In Our Mutual Friend, Silas Wegg is an incorrigible figure, always looking to profit off of others' misfortunes. Ironically, Wegg himself has experienced quite a bit of misfortune—he walks around with a peg leg and scarcely sells any of his ballads. He also profits off of the goodness of others, obtaining room and board from Mr. Boffin, a member of the nouveau-riche. Nevertheless, Wegg is hardly a pitiable character. Purely greedy, he uses his knack for deception to prey on the weak and unsuspecting members of society. While some scheming, deceitful characters in literature redeem themselves because of whom they target—the uncaring bourgeois, the arrogant, the despotic—but Wegg has no moral basis behind his exploitation.
Here are several quotes that point to Wegg's duplicitous nature.
For Silas Wegg felt it to be quite out of the question that he could lay his head upon his pillow in peace, without first hovering over Mr. Boffin's house in the superior character of its Evil Genius.
In this quotation, the narrator observes some situational irony in Wegg's instinct to blackmail and steal from the good-natured, illiterate, recently rich Mr. Boffin. So infected is he with the desire to steal, he is unable to sleep without "hovering" over the matter of how best to plunder Mr. Boffin's coffers. While the trope of sleeplessness in literature is often used to signal a character's difficulty in making an important moral choice, Wegg's sleeplessness originates in a desire to commit an obviously immoral one.
I'll put him in harness, and I'll bear him up tight, and I'll break him and drive him.
Here, the extent of Wegg's sadism is articulated straight from the source. Wegg employs the language of "breaking in" a horse or other load-bearing animal to describe his intentions for cleaning out Mr. Boffin. Not only does Wegg intend to blackmail his benefactor, but he also obtains glee from the prospect of totally subjugating him.
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