A Sketch of Mr Guppy from 'Bleak House'
Transparent and Grotesque ? Or a Good Sort? Illustration ' Guppy puzzling over the portrait of Lady Dedlock' Copyright Gerry Mooney 2023 and reproduced with the kind permission of the artist / https://gerrymooneyillustratingdickens.com" ; For those who haven't read Dickens's masterpiece 'Bleak House', it is hard to sum up Mr Guppy's role. A minor legal clerk who desperately aspires to be more than he is. A small fish desperately mimicking the big fish and coming unstuck.Dickens may have been thinking of an actual Mr Guppy from the case 'Stevens v Guppy' which reached the Chancery Court in 1824, when choosing the name SHATTO . Yet in his own way, Mr Guppy pl...