SOURCE: “Dickens and Popular Culture: Silas Wegg's Ballads in Our Mutual Friend,” in The Dickensian, Vol. 86, No. 3, Autumn, 1990, pp. 142-57.

[In the following essay, Dvorak examines Dickens's use of Victorian popular ballads to illuminate the character of Silas Wegg and to reinforce the themes of Our Mutual Friend.]

Recently (in The Dickensian, 1972), Lillian Ruff reminded us that ‘Dickens's novels are a rich source of information about popular vocal music in the first half of the nineteenth century’, and she noted more than 200 songs ‘of social and historical interest’, suggesting that Dickens's original readers would have ‘quickly recognized these scraps of song, and mentally heard the tune’.¹ The ballad literature which Dickens has Silas Wegg distort in Our Mutual Friend is a particularly good case in point in this regard: the fifteen ballads from which Wegg quotes were very familiar to both Dickens and his readers (middle class and lower class alike) and represent a rich and diverse popular culture which they shared.² But in using these ballads Dickens seems to have had much more in mind than just to add ‘charm and quaintness’ to Wegg's dialogue or to merely provide comedy or humour in his novel. Rather, more importantly, Dickens uses the ballads to reveal and refine the nature of Wegg's character and thereby develop (or at least reinforce) his major themes in Our Mutual Friend. Moreover, it is an indication of Dickens's particular genius as a popular artist that he is able so clearly to capture the attention and enrich the understanding of his readers by artistically shaping this familiar and popular ballad material into an important thematic statement about his own times: in effect, he manages to ‘teach’ his readers important moral truths, while engaging them in the delightful parade of many of his and their favourite musical tunes.

In the amount of space Dickens gives to him, Silas Wegg is one of the most important minor characters in Our Mutual Friend, appearing as a leading figure in nine chapters of the novel, and effectively embodying Dickens's central concern about the pursuit of money as a false goal (involving such additional themes as avarice, predation, search for identity, pride, education, and moral reformation).³ When we first meet Wegg in Bk. I, Ch. 5, he combines traits of the Victorian ballad-monger and those of the incipient miser. His stall, with its ‘choice collection of half-penny ballads’, is typical of that of other ballad-hawkers of the 1860's described by Mayhew and others (including Dickens's contributors to All the Year Round);⁴ and his placard is itself his own most-loved ballad:

Errands gone
On with fi
Delity By
Ladies and Gentleman
I remain
Your humble Serv(t):
Silas Wegg

Wegg's placard suggests that he most likely has learned to read and write from a love of popular ballads. And it is really a similar hunger for learning and literature which motivates Noddy Boffin to approach Wegg for the first time in this chapter to ask him to become his ‘literary man’. For Boffin has earlier heard Wegg sing his ballads to the butcher-boy and been very much taken with admiration for the songs themselves and for Wegg's felicity in singing them. Ironically, however, it is precisely Boffin's request of Wegg, leading as it does to Wegg's self-congratulatory self-deception about the importance of his role as Boffin's reader, that initiates the process of his corruption by avarice. I do not think that Dickens is implying at this point that ballad-sellers are necessarily ridiculous, exploitative, or self-deceptive, but he is revealing his ambivalence about Victorian ballad culture. Evidently he feels sympathy for Boffin's aspirations and sees ballads as one way for him to satisfy them. But, at the same time, he recognizes that the aspirations of the illiterate are often exploited by unscrupulous ballad-sellers like Wegg who crave only money. And this then is the theme he develops in the subsequent dialogue (still Bk. I, Ch. 5) between Boffin and Wegg about poetry, which eventually leads Wegg to quote for the first time from a popular ballad.

As Wegg explains to Boffin in their conversation, poetry ‘would come dearer’ because ‘he should expect to be paid for its weakening effect on his mind’, and by the time he is done with Boffin, who had hoped poetry would be a gift from a friend genuinely moved by feeling, Wegg has tricked the honest Dustman into agreeing to pay ‘double the money’ for his quoting poetry (p. 95). Not surprisingly, the immediate result is Wegg ‘drops’ into poetry to pretend a long familiarity with the ‘Decline-And-Fall-Off-The-Rooshan Empire’ (the first book he has consented to read for Boffin):⁵

‘But know him? Old familiar declining and falling off the Rooshan? Rather, sir! Ever since I was not so high as your stick. Ever since my eldest brother left our cottage to enlist into the army. On which occasion, as the ballad that was made about it describes:

Beside that cottage door, Mr Boffin,
          A girl was on her knees;
She held aloft a snowy scarf, Sir,
          Which (my eldest brother noticed) fluttered in the breeze.
She breathed a prayer for him, Mr Boffin;
          A prayer he could not hear.
And my eldest brother lean'd upon his sword, Mr Boffin,
          And wiped away a tear.’

(p. 96)

Noddy Boffin is ‘much impressed’ by Wegg's ‘family circumstance’ and his ‘friendly disposition’ in quoting verse, but Dickens's readers, who would have recognized immediately that Wegg was distorting the second stanza of Thomas Bayly's ‘The Soldier's Tear,’ instead would have been amused and instructed by Wegg's actions. Bayly's ballad was one of the most popular sentimental parlour songs of the nineteenth century, celebrating the English soldier's courage and genuine feeling for his country and its people (thus his ‘tear’). In using the poem, Dickens makes it quite clear that in attempting to solidify his hold on Boffin, Wegg is expressing his mercenary designs, for he has transformed a song affirming values supportive of the stability of the social community into a verse validating his own greed, which is indeed a genuine threat to any moral community.

