Mr. Wegg and Mr. Venus in Consultation
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
7.5 cm wide by 10.1 cm high
Illustration for chapter 7 of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in the Lee & Shepard (Boston), and Charles T. Dillingham (New York) 1870 Illustrated Household Edition.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
While Dickens in "Mr. Wegg Looks after Himself" (chapter 7) establishes Mr. Venus's character by detailed description of the natural curiosities with which his shop abounds and his "sallow face with weak eyes, surmounted by a tangle of reddish-dusty hair" (48), Eytinge is clearly more interested in Mr. Venus's one-legged customer, Silas Wegg. Here, Eytinge illustrates a specific moment in order to underscore Wegg's obsession with retrieving his severed limb. Dickens, interested in Venus, describes him minutely from the front:
The owner of the face has no cravat on, and has opened his tumbled shirt-collar to work with the more ease. For the same reason he has no coat on: only a loose waistcoat over his yellow linen. His eyes are like the over-tried eyes of an engraver, but he is not that; his expression and stoop are like those of a shoemaker, but he is not that. [48]
Eytinge, on the other hand, shows him from the back, and focuses on Wegg:
"I don't know how it comes about. Stand up a minute. Hold the light." Mr. Venus takes from a corner by his chair, the bones of a leg and foot, beautifully pure, and put together with exquisite neatness. These he compares with Mr. Wegg's leg; that gentleman looking on, as if he were being measured for a riding-boot. "No, I don't know how it is, but so it is. You have got a twist in that bone, the best of my belief. I never saw the likes of you." [50]
The above excerpts reveal that Eytinge is attempting to realize a single textual moment, studying Wegg's reaction to seeing his missing limb. The mummified baby in the jar and the articulated skeleton (upper right) and the skull and leg-bone underneath Venus's chair suggest rather than delineate the contents of the shop, and of course his cup of tea sits on the table by Wegg, ready to be consumed. But the focus of the piece is clearly Wegg himself, a pirate in middle-class garb, his neanderthal-like head illuminated by the flaring candle.
Since the "illustrated Household Edition" of the novel post-dates both Dickens's second visit to America (November 1867 through April 1868) and Eytinge's to England (May-June 1869), it is reasonable to assume that the illustrator had ample opportunity to discuss Dickens's own conception of the novel, as well as to study for some time Marcus Stone's original Sixties' style illustrations for the Chapman and Hall (May 1864 through November 1865) serialisation, so that the image of Silas Wegg is informed by both Dickens's conception and Stone's realisations of the character.
Last modified 26 October 2010