The Dutch Bottle — Marcus Stone's second April 1865 illustration for "Our Mutual Friend"

The Dutch Bottle

Marcus Stone

Wood engraving by Green

12.8 cm high x 8.8 cm wide

Stone's illustration for Book 3, "A Long Lane," Chapter 6, "The Golden Dustman falls into Worse Company," in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual friend appeared in the April 1865, instalment. Since it alludes to one of the most celebrated aspects and central symbols of the novel, Boffin's dust-heaps, Dickens selected it as the frontispiece for the second volume of the November 1865 Chapman and Hall edition.

[See below for commentary and passage illustrated.]

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 the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Silas Wegg and his companion, the taxidermist, Mr. Venus, having participated in an oral reading for Mr. Boffin, surreptitiously follow him out to the mounds in hopes of learning where he has secreted his treasure. The passage which culminates in Noddy Boffin's unearthing the Dutch bottle is as follows:

At a nimbler trot, as if the shovel over his shoulder stimulated him by reviving old associations, Mr. Boffin ascended the 'serpentining walk', up the Mound which he had described to Silas Wegg on the occasion of their beginning to decline and fall. On striking into it he turned his lantern off. The two followed him, stooping low, so that their figures might make no mark in relief against the sky when he should turn his lantern on again. Mr. Venus took the lead, towing Mr. Wegg, in order that his refractory leg might be promptly extricated from any pitfalls it should dig for itself. They could just make out that the Golden Dustman stopped to breathe. Of course they stopped too, instantly.

'This is his own Mound,' whispered Wegg, as he recovered his wind, 'this one.

'Why all three are his own,' returned Venus.

'So he thinks; but he's used to call this his own, because it's the one first left to him; the one that was his legacy when it was all he took under the will.'

'When he shows his light,' said Venus, keeping watch upon his dusky figure all the time, 'drop lower and keep closer.'

He went on again, and they followed again. Gaining the top of the Mound, he turned on his light — but only partially — and stood it on the ground. A bare lopsided weather-beaten pole was planted in the ashes there, and had been there many a year. Hard by this pole, his lantern stood: lighting a few feet of the lower part of it and a little of the ashy surface around, and then casting off a purposeless little clear trail of light into the air.

'He can never be going to dig up the pole!' whispered Venus as they dropped low and kept close.

'Perhaps it's holler and full of something,' whispered Wegg.

He was going to dig, with whatsoever object, for he tucked up his cuffs and spat on his hands, and then went at it like an old digger as he was. He had no design upon the pole, except that he measured a shovel's length from it before beginning, nor was it his purpose to dig deep. Some dozen or so of expert strokes sufficed. Then, he stopped, looked down into the cavity, bent over it, and took out what appeared to be an ordinary case-bottle: one of those squat, high-shouldered, short-necked glass bottles which the Dutchman is said to keep his Courage in. As soon as he had done this, he turned off his lantern, and they could hear that he was filling up the hole in the dark. The ashes being easily moved by a skilful hand, the spies took this as a hint to make off in good time. [424-425]

The precise moment that Stone has realized is Boffin's abstracting the bottle from the mound, but immediately before he turns off his lantern (off right). All the other elements of the scene as described in the text are present: the watchers, Wegg and Venus, in the background; and Boffin's shovel, pole, and Dutch bottle. Although Stone has satisfactorily captured the mysteriousness of the scene, using chiaroscuro effectively, the central figure, Nicodemus Boffin, looks nothing much like the portly, middle-aged gentleman of such earlier plates as "Bibliomania of the Golden Dustman" (the other April 1865 illustration).

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 30 June 2011