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OMF, Book 3, Chp. 15 - 17
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And yet...there is a moment whenBella seems to be on the verge of discovering Rokesmith's identity.On her parents ' anniversary she steals into the lodger's room and sees "shelves and stands of books, English, French, and Italian" and " sheets upon sheets of memoranda and calculations in figures, evidently referring to the Boffin property."
She also finds "the placard descriptive of the murdered man who had come from afar to be her husband." Bella! Connect the dots! But no, we learn "She shrank from this ghostly surprise, and felt quite frightened as she rolled and tied it up again." She even finds a portrait of a Harmon ancestor, but just like the young girl she is, she interprets it as a likeness of herself.
Dickens gave Bella the opportunity to unravel the mystery but she burned dinner instead.
Mod
Ami and Mary Lou,
did I write "my father-in-law's wife"? Oh dear, that's neither Freudian nor Biercian. Dante comes to mind, rather ...
And thanks for your good wishes!
Mod
Fabulous news, Peter! Congratulations!"
Peter wrote: ..."
I don't know whether Bella and young John Harmon ever really met a lot and whether Bella would have had a chance of seeing John smile or of taking a good look at his eyes in the old days. The way I took that episode was that Old Harmon decided on a whim that his son should get married to the wilful little girl he saw venting her spleen on her father and that Old Harmon did not even know the Wilfers very well. But then I might be mistaken.
And yes, Rokesmith probably had a bushy beard. I am growing one at present, and when my wife asked me when I would like to stop, I showed her a picture of Herman Melville and said, Then.
Mod
On her parents ' anniversary she steals into the lodger's room and sees "shelves and stands of b..."
Linda
" ... but she burned dinner instead." I've just stopped laughing. Great analysis.
Mod
Fabulous news, Peter! Congratulations!"
P..."
You are a very brave man but may awaken one morning shorn like a sheep.
:-))
Mod
Haha Tristram, it's a great decision to keep the beard!!!Wonderful news, on the grandparent front, Mary Lou and Peter! And all of the anniversaries as well, including you, Tristram. Congratulations!! That was a close shave though Tristram, you might have tied the knot with your mother-in-law to be! Such a mercy that you chose the British version of the date! Otherwise, who knows what might have happened? ;p
My husband has always been hirsute, though he no longer has the ringlets he had in his teens (it looked quite normal for the times!) Our most recent wedding anniversary was number 43. Yes, I must have been a child bride, mustn't I? ;)Can't remember if I said elsewhere, but my hearty congratulation to all the new little bambinos expected :)
Mod
A child bride, Jean? We have an expression in Canada ( perhaps it exists elsewhere?)
I would say he robbed the cradle. Congratulations on 43 years. And I bet you are still the blushing bride.
Peter - I didn't think I'd heard that one - but people can be called "cradlesnatchers" - which I guess is the same! We were only a few months apart in age though. I've put back my current profile pic from May, in which my hair is blushing, so that will have to do :D
Mod
Bella 'Righted' by the Golden Dustman
Book 3 Chapter 15
Marcus Stone
Commentary:
The Golden Dustman, Nicodemus or "Noddy" Boffin, having been alerted by Mrs. Lammle the previous evening about John Rokesmith's proposal to his ward, Bella Wilfer, acts to protect the young heiress from a man whom he regards as a fortune-hunter. Since breakfast he has been signalling his displeasure with his secretary (left) by clenching and unclenching his fists. Now, having summoned Bella, the secretary, and his wife to his study, Mr. Boffin discharges Rokesmith, accusing him of mercenary intentions. Bella, dismayed by Boffin's unjust treatment of Rokesmith, is to the right; Mrs. Boffin, equally upset, is in the background. Clearly, since we cannot see Rokesmith's face, the focus of Stone's illustration of this key scene in the romantic plot is Boffin himself (centre), fiercely indignant at his secretary's reported presumption:
John Rokesmith stared at him in his outburst, as if with some faint idea that he had gone mad.
