File:Pa's Lodger and Pa's Daughter.jpg

"Pa's Lodger and Pa's Daughter" Marcus Stone

Wood engraving by Dalziel

14.6 cm high x 9.4 cm wide (framed).

Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Book Two ("Birds of a Feather"), Chapter Eight, "In Which an Innocent Elopement Occurs" [This part of the novel originally appeared in periodical form in Part 8, December 1864.] Dickens and his illustrator introduce the relationship between John Harmon (a. k. a., "Rokesmith"), the heir to a vast estate who has assumed another identity, and the struggling clerk's materialistic daughter, Bella Wilfer, in the December, 1864, part (Chapter 8 of the second book).

The young man offers to carry messages home for the young lady who has had the good fortune to be taken up by the Boffins and translated to their mansion, where Rokesmith has just been hired as Mrs. Boffin's "Secretary." Clearly his moral intention in the text is to upbraid the wilful Bella for neglecting her own family since the Boffins have translated her to a loftier sphere. His subtle goading provokes Bella to visit her parents (in the Boffins' coach, of course) and buy her father a new wardrobe. Stone's illustration extends the texts by providing Rokesmith with a pretext for being in the room, namely fetching or returning to their shelves several volumes for the Boffins, and by providing Bella with some theatrical "business," namely reading from an extremely slight but ornately covered volume that may be emblematic of Bella herself, elegantly and fashionably attired and coiffed, but rather shallow in terms of her underlying values. Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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