History

Our Wegg is inspired by the villainous amputee of the same name, who appears in Charles Dickens’s final complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, which was published serially from 1874 to 1875. In this novel, Wegg begins as a ballad-seller on the streets of London but is taken on as a teacher by a character called Mr Boffin, who thinks that Wegg is worldly and knowledgeable (in part) because of his use of a wooden leg. Wegg is a comical but sinister and fraudulent character in Dickens’s novel, revealing mid-nineteenth-century anxieties about the ability of disabled people to climb the social ladder. For more on this topic, see chapter 4 of Ryan Sweet’s free 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Backstory

A male street seller, who was born with a deformed leg. It was eventually amputated in a local hospital.
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