'What is due to this young lady,' said Mr. Boffin, 'is Money, and this young lady right well knows it.'
'You slander the young lady.'
'YOU slander the young lady; you with your affections and hearts and trumpery,' returned Mr. Boffin. 'It's of a piece with the rest of your behaviour. I heard of these doings of yours only last night, or you should have heard of 'em from me, sooner, take your oath of it. I heard of 'em from a lady with as good a headpiece as the best, and she knows this young lady, and I know this young lady, and we all three know that it's Money she makes a stand for — money, money, money — and that you and your affections and hearts are a Lie, sir!'
'Mrs. Boffin,' said Rokesmith, quietly turning to her, 'for your delicate and unvarying kindness I thank you with the warmest gratitude. Good-bye! Miss Wilfer, good-bye!'
'And now, my dear,' said Mr. Boffin, laying his hand on Bella's head again, 'you may begin to make yourself quite comfortable, and I hope you feel that you've been righted.'
In order to ascertain the expression on Rokesmith's face throughout Boffin's diatribe, the reader must consult the text; clearly Stone's illustration for its effectiveness relies upon the sharp contrast in the postures of the characters and the range of emotions realised. However, despite the strength of the composition with respect to the male figures, Bella's posture and expression are not suitably expressive of her conflicting feelings, and therefore are not a strong complement to the text. nor do the study's furnishings in any way support the scene, giving no clue as to Boffin's character or tastes, although the books on the table beside Rokesmith suggest, perhaps, the occupant's obsession with acquiring tales of misers' lives and therefore support his alluding repeatedly to several celebrated examples of the type: "Dancer, and Elwes, and Hopkins, and Blewbury Jones, and ever so many more of 'em". Stone in this illustration provides a representation of the Golden Dustman at once highly realistic and emblematic, with his whiskers and blown-back hair suggesting intense energy.
The thick-set, balding, middle-aged Boffin, wearing the older style of respectable male fashion (frock coat and double-breasted waist-coat), is contrasted by the thin, elegant line of Rokesmith in his modern business suit. In this contest of wills, Boffin — and therefore Lammles — appears to have won, as shortly Rokesmith will pick his severance cheque up off the floor and to Bella's sorrow quit the mansion of the Golden Dustman.
Mod
"You have been a pleasant room to me, dear room. Adieu! We shall never see each other again."
Book 3 Chapter 15
James Mahoney
Household Edition 1875
Text Illustrated:
"But there was Mrs. Boffin to part from, and, in the full flush of her dignity, the impressible little soul collapsed again. Down upon her knees before that good woman, she rocked herself upon her breast, and cried, and sobbed, and folded her in her arms with all her might.
"You're a dear, a dear, the best of dears!' cried Bella. "You're the best of human creatures. I can never be thankful enough to you, and I can never forget you. If I should live to be blind and deaf I know I shall see and hear you, in my fancy, to the last of my dim old days!"
Mrs. Boffin wept most heartily, and embraced her with all fondness; but said not one single word except that she was her dear girl. She said that often enough, to be sure, for she said it over and over again; but not one word else.
Bella broke from her at length, and was going weeping out of the room, when in her own little queer affectionate way, she half relented towards Mr. Boffin.
"I am very glad," sobbed Bella, "that I called you names, sir, because you richly deserved it. But I am very sorry that I called you names, because you used to be so different. Say good-bye!"
"Good-bye," said Mr. Boffin, shortly.
"If I knew which of your hands was the least spoilt, I would ask you to let me touch it," said Bella, "for the last time. But not because I repent of what I have said to you. For I don't. It's true!"
"Try the left hand," said Mr. Boffin, holding it out in a stolid manner; "it's the least used."
"You have been wonderfully good and kind to me," said Bella, "and I kiss it for that. You have been as bad as bad could be to Mr. Rokesmith, and I throw it away for that. Thank you for myself, and good-bye!"
"Good-bye," said Mr. Boffin as before.
