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Passage Illustrated

"Now, Wegg," said Mr.​Boffin, hugging his stick closer, "I want to make a sort of offer to you. Do you remember when you first see me?"

The wooden Wegg looked at him with a meditative eye, and also with a softened air as descrying possibility of profit. "Let me think. I ain't quite sure, and yet I generally take a powerful sight of notice, too. Was it on a Monday morning, when the butcher-boy had been to our house for orders, and bought a ballad of me, which, being unacquainted with the tune, I run it over to him?" [Ch. 5, "Boffin's Bower," I, 76-79]

Commentary

One of the most memorable meetings in nineteenth-century British literature is involved in Noddy Boffin's hiring the duplicitous one-legged ballad-monger, Silas Wegg, to read him Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Working in 1866 on three frontispieces for the May 1864-November 1865 novel, Darley had at hand the models of Boffin and Wegg provided in the monthly parts by Dickens's new illustrator Marcus Stone, working in the new, realistic mode of the 1860s. However, since neither character in this initial frontispiece much resembles his counterpart in the Stone illustrations, Darley apparently felt uncomfortable with the new style and elected to take an approach more consistent with the earlier, caricatural style as exemplified by the work of Hablot Knight Browne and George Cruikshank. Darley has, moreover, reduced the size of Wegg's stall and reduced considerably the space occupied by background​buildings in his revision of Stone's Bibliomania of the Golden Dustman (April 1865) in order to ​​focus on the character of Wegg, under his enormous umbrella, as described in the following passage at the opening of the fifth chapter:

Over against a London house, a corner house not far from Cavendish Square, a man with a wooden leg had sat for some years, with his remaining foot in a basket in cold weather, picking up a living on this wise: — Every morning at eight o'clock, he stumped to the corner, carrying a chair, a clothes-horse, a pair of trestles, a board, a basket, and an umbrella, all strapped together. Separating these, the board and trestles became a counter, the basket supplied the few small lots of fruit and sweets that he offered for sale upon it and became a foot-warmer, the unfolded clothes-horse displayed a choice collection of halfpenny ballads and became a screen, and the stool planted within it became his post for the rest of the day. All weathers saw the man at the post. This is to be accepted in a double sense, for he contrived a back to his wooden stool, by placing it against the lamp-post. When the weather was wet, he put up his umbrella over his stock in trade, not over himself; when the weather was dry, he furled that faded article, tied it round with a piece of yarn, and laid it cross-wise under the trestles: where it looked like an unwholesomely-forced lettuce that had lost in color and crispness what it had gained in size. [69]

In contrast to the subtlety of Darley's engraving, the other illustrators of the period utlised the bold lines of the composite wood-block engraving, with particularly dramatic effect in the Household Edition half- and whole-page illustrations by social realist James Mahoney. As both J. A. Hammerton and Frederic G. Kitton have noted, Marcus Stone, the original part-publication illustrator, worked closely with Dickens, so that the resulting illustrations bear the stamp of authorial intention, influencing such later illustrators as Harry Furniss. Conversations with and detailed notes from the novelist gave young Stone direct access to what he himself termed Dickens's "pictorialism" (Kitton, 197), that is, an innate sense of what in in a text will be most suitable as an illustration. Although Darley did not have these opportunities for artistic collaboration with Dickens, he was generally an outstanding "'character' draughtsman" (Kitton, 223) with the knack of placing complementary characters together in an interesting situation as described in the narrative. Such is the case with his dual portrait of the genial dustman, the millionaire of garbage, and his alter-ego, the envious malcontent and purveyor of shoddy goods, Silas Wegg.

Both Felix Octavius Carr Darley and John Gilbert, working on the Hurd and Houghton edition frontispieces just the year after the book's publication in England, at least had the opportunity to study Marcus Stone's work, but developed different scenes and developed their own interpretations of the characters. In the case of Boffin, Darley has produced a heavy-set man of advanced middle age trying to dress like a bourgeois, but not quite comfortable in his respectable clothing, over which he wears a serviceable but not particularly fashionable jacket (a "pea overcoat"), revealing the tails of his frock-coat. Darley has incorporated the broad-brimmed hat and gaiters of Dickens's text, but shows only Boffin's profile. He is not as obtuse as the Boffin produced the following year by Darley's fellow American, Sol Eytinge, Jr. The artist has lavished considerably more attention on the ballad-monger, detailing his wares and conspicuously showing his salient feature, a wooden leg, under his table. Oddly enough, Darley has Wegg sitting on a chair rather than a stool, and makes his face more pliable and less stoney than Dickens suggests. Both characters in the 1866 frontispiece are more engaging, however, than their counterparts in Mahoney's wood-engravings.

Boffin and Wegg in the original, Diamond, and Household Editions, 1865-1875

Left: Marcus Stone's April 1865 serial illustration of Boffin's looking for tales of misers at a bookstall, Bibliomania of the Golden Dustman.​ Right: Sol Eytinge, Junior's interpretation of the​ Golden Dustman and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin (1867).

Above: James Mahoney's realistic interpretation of ​Boffin's meeting Wegg at his bookstall in Book One, Chapter Five, "Here you are again," repeated Mr. Wegg, musing. "And what are you now?" (Household Edition, 1875). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.

The Characters of Charles Dickens pourtrayed in a series of original watercolours by "Kyd." London, Paris, and New York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, n. d.

Cohen, Jane Rabb. "The Illustrators of Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Marcus Stone, Charles Collins, Luke Fildes." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Canton: Ohio U. P., 1980. Pp. 203-228.

Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Character Sketches from Dickens. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1888.

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

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Illustrated by Marcus Stone [40​composite wood-block engravings]. Volume 14 of the Authentic Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1901 [based on the original nineteen-month serial and the two-volume edition of 1865].

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866. Vol. 1.

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Illustrated by James Mahoney [58 composite wood-block engravings]. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1875.

Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 21: The Other Novels." The ​​ Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles​Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 17. Pp.​441-442.

Kitton, Frederic G. Dickens and His Illustrators. (1899). Rpt. Honolulu: ​U​niversity of Hawaii, 2004.

Kyd [Clayton J. Clarke]. Characters from​ ​Dickens. Nottingham: John Player & Sons, 1910.

"Our Mutual Friend — Fifty-eight Illustrations by James Mahoney." Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens, Being Eight Hundred and Sixty-six Drawings by Fred Barnard, Gordon Thomson, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), J. McL. Ralston, J. Mahoney, H. French, Charles Green, E. G. Dalziel, A. B. Frost, F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.

Vann, J. Don. Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985.

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