Better to be Abel than Cain — Marcus Stone's second September 1865 illustration for "Our Mutual Friend"

Better to be Abel than Cain

Marcus Stone

Wood engraving by Green

13.9 cm high x 9.2 cm wide, framed (facing p. 618).

Stone's illustration for Book 4, "A Turning," Chapter 7, "Better To Be Abel Than Cain," appeared in the September, 1865, instalment. The precise moment captured in the illustration is easily determined since Headstone grovels on the floor after Charley Hexam's chastising for his selfishness in attacking Wrayburn, a criminal act that may well blight Charley's career as a school-master.

[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.]

When he had dried his eyes and heaved a sob over his injuries, he began moving towards the door.

'However, I have made up my mind that I will become respectable in the scale of society, and that I will not be dragged down by others. I have done with my sister as well as with you. Since she cares so little for me as to care nothing for undermining my respectability, she shall go her way and I will go mine. My prospects are very good, and I mean to follow them alone. Mr Headstone, I don't say what you have got upon your conscience, for I don't know. Whatever lies upon it, I hope you will see the justice of keeping wide and clear of me, and will find a consolation in completely exonerating all but yourself. I hope, before many years are out, to succeed the master in my present school, and the mistress being a single woman, though some years older than I am, I might even marry her. If it is any comfort to you to know what plans I may work out by keeping myself strictly respectable in the scale of society, these are the plans at present occurring to me. In conclusion, if you feel a sense of having injured me, and a desire to make some small reparation, I hope you will think how respectable you might have been yourself and will contemplate your blighted existence.'

Was it strange that the wretched man should take this heavily to heart? Perhaps he had taken the boy to heart, first, through some long laborious years; perhaps through the same years he had found his drudgery lightened by communication with a brighter and more apprehensive spirit than his own; perhaps a family resemblance of face and voice between the boy and his sister, smote him hard in the gloom of his fallen state. For whichsoever reason, or for all, he drooped his devoted head when the boy was gone, and shrank together on the floor, and grovelled there, with the palms of his hands tight-clasping his hot temples, in unutterable misery, and unrelieved by a single tear.[618-619]

Marcus Stone has adopted some tricks of realisation customary in Phiz's illustrations of Dickens's novels, namely the chair whose central back support resembles a grinning mask and the embedded biblical scene on the wall, above Bradley Headstone's respectable bourgeois top hat. The barley cane twist table-leg links the illustration of the first murder with the murderer — in fact, the table-leg creates the illusion of the picture and the hat drilling down into the prostrate school-master, whose impetuosity and jealousy — in short, his utter inability to control his emotions — have cost him his livelihood, his social station, his friendship with the equally self-centred Charley, and (if apprehended for the crime) his life. His pose bespeaks utter misery, as he shields his ears, as if to block out the recollection of Charley's stinging rebuke. The image of Headstone on the floor is Rodinesque in that it remains in the mind's eye and reveals so much about the psychological state of the subject. The chapter title prepares the reader for this narrative moment in the two media as, it implies, Headstone so deeply regrets the consequences of his rash action that he wishes he were dead rather than having to confront what he has done: "Better to be Abel [the victim] rather than Cain [the assailant]."

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 22 July 2011