Bella caught him round the neck and kissed him, and ran out for ever.
She ran up-stairs, and sat down on the floor in her own room, and cried abundantly. But the day was declining and she had no time to lose. She opened all the places where she kept her dresses; selected only those she had brought with her, leaving all the rest; and made a great misshapen bundle of them, to be sent for afterwards.
"I won't take one of the others," said Bella, tying the knots of the bundle very tight, in the severity of her resolution. "I'll leave all the presents behind, and begin again entirely on my own account." That the resolution might be thoroughly carried into practice, she even changed the dress she wore, for that in which she had come to the grand mansion. Even the bonnet she put on, was the bonnet that had mounted into the Boffin chariot at Holloway.
"Now, I am complete," said Bella. "It's a little trying, but I have steeped my eyes in cold water, and I won't cry any more. You have been a pleasant room to me, dear room. Adieu! We shall never see each other again."
With a parting kiss of her fingers to it, she softly closed the door and went with a light foot down the great staircase, pausing and listening as she went, that she might meet none of the household. No one chanced to be about, and she got down to the hall in quiet. The door of the late Secretary's room stood open. She peeped in as she passed, and divined from the emptiness of his table, and the general appearance of things, that he was already gone. Softly opening the great hall door, and softly closing it upon herself, she turned and kissed it on the outside — insensible old combination of wood and iron that it was! — before she ran away from the house at a swift pace."
Commentary:
Since it was his visual antecedent, Mahoney's 1875 treatment of the textual material is often a response to the original series of illustrations by Marcus Stone, Dickens's original serial and volume illustrator. Although Mahoney sometimes accepts Stone's notions, in The Dutch Bottle, one of three illustrations for the April 1865 or twelfth monthly part in the British serialisation, the Household Edition illustrator reorganised the equivalent Stone illustration. However, here Mahoney felt a dramatic change was in order since Stone's attempt at describing the confrontation between the suspicious employer and the disrespected employee, Bella 'Righted' by the Golden Dustman (July 1865), was less than successful, largely because the original illustrator failed to deal with the complete embarrassment Bella suffers as Boffin denigrates Rokesmith. Indeed, the only wholly satisfactory figure in the original is the Golden Dustman. That Stone's drawing is not as powerful as the text is doubly ironic in that, according to Sean Grass, this is one of the few places in the manuscript upon which Dickens expended considerable effort. Thus, Mahoney has abandoned the dramatic confrontation scene entirely in order to focus on Bella's internal conflict in a contemplative moment following her dressing down of the Golden Dustman.
The Stone illustration had not done justice to Bella's internal conflict, or, for that matter, Mrs. Boffin's obvious distress and the Secretary's stoicism. Mahoney improves considerably on the chief feature: Bella's emotional response. The illustrator conveys a sense of Bella's inner turmoil through the objects scattered on the floor (presumably, the "presents" that she has elected to leave behind, so that she will owe Boffin nothing) and the bundle of dresses (left). Although the text specifies that she kisses her fingertips in saluting the room where she has been so happy — "With a parting kiss of her fingers to it" — Mahoney subtly suggests regret and perhaps even a moment's indecision as Bella considers the "great misshapen" bundle of dresses that will be sent after her. She wears neither coat nor bonnet, and carries just a small parasol, as if the illustrator wishes to imply that she is not entirely prepared for her departure.
Mod
The Lovely Woman has her Fortune told
Book 3 Chapter 16
Marcus Stone
Commentary:
Stone's illustration for Book 3, "A Long Lane," Chapter 16, ""The Feast of the Three Hobgoblins," appeared in the July, 1865, installment. The scene, however, is not R. W.'s office, where earlier in the day Bella and John Rokesmith announced their engagement and celebrated in the "hobgoblins'" feast of penny-loaves and milk with Bella's father. Rather, the scene realised occurs towards the end of the chapter when, Bella having announced that she has left the Boffins on a matter of principle, she returns to the family dining room after her sister Lavvy and her mother have gone to bed. There she promises her father that he will always have a place in their modest, middle-class home. The passage which Stone has captured in this second installment for the July installment is this:
R. W. was left alone among the dilapidations of the supper table, in a melancholy attitude.
But, a light footstep roused him from his meditations, and it was Bella's. Her pretty hair was hanging all about her, and she had tripped down softly, brush in hand, and barefoot, to say good-night to him.
