Originally illustrated for the Chapman and Hall serialisation by
Marcus Stone, who enjoyed Dickens's complete
confidence and a considerable degree of autonomy in planning an extensive
narrative-pictorial program (from May 1864 through November 1865), Our
Mutual Friend was published in the United States in the "Illustrated Household
Edition" of 1870 as a joint venture by a Boston and a New York publisher. The artist whom
they selected for the project, Solomon Eytinge, Junior (1833-1905), had already
illustrated A Holiday Romance for Ticknor-Fields'
juvenile magazine Our Young Folks in 1867. Moreover
and more significantly, in anticipation of that 1867-68 reading tour,
the Boston publisher James T. Fields had commissioned from Eytinge ninety-six designs for
wood-engravings to grace the pages of the exhaustive Diamond Edition of
Dickens's works. In May, 1869, which marked the beginning of the last year of
the novelist's life, Eytinge in company with James and Annie Fields, and her
friend Amy Lowell, travelled to England and visited Dickens and his family at
Gad's Hill, near Rochester, Kent, where over several siitings he painted the
writer's portrait, which he subsequently transformed in to a lithograph to be
published by Ticknor-Fields.
Some of the following plates eschew the conventional framed form of nineteenth-century book illustration by using a a rounded arch for the upper register of each picture, which is generally a double character study rather than an attempt to capture an actual moment in the text. William Winter in his autobiography recalls that Eytinge's illustrations for Dickens's works "gained the emphatic approval of the novelist" (318), although of course the pair did not actively collaborate on this series, as did Marcus Stone and Dickens for the 1864-65 forty serial illustrations for Chapman and Hall. Nevertheless, as one regards this series of sixteen dual character studies for Our Mutual Friend, one is tempted to agree with Winter that
The most appropriate pictures that have been made for illustration of the novels of Dickens, — pictures that are truly representative and free from the element of caricature, — are those made by Eytinge. . . . [317-318]
- Frontispiece, The Bird of Prey
- The Veneering Dinner
- Mr. and Mrs. Boffin
- The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters
- Mr. Wegg and Mr. Venus in Consultation
- Podsnappery
- Mrs. Higden, Sloppy, and The Innocents
- Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam
- The Person of the House and The Bad Child
- Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Lammle
- Fledgeby and Riah
- Rogue Riderhood and Miss Pleasant at Home
- John Harmon
- Wrayburn and Lightwood
- The Cherub and The Lovely Woman
- Mrs. Wilfer, Miss Lavinia, and Mr. Geo. Sampson
- Title-page for the "Diamond Edition" of Our Mutual Friend (1867).
- Cover of the "Diamond Edition" of Our Mutual Friend (1867).
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham, Professor Emeritus, Lakehead University. [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.]
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.
Created 14 December 2010 last updated 15 March 2023