Book of a Lifetime: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

From ‘The Independent’ archive: Shirley Williams looks at the dark imagery in one of the author’s most compelling novels

It may not be his greatest novel, but in some ways it is his most compelling (Getty)

I am fortunate enough not to have had the novels of Dickens urged onto me as a child or been required to write about them at university. I encountered them properly in middle age and have re-read them with enormous pleasure since.

Our Mutual Friend may not be his greatest novel, but in some ways it is his most compelling. From the opening paragraph, the dark imagery comes straight off the page and into your visual imagination and, as an illustrator, I find it irresistible: the autumn evening closing in, the crazy little boat afloat on the filthy Thames, the strong young woman plying the oars and a ragged, grizzled man, her father, busying himself with something towed in the water behind them.

You are some way into the narrative before it dawns on you that it is a drowned body. They are at their evening’s work as scavengers of the river. You are transported to the brightly lit, highly varnished home of the nouveau riche Veneerings, where everything, including their friends, is new and full of hard reflections.