"On the Track — Page 119"; Felix Octavius Carr Darley's frontispiece for "Our Mutual Friend" (volume 4) (original) (raw)

​

Passage Illustrated

"By George and the Draggin!" cried Riderhood, "if he ain't a going to bathe!" . . . Prone in another ditch (he had changed his ditch as his man had changed his position), and holding apart so small a patch of the hedge that the sharpest eyes could not have detected him, Rogue Riderhood watched the bather dressing. And now gradually came the wonder that he stood up, completely clothed, another man, and not the Bargeman. [Book Four, Ch. 7, "Better to be Cain than Abel," IV, 118-19]

Commentary: Bradley Headstone and Rogue Riderhood

Early reviewers noted the neurotic nature of the schoolmaster, and that he is what we today would call a "stalker," shadowing both Lizzie Hexam and Eugene Wrayburn; here, the stalker becomes the prey as Rogue Riderhood (now lock-keeper at Plashwater Weir Lock) determines to get to the bottom of Bradley Headstone's odd behaviour. Riderhood in his new situation has had ample opportunity to observe the comings and goings of the young lawyer ("T' other governor") on his frequent visits to Lizzie, who works at the paper-mill, and "The Governor," their stalker. School holidays have given Headstone the freedom to observe the pair, for which activity he has adopted the expedient of wearing clothing exactly like Riderhood's. Although all of these characters are what one contemporary reviewer termed "mere supernumeraries in the drama" (cited in Grass, 244), readers of the final numbers were apparently fascinated by how Dickens utilised the surveillance of the lock-keeper as a means of coherently developing the love-triangle that is likely to lead to murder.

In the frontispiece for the fourth and final "Household Edition" volume of 1866, the illustrator sets up a proleptic reading of Riderhood's following the activities of the jealous schoolmaster in what was originally Part 17 (September 1865 in Great Britain, October 1865 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in America). Merely studying the illustration, the reader cannot determine who is following whom by the river, but the identities of both men must have been fully apparent as the reader approached Book Four, Chapter 7, when, after a brutal assault on Wrayburn, his perceived rival, Headstone returns to the lock in order to implicate Riderhood himself. As the pair share a meal, Headstone accidentally cuts himself, spattering blood on Riderhood's clothes. Suspicious, the lock-master follows Headstone, and sees him changing back into his schoolmaster's clothes before throwing a bundle (the bloody disguise) into the river. Subsequent to the moment illustrated, Rogue immediately comes out of hiding once Headstone has left, and fishes the bundle out of the river. At the close of the episode the reader is left wondering whether Wrayburn will die as a result of the attack, and whether Riderhood will use the evidence to blackmail Headstone or whether he will turn it over to the police with an account of the schoolmaster's recent activities upriver. In the American serial, two parts yet remained for Dickens to resolve these plot complications by having Headstone and Riderhood kill one another in a sensational climax at the Plashwater Weir. The natural backdrop, one of Darley's strengths throughout his frontispieces, is almost tropical here, suggesting that this is not the Wordsworthian, mellow nature of the Betty Higdin frontispiece, but a Darwinian jungle whose only ethic is survival by strength and stealth. Since Dickens develops the narrative here from Riderhood's perspective, as the reader overhears Riderhood processing aloud what he is observing, Darley has appropriately placed the observer nearest the reader since Riderhood is a surrogate for the reader as the observer and overhearer of all the characters in the story. The juxtaposition of the two unknown men at the very beginning of the fourth volume sets up a series of questions and anticipations in the reader's mind that only a subsequent reading of the next hundred-odd pages can resolve.

Early illustrators such as Marcus Stone and Sol Eytinge, Junior, introduced readers to the "thoroughly decent young man of six-and-twenty" (vol. 2, p. 12), Bradley Headstone, in professional garb: "decent black coat and waistcoat, and decent white shirt, and decent formal black tie, and decent pantaloons of pepper and salt" (Book Two, Chapter 1, "Of an Educational Character"), but also attempted to communicate something of his disturbed, volatile personality in his proud, moody, and sullen expression. By introducing Headstone as a small figure in the distance here, Darley has had to forego the opportunity to provide visual cues to Headstone's disturbed psyche, so effectively realised in Stone's September 1865 (in America, October 1865) wood-engraving,Better to be Cain than Abel in which the self-styled murderer of Eugene Wrayburn begins to unravel. The only clue that Darley provides to the identity of the stalker in the foreground is the fur hat which he grips in his left hand, almost a signature for this character seen in the original Stone illustration The Bird of Prey brought down (Chapter 14), although this feature is not seen in such later illustrations of the rascal as Kyd's Player's Cigarette Card Number 33, Rogue Riderhood (1910).

Bradley Headstone in the original and later editions, 1865-1875

Left: Marcus Stone's September 1865 serial illustration of Bradley Headstone in the throes of dementia, Better to be Cain than Abel.​ Centre: Sol Eytinge, Junior's study of the​ highly strung schoolmaster and his disciple, Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam(1867). Right: James Mahoney's Household Edition illustration of the lawyers and the schoolmaster, They almost ran against Bradley Headstone (1875). [Click on images to enlarge them.]

Above: Marcus Stone's winding up of ​the Headstone-Riderhood subplot at Plashwater Mill Weir, Not to be Shaken off (Part 19, November 1865). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Bibliography

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Cohen, Jane Rabb. "The Illustrators of Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Marcus Stone, Charles Collins, Luke Fildes." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Canton: Ohio U. P., 1980. Pp. 203-228.

Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Character Sketches from Dickens. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1888.

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Last modified 14 November 2015