[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Harry Furniss —> Charles Dickens —> Next]
Frontispiece: "Keep her out, Lizzie, the tide runs strong here!"
Harry Furniss
1910
13.8 cm x 9.3 cm, framed
Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in the Charles Dickens Library Edition, Book One, Ch. 1, "On the Look-Out," facing XV, title-page.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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.
Allied to the bottom of the river rather than the surface, by reason of the slime and ooze with which it was covered, and its sodden state, this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought. Half savage as the man showed, with no covering on his matted head, with his brown arms bare to between the elbow and the shoulder, with the loose knot of a looser kerchief lying low on his bare breast in a wilderness of beard and whisker, with such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat, still there was a business-like usage in his steady gaze. So with every lithe action of the girl, with every turn of her wrist, perhaps most of all with her look of dread or horror; they were things of usage.
"Keep her out, Lizzie. Tide runs strong here. Keep her well afore the sweep of it." [Book the First — "The Cup and the Lip," Chapter 1, "On the Look-Out," 1-2]
Above: Mahoney's 1875 Household Edition untitled headpiece for Ch. 1: Lizzie and Gaffer on the Thames.
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. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. New York: Sheldon and Company, 1866. Vols. 1-4.
_____. Our Mutual Friend. Illustrated by James Mahoney [58 composite wood-block engravings]. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1875. Vol. 9.
_____. Our Mutual Friend. With 28 illustrations by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 15.
Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 21: The Other Novels." The Dickens Picture-Book. The CharlesDickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910. XVII, 441-42.
Created 22 November 2019
Last modified 6 February 2020