'My dear, you most unquestionably are a lovely woman,' said the cherub, taking up a tress in his hand.
'Look here, sir,' said Bella; 'when your lovely woman marries, you shall have that piece if you like, and she'll make you a chain of it. Would you prize that remembrance of the dear creature?'
'Yes, my precious.'
'Then you shall have it if you're good, sir. I am very, very sorry, dearest Pa, to have brought home all this trouble.'
'My pet,' returned her father, in the simplest good faith, 'don't make yourself uneasy about that. It really is not worth mentioning, because things at home would have taken pretty much the same turn any way. If your mother and sister don't find one subject to get at times a little wearing on, they find another. We're never out of a wearing subject, my dear, I assure you. I am afraid you find your old room with Lavvy, dreadfully inconvenient, Bella?'
'No I don't, Pa; I don't mind. Why don't I mind, do you think, Pa?'
'Well, my child, you used to complain of it when it wasn't such a contrast as it must be now. Upon my word, I can only answer, because you are so much improved.'
'No, Pa. Because I am so thankful and so happy!'
Here she choked him until her long hair made him sneeze, and then she laughed until she made him laugh, and then she choked him again that they might not be overheard.
'Listen, sir,' said Bella. 'Your lovely woman was told her fortune to night on her way home. It won't be a large fortune, because if the lovely woman's Intended gets a certain appointment that he hopes to get soon, she will marry on a hundred and fifty pounds a year. But that's at first, and even if it should never be more, the lovely woman will make it quite enough. But that's not all, sir. In the fortune there's a certain fair man — a little man, the fortune-teller said — who, it seems, will always find himself near the lovely woman, and will always have kept, expressly for him, such a peaceful corner in the lovely woman's little house as never was. Tell me the name of that man, sir.'
'Is he a Knave in the pack of cards?' inquired the cherub, with a twinkle in his eyes.
'Yes!' cried Bella, in high glee, choking him again. 'He's the Knave of Wilfers! Dear Pa, the lovely woman means to look forward to this fortune that has been told for her, so delightfully, and to cause it to make her a much better lovely woman than she ever has been yet.
Although Stone is accurate and consistent in his depiction of R. W., his figure of Bella does not resemble stronger representations of the "Boofer Lady" and he has failed to capture either the touching sentimentality or the father-daughter playfulness of Dickens's deftly written scene. There is no "twinkle" in the eyes of this R. W., and no sportiveness in the expression of this Bella, whose triumph over her former mercenary principles should be evident here. Despite the fact that we cannot see her toes, however, Stone has given us a fetching profile of Bella in her nightgown, with her hair (rather lighter than in previous illustration) down and a brush in her left hand as her father tenderly holds her right.
Mod
The Cherub and the Lovely Woman
Book 3 Chapter 16
Sol Eytinge
Household Edition 1870
Commentary:
Eytinge briefly reveals Bella Wilfer, the ward of the Boffins, in the thirteenth illustration, "John Harmon," but here, in the previous chapter (Book Three, no. 15, "The Golden Dustman at his Worst") having broken with Noddy Boffin over his supposed unkindness to his Secretary, John Rokesmith, she appears in her father's office to break the news to him that she will be returning home, a penniless girl once again. The scene is the counting-house of the "drug-house" of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles, in Mincing Lane, near the Bank of England in the City. Her father, a senior clerk of the Bob Cratchit variety and genial disposition, bears the nickname "Rumpty" with which the younger, more whimsical office workers address him on account of his initial, "R." (which, in fact, as we learn in the fourth chapter of book one stands for "Reginald," although he always signs himself "R. Wilfer").
