In which Dickens novel do the characters 'Gaffer Hexam', 'John Harmon', and 'Bradley Headstone'?
Our Mutual Friend Victorian society generally, not Dickens himself. Harland S Nelson's 1973 article "Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend" and Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor"" examines Dickens's inspiration for two of the novel's working class characters. Nelson asserts that Gaffer Hexam and Betty Higden were potentially modelled after real members of London's working class whom Mayhew interviewed in the 1840s for his nonfiction work "London Labour and the London Poor." Unlike some of Dickens's contemporaries, who regarded the characters in "Our Mutual Friend" as unrealistic representations of actual Victorian people, Nelson maintains that London's nineteenth-century working class is authentically depicted through
Our Mutual Friend father lives with them, and is treated by Jenny as a child. Lizzie has caught the eye of the work-shy barrister, Eugene Wrayburn, who first noticed her when accompanying his friend Mortimer Lightwood to the home of Gaffer Hexam. Wrayburn falls in love with her. However, he soon gains a violent rival in Bradley Headstone, the schoolmaster of Charley Hexam. Charley wants his sister to be under obligation to no one but him, and tries to arrange lessons for her with Headstone, only to find that Wrayburn has already engaged a teacher for both Lizzie and Jenny. Headstone quickly becomes