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Passage Illustrated: Gaffer the Waterman on the Lookout for Flotsam

In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight head-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror. [Chapter I, "On The Lookout," 7]

Commentary: A Dual Portrait of Gaffer and Lizzie Hexam, Creatures of The Thames

Sol Eytinge, Ticknor-Fields' house illustrator who completed all of the plates for the sixteen-volume Diamond Edition (1867), met Dickens over dinner at the Parker House, Boston, at the start of the great writer's second American reading tour in 1867. Eytinge at about that time completed four thumbnails (embellished initial-letter vignettes) for the Ticknor-Fields juvenile magazine Our Young Folks serialisation of the four-part Dickens children's novella A Holiday Romance.

Eytinge's initial woodcut sets the tone for the work; rather than capturing a moment in the action, apparently Eytinge's intention was the provide the first in a series of sixteen character studies in a quasi-realistic manner that both looks back to the caricatures of Hablot Knight Browne and forward to the thorough-going realism of Fred Barnard, shortly to become lead illustrator for Chapman and Hall's forthcoming Household Edition (1871-79). Here Eytinge depicts Lizzie Hexam as the reluctant companion and anxious helper of her father, the disreputable Thames waterman Gaffer Hexam. With sharp eye and powerful arms he preys upon the victims of the polluted river, whose far shore shimmers in the distance.

Bibliography

Schlicke, Paul, ed. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999.

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

Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London 1899 edition.

Winter, William. "Charles Dickens" and "Sol Eytinge." Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard, & Co., 1909. Pp. 181-202, 317-319.

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