Gradually his daughter Bella tries to prepare her father for the news that she has lost the precuniary prospects to which she has clung for so long. She will shortly be interrupted in her narrative by the arrival of John Rokesmith (Harmon disguised) himself. Although the illustrator omits Mr. Wilfer's modest "refection" (milk and a cottage loaf, constituting his "tea") on the window-seat, Eytinge gives us the essentials of the dark, ill-heated office: the plate glass affording a view of the lane, and "Rumty's Perch" (his high desk). Details that Eytinge has provided are R. Wilfer's inverted top hat, Bella's bonnet, and the quill pen behind Rumty's ear. As she attempts to break the news, Bella rumples his whispy hair as she has been wont to do since childhood, the illustration capturing this moment:
"He was falling back on his loaf and milk, with the pleasantest composure, and Bella stealing her arm a little closer about him, and at the same time sticking up his hair with an irresistible propensity to play with him, founded on the habit of her whole life. . . . "
Eytinge defines their relationship by Bella's playfulness as she dotes upon her parent as if he were her child. The curves of Rumpty's body and cheeks accord nicely with Dickens's description of him in Book One, chapter four ("The R. Wilfer Family"), as both "boyish" and cherubic. However, this is a far more charming and less surly and petulant Bella than the one to whom Dickens introduced us in chapter 4. Earlier, she seemed haughty and mercenary; now she freely expresses her devotion to her father, and to the supposedly penniless John Rokesmith.
Mod
"The cherub, whose hair would have done for itself, under the influence of this amazing spectacle, what Bella had just done for it, staggered back into the window-seat from which he had risen, and surveyed the pair with his eyes dilated to their utmost."
Book 3 Chapter 16
James Mahoney
Household Edition 1875
Text Illustrated:
"My gracious me!" he exclaimed, invoking the Mincing Lane echoes as before. "This is very extraordinary!"
"What is, Pa?"
"Why here's Mr. Rokesmith now!"
"No, no, Pa, no,"cried Bella, greatly flurried. "Surely not."
"Yes there is! Look here!"
"Sooth to say, Mr.Rokesmith not only passed the window, but came into the counting-house. And not only came into the counting-house, but, finding himself alone there with Bella and her father, rushed at Bella and caught her in his arms, with the rapturous words "My dear, dear girl; my gallant, generous, disinterested, courageous, noble girl!" And not only that even, (which one might have thought astonishment enough for one dose), but Bella, after hanging her head for a moment, lifted it up and laid it on his breast, as if that were her head's chosen and lasting resting-place!
"I knew you would come to him, and I followed you," said Rokesmith. "My love, my life! You are mine?"
To which Bella responded, "Yes, I am yours if you think me worth taking!" And after that, seemed to shrink to next to nothing in the clasp of his arms, partly because it was such a strong one on his part, and partly because there was such a yielding to it on hers.
"The cherub, whose hair would have done for itself under the influence of this amazing spectacle, what Bella had just now done for it, staggered back into the window-seat from which he had risen, and surveyed the pair with his eyes dilated to their utmost.
"But we must think of dear Pa,"said Bella; "I haven't told dear Pa; let us speak to Pa."Upon which they turned to do so.
"I wish first, my dear,"remarked the cherub faintly, "that you'd have the kindness to sprinkle me with a little milk, for I feel as if I was — Going."
In fact, the good little fellow had become alarmingly limp, and his senses seemed to be rapidly escaping, from the knees upward. Bella sprinkled him with kisses instead of milk, but gave him a little of that article to drink; and he gradually revived under her caressing care.
"We'll break it to you gently, dearest Pa,"said Bella.
"My dear,"returned the cherub, looking at them both, "you broke so much in the first — Gush, if I may so express myself — that I think I am equal to a good large breakage now."
"Mr. Wilfer,"said John Rokesmith, excitedly and joyfully, "Bella takes me, though I have no fortune, even no present occupation; nothing but what I can get in the life before us. Bella takes me!"
