Our Mutual Friend : With original illustrations

Dickens's last completed novel is a marvel of play-acting and posturing, of taking on roles through delusion, calculation and ambition. I've come to think of it as a sort of late-period masque, where the roles and disguises that John Harmon and Boffin consciously assume exaggerate the more ordinary play-acting and pretence that we all engage in. The Veneerings' awful dinner parties, or the love affairs where both participants wonder whether they are quite up to the mark, or the Lammles' get...