Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
7.5 cm wide by 10 cm high
Illustration for Book 2, chapter 1, 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.
To illustrate "Of an Educational Character," Eytinge contrasts the Poe-esque school-master and his self-possessed pupil teacher. Although the American illustrator was undoubtedly able to mine the rich vein of visual material in the 1865 Chapman and Hall volume, Marcus Stone in his extensive narrative-pictorial series provided him with no usable model for the obsessed school-master, Bradley Headstone. To suggest the mania which will subsequently overwhelm Headstone, Eytinge depicts him as anxiously studying the viewer as he gnaws his fingernails. He grips his chair, as if he were about to rise. Across from him, too small as yet to occupy easily the adult-size chair, duplicate to that on which the master sits uneasily, Charley Hexam dangles his feet above the schoolroom floor. Charley seems to be studying the master as much as the textbook before him. The large maps on the back wall and the students in the middle ground establish the physical setting. No aspect of the picture, however, suggests the topic of Charley and Bradley's conversation: a visit to Lizzie Hexam. As opposed to the situation described in the text, the two do not interact in this dual character study; the Jaggers-like right forefinger is not in one of the bottonholes of the boy's coat, and the master interrogates his acolyte about his sister.
Although Eytinge captures well Headstone's stiffness of manner, he looks older than twenty-six, and hardly seems a repository of knowledge or human calculator; rather, the illustrator has attempted to convey certain key traits of his character, notably his suspicious nature, his constrained manner, his smouldering but also "naturally slow" nature. Perhaps the plate illustrates this single line: “He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should be missing from his mental warehouse and taking stock to assure himself” (135).
Last modified 31 October 2010