"Yes, I should rather have inferred, my dear sir,"returned the cherub feebly,"that Bella took you, from what I have within these few minutes remarked."
Commentary:
Since it was his visual antecedent, Mahoney's 1875 treatment of the textual material is often his response to the original series of illustrations by young Marcus Stone, Dickens's 1860s serial and volume illustrator after Dickens's dropping Hablot Knight Browne, his principal illustrator for twenty-five years. Although Mahoney sometimes accepts Stone's notions, as in The Dutch Bottle, one of three illustrations for the April 1865 or twelfth monthly part in the British serialisation, the Household Edition illustrator reorganised the equivalent Stone illustration. However, here once again James Mahoney felt that he had to revise Stone's illustration entirely since the somewhat insipid. The Lovely Woman has her Fortune told (July 1865) does not in the least communicate Bella's joy and her father's total astonishment at John Rokesmith's reiteration of his marriage proposal. The setting, the counting-house, contrasts this outburst of emotion, and Rokesmith's presence clarifies for the viewer exactly what textual situation that the picture is describing, in contrast to the vagueness of the Stone original. Mahoney then eliminates the painfully static situation of Stone's The Wedding Dinner at Greenwich to provide a further visual complement to the text's sense of the wonderful as the romantic difficulties of the young couple have been suddenly resolved by Bella's quitting not merely the Boffin mansion, but also her own acquisitiveness, so that text and image playfully and romantically celebrate Bella's epiphany.
Whereas Mahoney shows Bella and John only distinctly, in the shadowy section of the office furthest away from the window, he has placed R. W. in the window-seat (exactly as in the text) so that the reader can assess the scene from his perspective. Although the accompanying dialogue is divided evenly between the three characters, the illustration makes Bella's father the focal character. Mahoney exploits the commercial background of the lovers' tryst, even though the text does not offer any detail about the firm's counting-house. Romance can break out in the most mundane of situations, even among accounting stools and financial ledgers.
Mod
"After carefully reading the dingy scrap of paper handed to him, and as carefully tucking it into his waistcoat-pocket, Eugene tells out the money."
Text Illustrated:
Eugene, leaning back in his chair, is observing Mr. Podsnap with an irreverent face, and may be about to offer a new suggestion, when the Analytical is beheld in collision with the Coachman; the Coachman manifesting a purpose of coming at the company with a silver salver, as though intent upon making a collection for his wife and family; the Analytical cutting him off at the sideboard. The superior stateliness, if not the superior generalship, of the Analytical prevails over a man who is as nothing off the box; and the Coachman, yielding up his salver, retires defeated.
Then, the Analytical, perusing a scrap of paper lying on the salver, with the air of a literary Censor, adjusts it, takes his time about going to the table with it, and presents it to Mr. Eugene Wrayburn. Whereupon the pleasant Tippins says aloud, "The Lord Chancellor has resigned!"
With distracting coolness and slowness — for he knows the curiosity of the Charmer to be always devouring — Eugene makes a pretense of getting out an eyeglass, polishing it, and reading the paper with difficulty, long after he has seen what is written on it. What is written on it in wet ink, is:
"Young Blight."
"Waiting?" says Eugene over his shoulder, in confidence, with the Analytical.
"Waiting," returns the Analytical in responsive confidence.
Eugene looks "Excuse me," toward Mrs. Veneering, goes out, and finds Young Blight, Mortimer's clerk, at the hall-door.
"You told me to bring him, sir, to wherever you was, if he come while you was out and I was in," says that discreet young gentleman, standing on tiptoe to whisper; "and I've brought him."
"Sharp boy. Where is he?" asks Eugene.
"He's in a cab, sir, at the door. I thought it best not to show him, you see, if it could be helped; for he's a-shaking all over, like &mdaash;" Blight's simile is perhaps inspired by the surrounding dishes of sweets — "like Glue Monge."
