One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World''The great poet of the city.

He was created by London' Peter AckroydOur Mutual Friend centres on an inheritance - Old Harmon's profitable dust heaps - and its legatees: young John Harmon, presumed drowned when a body is pulled out of the Thames, and kindly dustman Mr Boffin, to whom the fortune defaults.

With brilliant satire, Dickens portrays a dark, macabre London, inhabited by such disparate characters as Gaffer Hexam, scavenging the river for corpses; enchanting, mercenary Bella Wilfer; the social-climbing Veneerings; and the unscrupulous street-trader Silas Wegg.

Dickens's last completed novel is richly symbolic in its vision of death and renewal in a city dominated by the fetid Thames, and of the corrupting power of money. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Adrian Poole