49 pages • 1 hour read
The Great Trouble
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Eel
Thirteen-year-old Eel is the protagonist and narrator of The Great Trouble. He adopted his nickname after being orphaned and left in the care of his abusive stepfather, Fisheye Bill Tyler. During that earlier time, he was forced to work as a thief at his stepfather’s behest. Later, after he and Henry escape Fisheye’s control, he works as a mudlark, searching the banks of the Thames for items to salvage and sell. Eel is aware of his nickname’s capacity as a metaphor for his adaptability, and he uses this comparison to obtain his initial employment with Dr. John Snow.
Eel is clever and hardworking, and he uses these skills to survive as an impoverished orphan in Victorian London, simultaneously providing for his brother, Henry. At the beginning of the novel, he works at Lion Brewery, which provides him with safe lodging and reliable meals. Despite this advantage, Eel is known for picking up additional odd jobs. He secretly uses the money he earns from these jobs to pay for Henry’s lodging at a boarding house. When Eel is falsely accused of stealing and is fired from the Lion, he uses his cleverness and diligence to find other work, including the difficult task of helping a “coffin man” to remove dead cholera victims from housing on Broad Street.
Despite his need to look out for himself and his brother, Eel is community-minded and wants to help Dr. Snow determine the source of the cholera outbreak. He is motivated not only for the sake of his friends or for the money that Snow gives him, but for the greater good. Eel has some education and has developed his reading and writing skills with the help of his late father, who was a clerk. Eel combines these skills with his scientific education at the hands of Dr. Snow and his own innate desire for knowledge to help solve the mystery of the outbreak’s source. At the end of the novel, Eel and Henry are adopted by Eel’s former employer, Mr. Edward, and Eel attends school and plans to become a physician like Dr. Snow.
Florrie Baker
Twelve-year-old Florrie Baker is Eel’s best friend and crush. Florrie is a kind girl with modest aspirations; she hopes to improve her prospects by becoming a maid at a fancy house. Eel worries that Florrie is too optimistic about this future, as all the scullery maids he knows are overworked. Despite Florrie’s larger ambition to become the kind of artist who can create something that lasts beyond her lifetime, she remains hopeful about her future employment even when Eel struggles to hide his doubts.
Florrie is kind and helpful to Eel and to others. Early in the novel, she thoughtfully distracts Betsy and Bernie Griggs to take them away from their ailing father’s bedside, and she later takes care of Bernie and Mrs. Griggs as they suffer from cholera, even though she believes that breathing the same air are puts her at greater risk of contracting the illness herself. She also helps Eel to create a map of the Broad Street area so that Dr. Snow can track the source of the epidemic, and she refuses Eel’s offer of payment when the map is completed. In the later parts of the novel, Florrie contracts cholera herself and goes through several ups and downs with her condition. Despite the danger of the disease, she faces her illness with bravery and optimism and ultimately recovers.
Dr. John Snow
In The Great Trouble, the character of Dr. John Snow is a fictionalized version of the real-life physician John Snow, who identified cholera as being transmissible by water during the 1854 Broad Street cholera epidemic. In the novel, Dr. Snow is a kind man who cares intently about the ethics of his scientific practices. He tells Eel that behaving humanely is an important aspect of scientific inquiry, and he practices vegetarianism due to his reluctance to harm animals. Though Dr. Snow cares greatly about the people he serves, he is not sentimental. When he tells Eel that he cannot help Bernie Griggs, he feels compassion for the young cholera victim but quickly moves on to proactive approaches to identifying the source of the epidemic and preventing its spread. Dr. Snow frequently fills the role of an educator in the novel, instructing Eel on how to ask the right questions to enable scientific discovery. He then leaves Eel to his own devices, allowing the boy to engage in the primary action of the text.
Fisheye Bill Tyler
As Eel’s disreputable stepfather, Fisheye Bill Tyler is the primary antagonist of The Great Trouble. Fisheye is a physically abusive man who seeks to exploit Henry by turning him into a thief and a con artist; Fisheye thinks that Henry’s childlike good looks will lead him to be an accomplished thief, which would in turn increase Fisheye’s own profits. Fisheye is cruel, as is his associate Kate (who is subtly implied to be a sex worker, although in deference to the novel’s younger readers, the author only inserts this information obliquely). Though Fisheye is not vanquished at the end of the novel, Eel’s adoption by Mr. Edward suggests that both he and Henry will be safe from Fisheye’s cruel machinations in the future.
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