"Sharp boy again," returns Eugene. "I'll go to him."
Goes out straightway, and, leisurely leaning his arms on the open window of a cab in waiting, looks in at Mr. Dolls: who has brought his own atmosphere with him, and would seem from its odor to have brought it, for convenience of carriage, in a rum-cask.
"Now Dolls, wake up!"
"Mist Wrayburn? Drection! Fifteen shillings!"
After carefully reading the dingy scrap of paper handed to him, and as carefully tucking it into his waistcoat pocket, Eugene tells out the money; beginning incautiously by telling the first shilling into Mr. Dolls's hand, which instantly jerks it out of window; and ending by telling the fifteen shillings on the seat.
"Give him a ride back to Charing Cross, sharp boy, and there get rid of him."
Commentary:
James Mahoney's forty-fifth illustration for Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Household Edition (New York), 1875. The Chapman and Hall two-line caption for woodcut for the third book's seventeenth chapter, "A Social Chorus," is much more dramatic: "Now, Dolls, wake up!" "Mist Wrayburn? Direction! Fifteen shillings." The composite wood-engraving concerns Eugene Wrayburn's paying "Dolls" (the attorneys' derogatory nickname for Jenny Wren's father, Mr. Cleaver) drinking money for information about Lizzie Hexam's whereabouts. Eugene has been called away in the midst of the Veneerings' dinner-party to deal with the informant in a cab across the street, so that the mansion in the background is the Veneerings' townhouse, and Eugene is in formal attire suitable to such a society occasion. The youth standing beside the carriage is Young Blight, Mortimer Lightwood's Cockney law-clerk (his age and social status suggested by his cap), who, acting upon Eugene's instructions, has brought the informant with due haste. As the chapter, the third book, and the fifteenth installment (July 1865) close, the reader wonders what information the dipsomaniac Dolls has exchanged for the fifteen shillings. As the commentator for the London Review remarked in his 8 July 1865 assessment of this conclusion, "Altogether, the number for this month takes a considerable step towards the dénouement, and is consequently of greater interest than one or two previous issues" (cited in Grass 211).
Since it was his visual antecedent, Mahoney's 1875 treatment of the textual material is often his response to the original series of illustrations by young Marcus Stone, Dickens's 1860s serial and volume illustrator after Dickens's dropping Hablot Knight Browne, his principal illustrator for twenty-five years. Although Mahoney sometimes accepts Stone's notions, in Bella 'Righted' by the Golden Dustman and The Lovely Woman has her Fortune told, the pair of illustrations for the July 1865 or fifteenth monthly part in the British serialization, the Household Edition illustrator had no suitable model with which to close what had originally been the serial curtain. Here, then, instead of revising a Stone illustration, James Mahoney invents a scene that will keep readers on the edge of their seats as the fourth book, "A Turning," begins. The bearded, lanky Eugene at the carriage window is the same man, despite the formal dinner attire, seen in They almost ran against Bradley Headstone and He stood leaning by the door at Lizzie's side, but his interlocutor, Mr. Dolls, is only now making his first appearance in Mahoney's narrative-pictorial sequence. A rather undistinguished, elderly man without a hat, Mr. Dolls here does not much resemble the inebriate in The Person of the House and the Bad Child (serial installment 30 September 1864) and Three-Penn'orth Rum (May 1865).Stone's images of the drunken father are highly consistent, providing visual continuity between scenes.
James Mahoney seems to have neglected or thought little about rendering Mr. Dolls with any degree of authenticity, despite the fact that Dolls' alcohol addiction prompts him to betray Lizzie's hiding-place to Wrayburn (despite the scene his doing so will provoke with his stern daughter). The alcoholic incoherence of Dolls in the text helps to convince the reader of Dolls' dissolute character, motivating his determined acquisition of the intelligence desired by Wrayburn, another aspect of the book's pattern of surveillance. The American illustrator Sol Eytinge, Junior, seems to have based his plausible conception of Jenny's father upon that frowzy figure whom he found in the serial illustrations of Marcus Stone, but inexplicably the Household Edition has represented him merely in passing and just this once, when he is merely a nondescript face at a carriage window. Mahoney, in contrast to Stone and Eytinge, relies entirely on Dickens's text to render Dolls' role in the plot plausible, and send Eugene Wrayburn upriver to Plashwater Weir in Book Four.