Essentially the same pattern continues throughout Our Mutual Friend whenever Dickens uses the popular ballads to develop or refine Wegg's character. Thus on the next four occasions during which Wegg sings ballads he does so to continue his ‘friendly gesture’ to gain as much money from the Boffins as he can, all the while revealing to the reader his progressive corruption by avarice. For example, when we next hear Wegg quoting poetry it is in Bk. I, Ch. 15, when he is reported complimenting Mrs Boffin on her coming into possession of ‘his’ house (the one in front of which he kept his stall) with the lines

‘The gay, the gay and festive scene,
The halls, the halls of dazzling light.’

(p. 230)

And Wegg adds on this occasion that he ‘would be willing to put himself out of the way’ in order to cheer up Mrs Boffin should she become depressed, when he goes on to play on the lines

‘I'll tell thee how the maiden wept, Mrs Boffin,
When her true love was slain, ma'am,
And how her broken spirit slept, Mrs Boffin,
And never woke again, ma'am.
I'll tell thee (if agreeable to Mr Boffin) how the steed drew nigh,
And left his lord afar;
And if my tale (which I hope Mr Boffin might excuse)
          should make you sigh,
I'll strike the light guitar.’

(p. 230)

The poem Wegg is appropriating for his own purposes is H. S. Van Dyke's well-known ‘The Light Guitar’, a parlour song of melancholy love and death, and implied seduction. Wegg's use of the ballad (especially his interjections) is wonderfully comic, but more importantly it is also another indication of his intensifying mercenariness, for so eager has he become to gain money from the Boffins that he has taken a poem totally inappropriate to celebrate a house-buying or to overcome depression and tried to transform it into a festive song. Though he succeeds in duping the Boffins, who are highly pleased, he also reveals to the aware reader that he neither respects the Boffins integrity nor that of the poetry he so crassly distorts, and he suggests as well that he will seek to ‘seduce by poetry’ both Mr and Mrs Boffin in his pursuit of their wealth.

However, the full extent of Wegg's mercenary designs on the Boffins is not yet clear at this point in Our Mutual Friend, either to Wegg himself or to the reader (the Boffins remain ignorant altogether still). But these designs are pretty much clarified when Wegg next appears at Boffin's Bower (still Bk. I. Ch. 15), to once again drop into poetry, no less than three times in succession. The circumstances are telling. Boffin has decided to hire Rokesmith as his secretary and he is concerned that Wegg will be ‘liable to jealousy’ (p. 234). For, as the narrator explains, ‘The man of low cunning had, of course, acquired a mastery over the man of high simplicity. The mean man had, of course, got the better of the generous man’ (p. 234). Consequently, when Wegg appears at the Bower, Boffin is prepared to offer him the job as its resident caretaker to keep him content:

‘What do you think,’ said Mr Boffin, ‘of not keeping a stall, Wegg?’

‘I think, sir,’ replied Wegg, ‘that I should like to be shown the gentleman prepared to make it worth my while!’

‘Here he is,’ said Mr Boffing.

Mr Wegg was going to say, My Benefactor, and had said My Bene, when a grandiloquent change came over him.

‘No, Mr Boffin, not you, sir. Anybody but you. Do not fear, Mr Boffin, that I shall contaminate the premises which your gold has bought, with my lowly pursuits. I am aware, sir, that it would not become me to carry on my little traffic under the windows of your mansion. I have already thought of that, and taken my measures. No need to be bought out, sir. Would Stepney Fields be considered intrusive? If not remote enough, I can go remoter. In the words of the poet's song, which I do not quite remember:

“Thrown on the wide world, doom'd to wander and roam,
Bereft of my parents, bereft of a home,
A stranger to something and what's his name joy.
Behold Little Edmund, the poor Peasant Boy.”

—And equally,’ said Mr Wegg, repairing the want of direct application in the last line, ‘behold myself on a similar footing!’

(p. 235-36)

This dialogue, with Wegg attempting ineffectually to quote from John Parry's immensely popular ‘The Peasant Boy’, finally makes clear Wegg's motive in trying to get the Boffins to buy ‘his’ mansion: he believed that if they did he himself would be in a position to be ‘bought off’. And, in this context, Parry's ballad provides a nice irony against Wegg, which Dickens's readers must have caught, for the song celebrates a poor peasant boy who, unlike Wegg, is ‘willing’ to ‘labour’ and ‘toil’ but cannot find work and so must wander and roam without a home, truly ‘a stranger to pleasure, comfort and joy’ (the line which Wegg cannot remember).

Boffin, however, is taken in by Wegg's resort to poetry, noting that Wegg is ‘too sensitive’. As their conversation continues, Wegg attempts to exploit Boffin's feelings about his sensitivity hoping that he will indeed be pensioned-off, but ironically the honest Dustman fools him with emphasizing that Wegg will have to work ‘to deserve’ money. Significantly, Wegg's response to Boffin's assertion is to again turn to poetry:

‘That, sir,’ replied Mr Wegg, cheering up bravely, ‘is quite another pair of shoes. Now, my independence as a man is again elevated. Now, I no longer

“Weep for the hour,
When to Boffines bower,
The Lord of the valley with offers came;
Neither does the moon hide her light
From the heavens to-night.
And weep behind her clouds o'er any individual in the present Company's shame.”

