; the schoolmaster Bradley Headstone, whose jealousy over her curdles into something violent; and the wooden-legged Silas Wegg, who sets about blackmailing the Boffins the moment he suspects what they're sitting on.

It was Dickens' last completed novel, serialised in nineteen monthly parts from May 1864 to November 1865 and published complete that year. His own postscript, dated 2 September 1865, describes surviving the Staplehurst rail crash that June while carrying an unfinished chapter's manuscript out of the wreckage — and closes, half in earnest, on how near he came that day to "parting company with my readers for ever."

Bibliomancer restores the 1865 text exactly as Dickens wrote it.