Mod
Mary Lou and Peter, grandchildren on the way! How wonderful, how fun, just be warned...... My grandson asked me the other day how old I was and I replied 56, he then replied "wow, you're the oldest person I know!" Then his sister came by and stopped to brush my hair (she likes to for some reason) and she told me that my hair is beautiful, there are so many white hairs covering up all the brown it looks like I highlighted it.
Thinking of anniversaries, my dad was married twice, his first wife's name was Jean, and so was my mom's. Dad used to say he intentionally married another Jean, that way if he called her by the wrong name she would never know it. On the other hand, my mom's birthday is or was I suppose, February 7th and the first Jean's was on February 13th. He did get those confused occasionally ending with my mom not speaking to him for a week.
Tristram, I've often seen you without a beard, in all the times I've thought of what you looked like, a beard was never in the picture.
I'm back by the way.
YAY Kim's back :)
Mod
Welcome back.
Mod
Mod
Book 3 Chapter 15
James Mahoney
Household Edition 1875
Text Illustrated:
"But there was Mrs. Boff..."
What a fine illustration. The tied bundle of clothes on the floor, the backward glance, the window unobstructed and, if I am not mistaken, a full figure mirror that rises from the bundle of clothes.
I like the idea that Bella would have been reflected in the mirror. As she entered her room in the beginning of the novel, here she is reflected as she leaves. The difference now between Bella and the image in the mirror is that Bella has matured. She is able to both stand up for her beliefs and principles and, at the same time, recognize and acknowledge her obligation to Mr. Boffin.
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I now know why you are in the Dickens department - because your mum's birthday is actually on the same as Dickens's. By the same token, I should set up a group for the reading of Robespierre's writings - although my mother would never chop anybody's head off.
As to the beard, if you look at my photos, you'll see it.
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Thanks a lot for the illustrations: It will probably still take a great deal to win me over to the drawings by Stone and Mahoney because, all in all, I think they look very static compared to the lightness and dynamics I associate with Phiz's art. Nevertheless, I like the picture that shows Bella on leaving her second home at the Boffins'. This look back underscores the importance of her step and probably also the fact that she also knows what she is leaving behind. On the other hand, she is definitely aware of what she is going to win. It's also noteworthy that her dress is black while the stuff she leaves behind is wrapped in a white bundle. One might have thought the black-and-white-contrast would have been applied the other way round, but then the colour black may stand for a new level of maturity and seriuosness our heroine has achieved.
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I didn't look yet but I was wondering if you'll be able to play Santa Claus yet. :-)
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I now know why you are in the Dickens department - because your mum's birthday is actually on the same as Dickens's. By the same token, I should set up a group for the reading of Robespierre'..."
My mom used to have to admit when she got mad at dad over the birthday thing, that they got married on October 8th, the day of her first marriage, that way she would always remember it. :-)
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I didn't look yet but I was wondering if you'll be able to play Santa Claus yet. :-)"
Give my beard and me two more years, and then it will probably have the right length and colour.
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The Old Curiosity Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Great Expectations (other topics)A Tale of Two Cities (other topics)
Authors mentioned in this topic
Anthony Trollope (other topics)Anthony Trollope (other topics)
Jane Austen (other topics)
Did Bella ever mee..."
You're right, I was under the impression they were aware of one another, Mary Lou... But they have never met. And the Boffins's... Very good point!!
I also thought Dickens was playing upon the typical ... The beautiful, willful and naive woman, who couldn't tell her man apart from the one under a disguise-Very Happy this was not the case. However, she never knew him, as you have said.