—Please to proceed, Mr Boffin.’

(p. 236)

From one point of view, Wegg's recovery from his disappointment by exploiting lines from Tom Moore's popular seduction ballad ‘Evelyn's Bower’ is ingenious: Wegg does dupe Boffin again, even eliciting from him a ‘Thank'ee’ for his confidence and dropping into poetry (p. 236). But, ironically, Dickens has also provided his readers with another telling sign: Boffin is hardly Moore's ‘Lord of the Valley’ seeking with ‘false vows’ to seduce Wegg; but Wegg is trying to seduce Boffin, by an appeal to poetry. Wegg's avariciousness has indeed intensified to a deplorable degree.

Nevertheless, Wegg is not yet finished with poetry on this occasion. Having finally been offered the job of keeper of the Bower—with assurances that he will thereby gain additional moneys—Wegg makes a poetical acceptance:

‘Mr Boffin, consider it done. Say no more, sir, not a word more. My stall and I are for ever parted. The collection of ballads will in future be reserved for private study, with the object of making poetry tributary … Tributary, to friendship, Mr Boffin, don't allow yourself to be made uncomfortable by the pang it gives me to part from my stock and stall. Similar emotion was undergone by my own father when promoted for his merits from his occupation as a waterman to a situation under Government. His Christian name was Thomas. His words at that time (I was then an infant, but so deep was their impression on me, that I committed them to memory) were:

“Then farewell, my trim-built wherry,
Oars and coat and badge farewell!
Never more at Chelsea Ferry
Shall your Thomas take a spell!”

—My father got over it, Mr Boffin, and so shall I.’

(p. 237)

So much for Wegg's fidelity to his poetical stock and stall! But at least Wegg's direct quote from Charles Dibdin's famous ‘Poor Tom!’ does help to convince Boffin that he has successfully worked out an arrangement with Wegg and need have no further concern. However, Dickens's aware readers would have known better, for Dibdin's song is richly ironic in this context. In the opera The Waterman, ‘Poor Tom!’ represents a bogus melodramatic threat by the hero Tom Hugg against the heroine Wilelmina that if she continues to be indecisive about her suit he will join a man-of-war to pursue death and thereby cause her grief. But, unlike Tom Tugg, Silas Wegg is dishonest in his protestations: he has no genuine feeling for Boffin, nor does he desire to be Boffin's friend; in fact, his ballad represents a declaration of war against Boffin's wealth, for it is becoming clear in Our Mutual Friend that his avariciousness is one thing Wegg will never get over.

When we next encounter Wegg (Bk. II, Ch. 7), he has become firmly entrenched in the Bower; and we discover that Boffin's fear that Wegg would become jealous over Rokesmith becoming secretary has been realized. But, though Wegg complains that he has been ‘banished’ to the Bower, he also takes advantage of his presence there to search the Dustmounds for hidden wealth. And in this regard Wegg again turns to poetry (he cannot help himself), as he discovers that he needs the assistance of Venus to perpetrate his ‘friendly move’ on Boffin. For example, when he tries to convince Venus to help him scavenge through the dust mounds to ferret out old Harmon's treasure, including any wills or codicils that Boffin may have hidden, Wegg breaks into song:

‘As one that the poet might have had his eye on, in writing the national naval words:

“Helm a-weather, now lay her close,
          Yard arm and yard arm she lies;
Again, cried I, Mr Venus, give her t'other dose,
          Man shrouds and grapple, sir, or she flies!”’

(p. 355-56)

On this occasion, Wegg is creating his own version of ‘The Tar for All Weathers’, Charles Dibdin's very popular idealized celebration of the English sailor—the man of courage, duty, and perseverance who nobly and philosophically accepts his work in life—in order to flatter Venus into believing that their plan to rob Boffin is indeed noble and right. Of course the ironic contrast between Dibdin's admirable sailor and the mercenary Wegg, to Wegg's discredit, would not have been missed by Dickens's readers.

For the moment, however, Wegg does succeed in entrapping Venus in his schemes, and he assures him, again echoing Dibdin, that in their ‘friendly move’ against Boffin ‘you will have a glorious object to rouse you’, in ‘secrecy, fidelity, and perseverance’ (p. 357-58). Nevertheless, by the next time we see Wegg and Venus in Our Mutual Friend (Bk. III, Ch. 6), Venus is beginning to have serious doubts about Wegg and their ‘friendly move’. And this time even Wegg's three efforts at poetry do not pacify Venus. Wegg tries poetry immediately on this occasion, since Venus greets him coldly:

‘Walk in brother,’ said Silas, clapping him on the shoulder, and take your seat in my chimley corner; for what says the ballad?

“No malice to dread, sir,
And no falsehood to fear,
But truth to delight me, Mr Venus,
And I forget what to cheer.
Li toddle de om dee.
And something to guide,
My ain fireside, sir,
My ain fireside.”

