In the Lock-Keeper's House — Marcus Stone's first August 1865 illustration for "Our Mutual Friend"

In the Lock-Keeper's House

Marcus Stone

Wood engraving by Dalziel

13 cm high x 9.2 cm wide, vignetted (facing p. 554).

Stone's illustration for Book 4, "A Turning," Chapter 1, "Setting Traps," appeared in the August, 1865, instalment. The precise moment captured in the illustration must have been at first difficult for the serial reader to determine because there are two such moments in the text, and Stone has provided few clues as to which textual passage is the basis for the illustration of the scene at Plashwater Weir-Mill Lock. [See below for commentary and passage illustrated.]

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 their initial meeting at the lock on the upper Thames, Rogue Riderhood, now installed as the keeper of the lock, studies the schoolmaster's uncharacteristic mode of dress:

Truly, Bradley Headstone had taken careful note of the honest man's dress in the course of that night-walk they had had together. He must have committed it to memory, and slowly got it by heart. It was exactly reproduced in the dress he now wore. And whereas, in his own schoolmaster clothes, he usually looked as if they were the clothes of some other man, he now looked, in the clothes of some other man or men, as if they were his own. [548]

Having switched his "rusty colourless wisp" (551) of a neckerchief for "a conspicuous bright red neckerchief stained black here and there by wear," Riderhood waits to see if Headstone, when he returns, will take note, and whether he will subsequently make a similar change in his attire (the pages' running heads being "Riderhood's Device," p. 551, and "The Test of the Red Neckerchief," p. 553). Sure enough, Headstone returns after ascertaining that Wrayburn has decided to stay the night at an Angler's Inn. Bradley Headstone rests on the cot in the lock-house of Rogue Riderhood before taking up his surveillance of Eugene Wrayburn in hopes of locating Lizzie Hexam.

Riderhood, leaning back in his wooden arm-chair with his arms folded on his breast, looked at him [Headstone] lying with his right hand clenched in his sleep and his teeth set, until a film came over his own sight, and he slept too. [553]

This, at first blush, would appear to be the moment realised. However, such a moment occurs again, three pages later. Headstone then returns after an intervening night and again avails himself of Riderhood's cot and spartan hospitality. On this second occasion, Riderhood notices that Headstone, still dressed in a manner almost identical to Riderhood himself, is now wearing a red bandanna around his neck. That Headstone is attempting to emulate Riderhood's manner of dress so precisely throws the waterman into a "brown study," in which he meditates upon Headstone's possible intentions. On this second night, amidst a lightning storm that serves as an appropriate psychological backdrop for the schoolmaster's vengeful motivations, Riderhood, ignorant of Headstone's plan, studies the sleeper:

Riderhood sat down in his wooden arm-chair, and looked through the window at the lightning, and listened to the thunder. But, his thoughts were far from being absorbed by the thunder and the lightning, for again and again and again he looked very curiously at the exhausted man upon the bed. [555]

Riderhood, again in his armchair, is studying the sleeping schoolmaster as the chapter concludes. Consequently, although the illustration does not suggest the lightning storm outside, the passage from the August instalment realised in this illustration is likely this:

Softly and slowly, he opened the coat and drew it back.

The draggling ends of a bright-red neckerchief were then disclosed, and he had even been at the pains of dipping parts of it in some liquid, to give it the appearance of having become stained by wear. With a much-perplexed face, Riderhood looked from it to the sleeper, and from the sleeper to it, and finally crept back to his chair, and there, with his hand to his chin, sat long in a brown study, looking at both. [556]

Whether Stone has fulfilled his intention — to engage the reader in the process of detection in order to underscore the importance of the scene in heightening the story's suspense and signalling Headstone's intention to murder Wrayburn — is far more germane to a consideration of the illustration than its technical fidelity to the text as a realisation. The reader, like Riderhood, is instructed by the illustration to consider Headstone's underlying intentions in shadowing Wrayburn as he rows upriver.

References

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

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.

Last modified 20 July 2011