Mrs. Boffin discovers an Orphan

Marcus Stone

Wood engraving by W. T. Green

14.6 cm high x 9.3 cm wide

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Chapter Fifteen, "Two New Servants"[This part of the novel originally appeared in periodical form in September 1864.]

For the September 1864 instalment, Marcus Stone's second illustration realizes the moment at which the new "Secretary," John Rokesmith, and his employer, the velvet-clad Mrs. Boffin, having left the carriage in the village square, approach Betty Higden's humble cottage and encounter her toddler grandson, Johnny, playing in the doorway in chapter 16, "Minders and Reminders." Like many modern parents and grandparents, Betty has found it necessary to erect a makeshift child-gate in the doorway to prevent the child's escaping. Shortly the visitors will discover that Betty is a "child-minder," and that she has charge of a pair of neighbour children whom she has dubbed "Toddles and Poddles." The passage realized is this: [Continued below]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[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 in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

After many inquiries and defeats, there was pointed out to them in a lane, a very small cottage residence, with a board across the open doorway, hooked on to which board by the armpits was a young gentleman of tender years, angling for mud with a headless wooden horse and line. In this young sportsman, distinguished by a crisply curling auburn head and a bluff countenance, the Secretary descried the orphan. [122]

In a letter of 14 June 1864 to the illustrator, Dickens proposed precisely this scene for the fifth instalment, describing it as "The Orphan Fishing" (Vol. 10: 404), having also proposed the scene in which Gaffer Hexam's body is brought to shore as the subject of the other illustration for the fifth monthly number. As a letter dated 7 July 1864 makes clear, Dickens entitled both illustrations himself. Whereas Stone, interested in setting up in the viewer's mind a sense of anticipation about what Mrs. Boffin and her secretary will discover within Betty Higden's ivy-covered Brentford cottage, has convincingly drawn the three figures and supplied a number of external details that the text lacks with respect to the condition of the poor widow's cottage, two other nineteenth-century illustrators — Sol Eytinge in "Betty Higden, Sloppy, and the Innocents" and the Household Edition's James Mahoney in the 1870s — chose to focus instead on the cottage interior and the occupants, realizing in particular the figure and character of the working-class widow Betty Higden. While there is a woodenness about Mahoney's seven figures and their disposition in the interior scene, "Come Here, Toddles and Poddles," for which salient interior details and the presence of Sloppy do not compensate and in no way give a sense of Betty's "minding-school," Eytinge conveys a strong sense of the characters of the proud, hard-working widow and her "Natural" assistant. Since Dickens disparaged Stone's interior scenes for "a rather objectionable sameness" (Vol 11: 34; 22 April 1865), one may assume that he enjoyed Stone's skillful use of the exterior of the cottage here, relishing such details as the sagging thatch, worn lintels, spade and broom (right, foreground). Although nobody appears to be "minding" the toddler, Stone has included a darkened figure against the diamond window-panes of the interior, foiling the pudgy-armed infant whose "fishing" here recalls the grimmer business of Gaffer Hexam and Rogue Riderhood, so that the picture seems to possess an intense, "inner" life. Stone provides a detailed realisation of the interior of Betty's cottage amounting to a character study in "Our Johnny," in the ninth chapter of Book Two.

References

Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Volume 14 of the Authentic Edition. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1901.