(p. 538)

Wegg is trying to quote from Elizabeth Hamilton's popular ‘My Ain Fireside’, and his distortions and memory lapses, which Dickens's readers would have caught, reveal that by this time in Our Mutual Friend he has become so single-minded that all he can think of is the falsehood and malice he actually intends toward Venus. That is the ‘truth’ which delights him, of course, and consequently he cannot remember that in the ballad it is friendship which is supposed to cheer him, with the ‘fireside’ standing as a metaphor for the happiness and peace of mind which come from living free of the very pursuit of wealth which he so craves, with all of the ‘flattery’ and ‘boastings’ which go with such a false pursuit.

Apparently Venus himself senses that in his poetry Wegg is being less than honest and friendly on this occasion, moreover, for he is not moved by the attempted flattery. But Wegg, not daunted, tries verse a second time:

‘We'll devote the evening, brother,’ exclaimed Wegg, ‘to prosecute our friendly move. And afterwards, crushing a flowing wine-cup—which I allude to brewing rum and water—we'll pledge one another. For what says the Poet?

“And you needn't Mr Venus be your black bottle,
For surely I'll be mine,
And we'll take a glass with a slice of lemon in it to which your're partial,
For auld lang syne.”’

(p. 539)

Of course the lines with which Wegg is trying to win Venus this time are from Robert Burns's wildly famous ‘Auld Lang Syne’; and in his attempt to quote Burns's last stanza (while evidently thinking of the rest of the poem as well) again Wegg signals that he simply cannot understand what real friendship is: ironically, as Dickens's readers would have known, Burns's ‘cup o' kindness’ pledged between trusting, loving friends has become a comic ‘glass with a slice of lemon in it’. Though Wegg's ‘flow of quotation’ may not be very good poetry, once again it exposes perfectly his exploitative, mercenary attitude toward Venus.

Still, for all of his poetic efforts, Wegg has not allayed Venus's doubts about the wisdom of digging in the Harmon dust mounds; in fact, Venus has about decided to give up. So, predictably, Wegg's response is a third try at poetry:

‘Charge, Chester, charge
On, Mr Venus, on!’

(p. 539)

As a last resort, Wegg is trying out Scott's Marmion on Venus. The lines are from Canto VI, Stanza 23, celebrating Marmion's selfless devotion to country and liberty to the very end of his life. As Dickens's readers would have seen at once (for even schoolboys knew the lines), Wegg's use of Scott is ludicrous, though a quite understandable reflection of his mercenary character: ironically, by this time in Our Mutual Friend, Wegg perceives himself as an heroic figure like Marmion locked in a noble battle to the death, pursuing the only object which he values—money—and he sees Venus as a fellow soldier who needs buoying up, by poetical means.

Not surprisingly, however, once again Wegg fails to excite Venus, whose resolution to extricate himself from the ‘friendly move’ is strengthened when Boffin arrives at the Bower and Wegg reads about the misers from Merryweather's Lives and Anecdotes and Kirby's Wonderful Museum (Bk. III, Ch. 6). For, though Wegg learns nothing from these stories about the misers' despicable behaviour, Venus does—that Wegg himself is an avaricious miser who cannot be trusted—and this lesson is reinforced when, after the reading, Wegg entertains murderous thoughts about Boffin, finally admitting to Venus that he has in fact already discovered a Harmon will which he has concealed from him, even while he was trying to convince him through poetry to continue searching the dust mounds. Clearly, at this point in the novel, Venus (and the reader) must suspect that Wegg's avarice has driven him to such a ‘pitch of insatiable appetite’ (p. 552) that he has become mentally unbalanced. Yet, rather quickly, Wegg regains the appearance of sanity (in Bk. III, Ch. 7), again taking up the ‘disguise’ as Venus's ‘brother’. Of course, from his point of view, Wegg now has a serious problem: he must regain control over Venus by somehow concealing the full extent of his duplicity. And, not surprisingly, once again Wegg's method is to try to overwhelm Venus with more verse, as in this description of how he found the Harmon will:

‘On a certain day, sir, I happened to be walking in the yard—taking my lonely round—for, in the words of a friend of my own family, the author of All's Well arranged as a duet:

‘Deserted, as you will remember Mr Venus, by the waning moon,
When starts, it will occur to you before I mention it, proclaim night's cheerless noon,
On tower, fort, or tented ground,
The sentry walks his lonely round,
The sentry walks!”

—under those circumstances, sir, I happened to be walking in the yard early one afternoon, and happened to have an iron rod in my hand, with which I have been sometimes accustomed to beguile the monotony of a literary life, when I struck it against an object not necessary to trouble you by naming—’

(p. 555)

Wegg is stalling, trying to avoid revealing to Venus the contents of the will by quoting from the popular ‘All's Well’ which appeared in Thomas Dibdin's often performed The English Fleet. Like so many of Charles Dibdin's ballads, Thomas Dibdin's duet is a tribute to the English sailor, summarizing the play's main theme: that ‘The post of watchman with a British captain is one too full of honour to decline; and, while English sailors are at hand to assist us, there's little to fear that the word will be “All's well.”’⁶ As Dickens's readers could not have missed, ironically, once again the crafty Wegg has tried to present himself as a noble, heroic figure, while in fact he remains a scavenger trying to foist his corrupt value system upon Venus—and England.

Nevertheless, Wegg's attempt to put off Venus does not work: slowly but surely Venus forces the fact about the Harmon will from Wegg, then the will itself, which he reads and takes into safe-keeping. To be sure, Wegg is not happy with the turn of events, Venus has become determined to resist him, even when Wegg makes one last attempt at winning him over with still more flattering poetry:

‘There you sit, sir, in the midst of your works, looking as if you'd been called upon for Home, Sweet Home, and was obleeging the company!

