Online Exhibition: Character Sketches from the World of Charles Dickens
This exhibition celebrates one of the most enduring legacies of Charles Dickens's genius: the unforgettable characters he brought to life.
A seeker of corpses on the Thames River who robs them of their valuables, Hexam eventually becomes one himself after he is suspected of murder. “. . . Such dress as he wore seeming to be made out of the mud that begrimed his boat. “
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.
“Both as to his dress and to himself, he was of an overlapping rhinoceros build, with folds in his cheeks, and his forehead, and his eyelids, and his lips and his ears; but with bright, eager, childishly-inquiring grey eyes, under his ragged eyebrows, and broad-brimmed hat.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.
A huckster of ballads on a London street corner, Silas Wegg is “a knotty man,” who later tries to blackmail Boffin. “Sooth to say, he was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally. . . .”
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.
Nicodemus, or Noddy, Boffin is the confidential servant to a wealthy garbage contractor, who left him a fortune upon his death. He engages the barely literate Silas Wegg to read to him in order to improve his mind through literature.
FOC Darley. Illustrations from the Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens.
The surly butler of the high society Veneerings never speaks a word, but his thoughts about their phony friends make him one of Dickens’s funniest characters: “Chablis Sir? You wouldn’t if you knew what it was made of. . . . Come down and be poisoned, ye unhappy children of men!”
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.
Jenny Wren supports her drunken father by making dolls’ dresses. “A child – a dwarf – a girl – a something. . . . The queer little figure, and the queer but not ugly little face, with its bright grey eyes, were so sharp that the sharpness of the manner seemed unavoidable.”
Child Characters from Dickens. Illustrated by Arthur A. Dixon. London: Ernest Nistar
Fledgby is the owner of a moneylending business who has a hold on several characters in the novel. “Young Fledgby had a peachy cheek. . . and was an awkward, sandy-haired, small-eyed youth, exceeding slim, and prone to examination in the articles of whisker and moustache.”
Kyd. Illustrations of Character s in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.