"Pa's Lodger and Pa's Daughter" — Marcus Stone's fifteenth illustration for "Our Mutual Friend"

"Pa's Lodger and Pa's Daughter"

Marcus Stone

Wood engraving by Dalziel

14.6 cm high x 9.4 cm wide (framed).

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Book Two ("Birds of a Feather"), Chapter Eight, "In Which an Innocent Elopement Occurs" [This part of the novel originally appeared in periodical form in Part 8, December 1864.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite it in a print one.]

Dickens and his illustrator introduce the relationship between John Harmon (a. k. a., "Rokesmith"), the heir to a vast estate who has assumed another identity, and the struggling clerk's materialistic daughter, Bella Wilfer, in the December, 1864, part (Chapter 8 of the second book)

[Continued below.]

The young man offers to carry messages home for the young lady who has had the good fortune to be taken up by the Boffins and translated to their mansion, where Rokesmith has just been hired as Mrs. Boffin's "Secretary." Clearly his moral intention in the text is to upbraid the wilful Bella for neglecting her own family since the Boffins have translated her to a loftier sphere. His subtle goading provokes Bella to visit her parents (in the Boffins' coach, of course) and buy her father a new wardrobe.

The passage illustrated involves Bella's incorrectly decoding Rokesmith's motivation and haughtily appraising him:

'Rather cool in a Secretary — and Pa's lodger — to make me the subject of his jealousy!'

That Pa's daughter should be so contemptuous of Pa's lodger was odd; but there were odder anomalies than that in the mind of the spoilt girl: the doubly spilt girl: spoilt first by poverty, and then by wealth. Be it this history's part, however, to leave them to unravel themselves.

'A little too much, I think,' Miss Bella reflected scornfully, 'to have Pa's lodger laying claim to me, and keeping eligible people [i. e., the attorney Mortimer Lightwood] off! A little too much, indeed, to have the opportunities opened to me by Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, appropriated by a mere Secretary and Pa's lodger.' [267]

The illustration introduces that staple of the Dickens novel: romance between two physically attractive young adults. What is different is Dickens's using the third-person limited omniscient to expose Bella's class-consciousness and vanity, making her a parallel figure to Estella in Great Expectations (1861).

The particular moment that Stone has captured shows little of the inner workings of either character's mind, but conveys well the upper-middle class milieu in which the pair constantly encounter one another, an ornately furnished drawing-room in the manner of Sixties illustrator and society novelist George Du Maurier:

'You never charge me, Miss Wilfer,' said the Secretary, encountering her by chance alone in the great drawing-room, 'with commissions for home. I shall always be happy to execute any commands you may have in that direction.'

'Pray what may you mean, Mr. Rokesmith?' inquired Miss Bella, with languidly drooping eyelids.

'By home? I mean your father's house Holloway."

She coloured under the retort. . . . [268]

Stone's illustration extends the texts by providing Rokesmith with a pretext for being in the room, namely fetching or returning to their shelves several volumes for the Boffins, and by providing Bella with some theatrical "business," namely reading from an extremely slight but ornately covered volume that may be emblematic of Bella herself, elegantly and fashionably attired and coiffed, but rather shallow in terms of her underlying values.

References

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Volume 14 of the Authentic Edition. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1901.

Last modified 19 February 2011