Our Mutual Friend

John Tomson, The Flying Dustman, c. 1877, Museum of London

By Charles Dickens, intro. Richard T. Gaughan, New York: Modern Library, 2002

A deliciously bitter satire about the lure of money in Victorian England.  This is Dickens's final full novel that includes a very complicated plot with a diverse cast of characters.  The newly enriched owner of a dust-heap is the kind Noddy Boffin, called "the Golden Dustman."  Dickens's protagonists are bizzare.  His world just doesn't pull me in.  Mr. Boffin reminded me of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There:  black comedy ensues when innocents gain access to filthy lucre.