“A exile from home splendour dazzles in vain,
O give you your lovely Preparations again,
The birds stuffed so sweetly that can't be expected to come at your call,
Give you these with the peace of mind dearer than all.
Home, Home, Home, sweet Home!”

—Be it ever’, added Mr Wegg, in prose as he glanced about the shop, ‘ever so ghastly, all things considered there's no place like it.’

(p. 562)

By referring to John Howard Payne's immensely popular ‘Home, Sweet Home’, Wegg is trying to find out about Venus's relationship with Pleasant Riderhood, evidently in the hope that this knowledge will allow him to regain some power over Venus. As usual, Wegg reshapes Payne's ballad rather creatively, as Dickens's readers would have noted, for clearly he is confused and upset, straining to almost offer genuine sympathy to Venus. Finally, however, for Wegg the virtues of the home and hearth which ‘Home, Sweet Home’ celebrates are insufficient and he remains dazzled by the very ‘splendour’ of riches which the poem seeks to expose as false. Thus Venus and his home must remain to Wegg ‘ever so ghastly’, ‘worthless for his purpose’; and ‘casting about for ways and means of dissolving the connexion without loss of money, reproaching himself for having been betrayed into an avowal of his secret, and complimenting himself beyond measure on his purely accidental good luck’ (that Venus still seems to want money, in part), Wegg sets out from Venus's shop to go to Boffin's house where he hovers ‘in the superior character of its Evil Genius’ (p. 563-64). For, by this point in Our Mutual Friend, Wegg has succumbed entirely to his greed, and what he misperceives in Boffin has become only too true of himself: ‘he's GROWN TOO FOND OF MONEY’ (p. 565).

So far we have seen Wegg trying to manipulate by means of poetry both Boffin and Venus in his efforts to acquire money. In the remaining chapters of Our Mutual Friend in which he appears, Wegg's desire for money intensifies into a lust for power, which, when particularly inflamed, he indulges in by dropping into poetry. For Wegg has now set about preparing ‘a grindstone for Mr Boffin's nose’ (Bk. III, Ch. 14). The first time we see Wegg in his new role is when he pays a visit to Venus's shop (with Boffin hidden behind the alligator observing) to see the will, the thought of which is enough to cause him to break into verse (still Bk. III, Ch. 14):

‘If you please, partner,’ said Wegg, rubbing his hands. ‘I wish to see it jintly with yourself. Or, in similar words to some that was set to music some time back:

“I wish you to see it with your eyes,
And I will pledge with mine.”’

(p. 644)

In his enthusiasm, Wegg is appropriating lines from Ben Jonson's popular ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’, which Dickens's readers would have known as a beautiful pledge of unselfish love, contrasting sharply with Wegg's pledge of avaricious lust, reflected also in a speech he makes to Venus (and the hidden Boffin) right after quoting from Jonson's ballad:

‘I tell you what, Mr Venus; it comes to this; I must be overbearing with Boffin, or I shall fly into several pieces. I can't contain myself when I look at him. Every time I see him putting his hand in his pocket, I see him putting it into my pocket. Every time I hear him jingling his money, I hear him taking liberties with my money. Flesh and blood can't bear it!’

(p. 645)

Sadly, in his lust for the power which he believes Boffin's money can bring him, Wegg has mentally appropriated Boffin's wealth. Yet Wegg is still not at his ‘worst’: that state in which he desires an insolent ‘revenge’ on Boffin for making him, Silas Wegg, actually work for money. And, significantly, just as Wegg begins to reach his worst state, he tries to draw back from total vileness, through poetry:

‘… your speaking countenance remarks, Mr Venus, that I'm duller and savager than usual. Perhaps I have allowed myself to brood too much. Begone, dull Care! 'Tis gone, sir. I've looked in upon you, and empire resumes her sway. For, as the song says—subject to your correction, sir—

“When the heart of a man is depressed with cares,
The mist is dispelled if Venus appears.
Like the notes of a fiddle, you sweetly, sir, sweetly,
Raises our spirits and charms our ears.”

Good-night, sir.”’

(p. 647)

Wegg is adapting lines from ‘Would You Have a Young Virgin?’, a famous song which appears in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, Act III, Scene 3, sung by the opera's hero, Macheath. Ironically, as Dickens's readers would have caught immediately, instead of signalling that Wegg is coming out of his avaricious spell the song confirms how much entranced he remains, for the ballad actually expresses Macheath's insatiable lust for women in the context of the moral: ‘And a Man who loves Money, might as well be contented with one Guinea, as I with one Woman.’⁷ Evidently poor Wegg is so obsessed with money by this time that even when he tries to take his mind away from it he can't.

It remains in Our Mutual Friend for Wegg to confront Boffin directly to try to take his insolent revenge; and this he begins to do in the next chapter in which he appears (Bk. IV, Ch. 3), not surprisingly, in the process again turning to poetry. In fact, Wegg's greeting to Boffin when he arrives (with Venus) at the Bower on this occasion is poetical:

‘Step in, sir.

“If you'll come to the Bower I've shaded for you,
Your bed shan't be roses all spangled with doo;
Will you, will you, will you, will you, come to the Bower?
Oh, won't you, won't you, won't you, won't you, come to the Bower?”’

