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The sacred rage engendered in Charles Dickens by the injustices and corruptions of his mid-Victorian world, with its obsessive fixations on money and status, only served to fuel his extraordinary imagination. Our Mutual Friend (1865), his last completed novel, is crammed with narratives of concealment and mistaken identity, of murder and attempted murder, of sin and redemption, and is continually propelled by a satiric impulse and a theatricality almost surreal in their power. And out of this fury of invention Dickens manages to create a portrait of a city and a civilization which is at once indignant, compassionate, and utterly convincing.
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