File:Not to be shaken off (Nov., 1865).jpg

To complete the narrative-pictorial sequence and wind up the subplot involving Bradley Headstone and Rogue Riderhood, Marcus Stone takes us back to the Upper Thames lock at Plashwater Mill Weir, although the beautifully drawn lock is actually on the Regent's Canal (constructed from 1814-1820; modern photograph), near London.

Consider the plight of young Marcus Stone as Our Mutual Friend was winding up its serial run and his mentor, the greatest of the great Victorian authors, Charles Dickens, had fled to the continent to recuperate from the shock of the Staplehurst railway accident. Although Stone had had a relatively free hand, Dickens had been accustomed to inspect his drafts and make suggestions for revision. Now, as he prepared the novel's culminating illustrations, Marcus Stone lacked that resource. Instead of choosing a moment of great comedy by depicting Silas Wegg's receiving a richly deserved comeuppance at the hands of Sloppy, Stone had chosen a sentimental moment, Bella in the nursery with her baby. But one significant subplot remained — the blackmailing of Bradley Headstone by Rogue Riderhood, who has the clothes that the schoolmaster wore when, dressed like the waterman, he had attempted to murder Eugene Wrayburn. How should he proceed?

Other illustrators — notably Hablot Knight Browne— would have depicted the fierce struggle between the schoolmaster and his blackmailer on the very edge of the Plashwater Weir Mill Lock, but such a sensational scene, full of violent passion, was evidently not to Stone's less than melodramatic taste. Instead, he chose to create a highly realistic setting (modelled closely on the upper lock of the Regent's Canal, completed in August, 1820, in what is now the "Little Venice" of Maida Vale, one of central London's more exclusive residential areas) and place the adversaries in it moments before the schoolmaster's attack, thereby keeping the reader in suspense until the last possible moment. And, in the process, the realist has created an evocative landscape portrait: the Thames lock covered in snow, the very picturesque nature of which is foiled by the duel of relentless wills transpiring in the letter-press adjacent to it. Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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