(p. 719)

As the narrator observes, ‘an unholy glare of contradiction and offence’ shine in Wegg's eyes as he greets Boffin, for he is taking lines from Tom Moore's famous ‘Will You Come to the Bower?’ And it is obvious, or at least it would have been to Dickens's readers, that Wegg has something in mind for Boffin which is even worse than the ‘gentle’ seduction which is the subject of Moore's poem. Moreover, significantly, for the first time in Our Mutual Friend. Wegg's poetic lines instead of trying to conceal his intention from his victim largely gave it away openly: not at his worst, Wegg is about to try to take his revenge.

Wegg's notion of getting revenge on Boffin involves getting paid for doing nothing, which, ironically, he imagines as freeing himself from ‘the Roman yoke’ and pandering to Boffin's ‘depraved appetite for miserly characters’ (p. 721). Yet, most of all, Wegg wants the power of money over Boffin so that he can humiliate him; he wants Boffin to ‘ask to be allowed as a favour to come to terms’ because ‘I'm as good a man as you, and better’ (p. 722). Indeed, so grossly exaggerated is Wegg's sense of importance by this time, because he really believes that Boffin's money belongs to him, that for one last time he exults in poetry:

‘I've got him under inspection, and I'll inspect him.

“Along the line the signal ran,
England expects as this present man
Will keep Boffin to his duty.”’

(p. 727)

Dickens has chosen well, for he has Wegg appropriate one of the most well-known poetical refrains of the nineteenth century, from S. J. Arnold's ‘The Death of Nelson’. Of course, as virtually every Victorian knew, Arnold's ballad celebrates Lord Nelson's devotion to duty, his pursuit of honour throughout his life, ‘for England, home and beauty’. And Wegg's misapplication of the poem nicely concludes the ironical movement of Wegg's balladry by showing him at the height of his self-deception in Our Mutual Friend: indeed, Wegg has gone so far as to imagine himself as the immortal Lord Nelson, pursuing Honour and saving England, while he is actually relishing his dishonourable avariciousness and thereby suggesting a mode of behavior which clearly in Dickens's view threatens England's very survival.

Wegg appears only one more time in Our Mutual Friend (Bk. IV, Ch. 4), when the ‘friendly move’ against Boffin receives its checkmate. On this occasion, not surprisingly, Wegg does not quote verse, though he remains as mercenary and self-deceptive as ever, including about his ballads. As Wegg explains, in ‘avaricious humiliation’, after Boffin indicates a willingness to set him up in another stall, ‘when I first had the honour of making your acquaintance, I had got together a collection of ballads which was, I may say, above price’ (p. 860). And Wegg does not stop with complaining about the loss of his ballads but goes on to list his other losses as well, ironically, even to complain about a ‘lowering’ of the tone of his mind by the ‘unwholesome reading on the subject of Misers’ when Boffin was in his disguise. Of course Wegg is right in complaining that it is difficult to ‘put a price upon his mind’ (p. 862), but even in making this statement he is trying to negotiate a price. For, unfortunately, Silas Wegg has learned nothing from his experiences with Boffin, and he will not accept responsibility for his own actions. Valuing only money to the end, it is appropriate that Wegg is seized by Sloppy at this point in Our Mutual Friend and exits deposited in a dust-cart.

Overall, Dickens has Silas Wegg quote poetry at least once in all but two of the chapters in which he appears in Our Mutual Friend; and, in the two chapters in which Wegg does not quote verse, Dickens makes it clear that Wegg refrains because he sees nothing to gain monetarily by doing so (in Bk. I. Ch. 7, when Wegg first makes arrangements with Venus to purchase his amputated leg; and in Bk. IV, Ch. 14, when Wegg's ‘friendly move’ is finally thwarted). Of course Dickens's comic presentation of Wegg is so rich in authorial commentary, incidents, and dialogues that it is quite possible for a reader to get some sense of Wegg's character even if he does not notice Wegg's propensity to quote from ballads, or does not know the ballads from which Wegg quotes. But certainly one of the important ways in which Dickens intends Wegg to be understood is in terms of his ballads—as a man who very much thinks in ballad lines and who, as he becomes increasingly mercenary, naturally expresses his growing avariciousness in the way he sings tunes. Thus, in the end, Wegg's misquotations of the ballads which he appropriates do reveal nicely his progressive corruption by avarice. First, in his initial greed, Wegg sings ballads as a ‘friendly gesture’ to try to gain as much money as he can from the Boffins as their ‘literary man’ (Bayly's ‘The Soldier's Tear’, in Bk. I, Ch. 5; and Van Dyke's ‘The Light Guitar’, Parry's ‘The Peasant Boy’, Moore's ‘Evelyn's Bower’, and Charles Dibdin's ‘Poor Tom!’, in Bk. I, Ch. 15). Then, secondly, as his greed becomes a compulsive disease, Wegg sings ballads to try to enlist and to keep the aid of Venus in his ‘friendly move’ against Boffin though his discovery of the Harmon will (Charles Dibdin's ‘The Tar for All Weathers’, in Bk. II, Ch. 7; Hamilton's ‘My Ain Fireside’, Burns' ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and Scott's Marmion, in Bk. III, Ch. 6; and Thomas Dibdin's ‘All's Well’ and Payne's ‘Home, Sweet Home’, in Bk. III, Ch. 7). And, finally, when his avariciousness has resulted in derangement, Wegg sings ballads to celebrate the power he thinks he has over Boffin in trying to gain his insolent revenge (Jonson's ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’ and Gay's ‘Would You Have a Young Virgin?’ in Bk. III, Ch. 14; and Moore's ‘Will You Come to the Bower?’ and Arnold's ‘The Death of Nelson’, in Bk. IV, Ch 3.). All in all, Wegg's performance, as orchestrated by Dickens, is indeed a revealing tragi-comic one.

