Dickens's Waste Land.
Our Mutual Friend (the seventh number of the serial run is shown here) was illustrated by Marcus Stone, the son of the artist Frank Stone, an old friend of Dickens. Stone was a young artist of twenty-five when Dickens chose him to illustrate the novel that would be the last he would live to complete; and as was his practice, the novelist "bombarded" his collaborator with instructions and suggestions. Stone recalled that Dickens was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy."

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