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...