As James Kincaid has rightly pointed out, Silas Wegg illustrates ‘most of the main themes of Podsnappery’.⁸ Most importantly, Wegg is one of Dickens's most important illustrations of the complex theme of money in Our Mutual Friend, for he turns out to be a genuine miser, a man who has been driven insane by avarice, and as such he stands as a foil to the characters in the novel who do not succumb to avarice: for example, John Harmon, Bella Wilfer, Eugene Wrayburn, Lizzie Hexam, Betty Higden, Noddy Boffin, and Venus. Indeed, in comic parody, Wegg's pursuit of money is his quest for identity. If John Harmon, Bella Wilfer, Eugene Wrayburn, and Lizzie Hexam, the novel's successful major characters, learn to take pride in their identities as loved and loving human beings free of any mercenary desires, Wegg learns how to sacrifice all genuine feelings for money; he identifies himself finally as a predatory creature of the dust-cart, the primordal slime, a ‘literary man’ whose art is dissimulation, the use of words, including poetical ones, to mislead and to conceal truth from himself and others. Of course the only thing that could save Wegg and Podsnappery would be a transformation of consciousness, the kind of death and rebirth Eugene Wrayburn undergoes; but such a transformation is evidently impossible, in Dickens's view, for either Wegg or Podsnappery: in the end, neither realizes that they need to experience a transformation because each believes the avaricious pursuit of wealth is the only value system worth treasuring. Consequently, as Dickens makes clear when Wegg's ‘friendly move’ is finally thwarted, even a good law—say about wills—is not protection from a man like Wegg who is determined to use it for evil purposes. In fact, in Our Mutual Friend the only thing that does preserve goodness is a hardmindedness—like that of John Harmon, Boffin, and Venus—which acts forcefully on the conviction that generosity and love are the only virtues that can bring genuine happiness to the self and others and so must be fought for and protected continuously.

It is no exaggeration to say that one of the most effective ways by which Dickens expresses these complex themes about money and morality to his contemporary readers in his novel is through the use he makes of the Victorian popular ballads. As we have seen, the fifteen ballads from which Wegg quotes are an integral part of his nature. And, no matter how sentimental or insipid we in the twentieth century may find them, free of the distortions which Wegg provides, these songs do represent a value system which is much more moral and attractive than the one Wegg creates from them. Though it is probably impossible to know whether Dickens himself believed completely or even in part in the value system expressed by these ballads, he deliberately used that value system to provide a telling ironic contrast by which his readers could evaluate the mercenary ethic of the nineteenth century which Silas Wegg embodies. That Dickens makes these ballads such a revealing part of Wegg's psychology and behaviour is part of his genius as a popular artist: in effect, by comic means, Dickens is able to expose one of the most serious evils of the 1860s by making his readers see clearly how Wegg's avariciousness leads him to pervert one of the things which they themselves hold most dear—the popular ballads.

Notes

1. Lillian M. Ruff, ‘How Musical was Charles Dickens?’, The Dickensian, 68 (1972), 40-41. See also Charles Haywood, ‘Charles Dickens and Shakespeare; or The Irish Moor of Venice, O'Thello, with Music’, The Dickensian, 73 (1977), 67-88, James T. Lightwood, Charles Dickens and Music (London: Kelly, 1912), Percy A. Scholes, ‘Dickens and Music’, in Everyman and His Music (London: Kegan Paul, 1917), pp. 114-17, Arthur L. Hayward, The Days of Dickens (London: Routledge, 1926), Charles Cudworth, ‘Dickens and Music’, The Musical Times, 3 (1969), 588-90, and the series of articles by J. W. T. Ley in The Dickensian between 1930-33 (Vols. 26-28), especially ‘The Songs of Silas Wegg’, 26 (1930), 111-17, as well as T. W. Hill, ‘Note to Our Mutual Friend’, The Dickensian, 43 (1947), 85-90, 142-49, 206-12.

2. For the most relevant discussion of Victorian balladry, see J. S. Bratton, The Victorian Popular Ballad (London, 1975); see also Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse (New York, 1974) and ‘The Study of Victorian Popular Culture’, Victorian Studies, 18 (1975), 473-83; Robert Collison, The Story of Street Literature (Santa Barbara, California, 1973), W. Henderson, Victorian Street Ballads (London, 1937), Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot, 1973), and Maurice Wilson Disher, Victorian Song: From Dive to Drawing Room (London, 1955).

