In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable ap-pearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in. The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very eas-ily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appli-ance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze.
Full Novel
Part -1 Our Mutual Friend
Our Mutual Friend (Part -1) (Charles Dickens) TABLE OF CONTENTS About Dickens Chapter-1 Chapter-2 Chapter-3 Chapter-4 Chapter-5 Chapter-6 Chapter-7 Chapter-8 Chapter-9 Chapter-10 Chapter-11 Chapter-12 Chapter-13 Chapter-14 Chapter-15 Chapter-16 Chapter-17 ...Read More
Part -2 Our Mutual Friend
The school at which young Charley Hexam had first learned from a book—the streets being, for pupils of his the great Preparatory Establishment in which very much that is never unlearned is learned without and before book—was a miserable loft in an unsavoury yard. Its atmosphere was op-pressive and disagreeable it was crowded, noisy, and confus-ing half the pupils dropped asleep, or fell into a state of wak-ing stupefaction the other half kept them in either condition by maintaining a monotonous droning noise, as if they were performing, out of time and tune, on a ruder sort of bagpipe. The teachers, animated solely by good intentions, had no idea of execution, and a lamentable jumble was the upshot of their kind endeavours. ...Read More
Part -3 Our Mutual Friend
It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and in-visible, and so being wholly neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to be night- creatures that had no business abroad under the sun while the sun itself when it was for a few moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing flat and cold. Even in the sur-rounding country it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner, and then browner, until at the heart of the City— which call Saint Mary Axe—it was rusty-black. From any point of the high ridge of land northward, it might have been discerned that the lofti-est buildings made an occasional struggle to get their heads above the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome of Saint Paul's seemed to die hard but this was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sound of wheels, and en-folding a gigantic catarrh. ...Read More
Part -4 Our Mutual Friend
Plashwater Weir Mill Lock looked tranquil and pretty on an evening in the summer time. A soft air stirred leaves of the fresh green trees, and passed like a smooth shadow over the river, and like a smoother shadow over the yielding grass. The voice of the falling water, like the voices of the sea and the wind, were as an outer memory to a contemplative listener but not particularly so to Mr Riderhood, who sat on one of the blunt wooden levers of his lock-gates, dozing. Wine must be got into a butt by some agency before it can be drawn out and the wine of sentiment never having been got into Mr Riderhood by any agency, nothing in nature tapped him. ...Read More