According to J. Hillis Miller, ‘Our Mutual Friend is about “money, money, money, and what money can make of life” ’. This critical view of the novel's dominant concern with commercialism is a long-established one which has, in more recent years, been given a fresh direction by theoretical developments which have led to a new focus upon the complex relationship between money and language as systems of signification in the narrative. As a novel pervasively concerned with the force of capitalism and framed by an inheritance plot in the story of the Harmon patrimony, Our Mutual Friend suggests itself for discussion in terms of the politics of the family in some obvious ways. The relationship between the family and the economy has always been a focus in Marxist studies, and Our Mutual Friend would seem to document the split between productive and reproductive relations held to be characteristic of capitalist social organisation, providing in the process a devastating critique of the morality of individualism associated with laissez-faire economics. The commercial ethos is satirised, for example, in the portrait of the Lammles, whose marriage exposes the extraordinary signifying power of money – a power that resides in its circulation as a collective fiction. Discussion of this function of the family as part of Dickens's attack upon the ‘uniform principle’ of ‘bargain and sale’ (196) is familiar in criticism of the novel. However, like Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend offers a representation of the family that is more ambiguous than the sort of Marxist reading alluded to here would suggest.