   Victorian popular ballads are often quite unlike both the earlier orally-transmitted rural ballads collected by Child (The English and Scottish Popular Ballad, 5 vols., Boston, 1882-98) and the sophisticated literary forms developed by the Romantic poets. Rather, they are the popular songs of the great urban communities of the nineteenth century, which had an audience of tens of thousands, in theatres, concert rooms, village halls, and in the streets of London and the newly emerging industrial centres of northern England. For example, all of the Ballads Wegg quotes were immensely popular, even in the 1860's. Five of the ballads first appeared as songs in English operas: Arnold's ‘The Death of Nelson’ in The Americans (1811), Thomas Dibdin's ‘All's Well’ in The English Fleet (1905), Charles Dibdin's ‘Poor Tom?’ in The Waterman (1774), Payne's ‘Home, Sweet Home’ in Clari (1823), and Gay's ‘Would You Have a Young Virgin?’ in The Beggar's Opera (1728). And the remaining ten ballads achieved a great popularity into the '60s primarily as a result of being frequently sung at musical entertainments: Jonson's ‘Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes’ and Burns's ‘Auld Lang Syne’ were especially popular in public and private drawing rooms; ‘The Soldier's Tear’, Party's ‘Peasant Boy’, Van Dyke's ‘The Light Guitar’, Hamilton's ‘My Ain Fireside’, Charles Dibdin's ‘The Tar for All Weathers’, and Moore's ‘Evelyn's Bower’ and ‘Will You Come to the Bower?’ were favourite ‘parlour’ ballads; and, of course, Scott's lines describing the death of Marmion were sung everywhere, including by schoolboys. Moreover, all of the songs were also commonly being reprinted throughout the 1860s in song-books, ballad collections, and on broadsides printed in Seven Dials, so that they would have been well known by members of all classes. For a sampling of what remains extant, see especially Thomas Crampton, ed., Collection of Broadside Ballads Printed in London, 7 vols. (London, 1860-70?), which includes sheets of ballads printed in Seven Dials. See also Sabine Baring-Gould, ed., Broadside Collection, 9 vols. (London, 1800-70), in the British Museum, and the many song-books there as well, especially Comic, Sentimental Songster (London, 1858) and The Popular Songster (London, 1890).

   Together, the fifteen popular ballads which Dickens uses for Our Mutual Friend give a good indication of the most common ballad themes celebrated in Victorian England: the home and the hearth, brotherhood and friendship, sentimental, melancholic, and unrequited love, the dangers of seduction, sympathy for the plight of the deserving poor, and the idealization of the bravery of the soldiers and sailors who are on guard to preserve England's liberty. Moreover, these ballads seem also to have been among Dickens's special favourites. For example, he owned copies of and often sang the songs by Gay, Jonson, Burns, Scott, Charles Dibdin, and Moore, as well as alluded to these songs and others by their authors in his novels. In addition, he also loved to sing the other seven songs, especially ‘Home, Sweet Home’, on long trips away from London, and ‘All's Well’, as a bedtime lullaby for his children. No wonder these ballads came to mind when he turned to popular Victorian songs to help create and develop the character of that delicious rascal, Silas Wegg! (Dickens's love of the ballads which Wegg distorts, and his relationship with their authors, is detailed by Lightwood and Ley, cited in note 1; see also the letters, especially in the Pilgrim Edition.)

3. All references in the text are to the Penguin edition of Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth, 1971). Useful discussions of money and related themes include my own ‘Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Frederick Somner Merryweather's Lives and Anecdotes of Misers', Dickens Studies Annual, 9 (1981), 117-41, Jack Lindsay, Charles Dickens (New York, 1950), pp. 380-85, J. Hillis Miller, ‘Our Mutual Friend’, in Dickens, ed. Martin Price (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), pp. 169-77, Angus Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (New York, 1972), pp. 278-83, Richard A. Lanham, Our Mutual Friend: The Birds of Prey’, VN [Victorian Newsletter], 26 (1964), 6-12, and Masao Miyoshi, ‘Resolution of Identity in Our Mutual Friend’, VN, 26 (1964), 5-9.

4. See Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York, 1968 [1862-62], Vol. I, pp. 220-51. Other interesting contemporaneous accounts include ‘Street Ballads’, National Review, 13 (1861), 397-419, M. T. Bass, Street Music (London, 1864, ‘The Poetry of Seven Dials’, Quarterly Review, 122 (1867), 382-496, Dickens's own ‘Seven Dials’, in Sketches by Boz (London: Oxford University Press, 1959 [1836], pp. 69-73, and the numerous descriptions in All the Year Round, especially ‘Manager and Music Halls’, 4 (Mar. 23, 1861), 558-61, ‘An Unreported Speech’, 6 (Nov. 16, 1861), 179-81, Andrew Halliday, ‘The Battle of the Barrels’, 11 (June 11, 1864), 421-24, and Henry Morley, ‘Old, New, and No Music’, 12 (Oct. 22, 1854), 260-64.

5. The motifs of reading, language, deception, and education have received much analysis of late. See especially Stanley Friedman, ‘The Motif of Reading in Our Mutual Friend’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 28 (1973), 38-61, G. W. Kennedy, ‘Naming and Language in Our Mutual Friend’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, 28 (1973), 165-78, Robert S. Baker, ‘Imagination and Literacy in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Criticism, 18 (1976), 57-72, and Rosemary Mundhenk, ‘The Education of the Reader in Our Mutual Friend’, Nineteenth Century Fiction, (1979), 59-72.

6. Thomas Dibden, The English Fleet (Cumberland's British Theatre, 1834), Vol. 32, p. 39.

7. John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (London, 1749), 6th ed., p. 27. This is the edition Dickens had in his library.

8. James R. Kincaid, Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (London, 1971), p. 248.