More Dead Than Alive — Marcus Stone's first January 1865 illustration for "Our Mutual Friend"

More Dead Than Alive

Marcus Stone

Wood engraving by Dalziel

13.4 cm high x 9.2 cm wide (vignetted)

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Book Two ("Birds of a Feather"), Chapter Thirteen, "A Solo and A Duet" [This part of the novel originally appeared in periodical form in Part 9, January 1865.]

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.]

Dickens and his illustrator now provide a flashback that explains how John Harmon exchanged identities with George Radfoot after being drugged at "a low public-house" immediately adjacent to the Thames. His assailants dumped his almost comatose body down a chute into the murky and chilly waters of the river, in which he returned to consciousness and struggled for his life, and finally caught hold of a causeway attached to a riverside public house. This, then, is the moment upon which Marcus Stone has elaborated, the dramatic moment at which Harmon crawled ashore:

'Was I long in the water? Long enough to be chilled to the heart, but I don't know how long. Yet the cold was merciful, for it was the cold night air and the rain that restored me from a swoon on the stones of the causeway. They naturally supposed me to have toppled in, drunk, when I crept to the public-house it belonged to; for I had no notion where I was, and could not articulate — through the poison that had made me insensible having affected my speech — and I supposed the night to be the previous night, as it was still dark and raining. But I had lost twenty-four hours. [321]

In Stone's illustration he offers the reader his construction of Harmon's crawling, soaking wet, across planking (hardly a "causeway") towards the shore, as the driving rain, reiterated in the text as the dominating feature of the fateful night, largely obscures the backdrop; whereas Dickens specifically mentions a moored boat nearby, Stone gives us only pylons, rendering the whole scene bleak and inhospitable. And yet Harmon has survived this Darwinian experience, and, reborn as it were, will be all the stronger for it. The illustration is strongly impressionist, not realising the text so much as using it as a point of departure, putting the reader through the protagonist's near-death experience by engulfing the reader in the pelting rain and darkness, Harmon's body almost a wet sack rather than recognizable as a human form.

References

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

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.

Last modified 13 June 2011