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The Characters in the Story
Harry Furniss
1910
14.5 x 9 cm vignetted
Engraved title-page for Our Mutual Friend, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing XV, frontispiece.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Although the characters in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's last complete novel, are not in the main as immediately identifiable as those in Furniss's ornate title-pages for Dickens's earlier, picaresque novels, several of the figures immediately stand out: the odd couple, roughly attired Rogue Riderhood and respectably garbed Bradley Headstone (centre, bottom); one-legged curmudgeon Silas Wegg (upper left); Lizzie Hexam holding an oar as she stands in her father's skull (upper right); Mr. Boffin and Bella Wilfer (lower left); Riah and Fascination Fledgeby (centre right); Jenny Wren, the dolls' dressmaker (upper right), and, looming large in the right-hand corner, Miss Abbey Potterson, reading her newspaper at the bar of The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters. Eugene Wrayburn, Mortimer Lightwood, and the rest of the cast of characters, so readily distinguishable by their mannerisms and voices in Dickens's text, are not nearly so readily identifiable visually. Although there are sixty-eight named characters in the text, only thirty-six appear in the title-page vignettes, and many of them are simply too small to identify. Curiously, Furniss has not modelled his study of Miss Petterson upon one of his own full-page illustrations, but rather on Marcus Stone's serial illustration At the Bar (June 1864).
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 9 January 2020
Last modified 6 February 2020