Carghill and Touchwood

Mulready's literary genre painting included subjects from Scott's novels, and Carghill and Touchwood are characters from 'St. Ronan's Well' (1823) — the young minister Josiah Carghill and the eccentric traveler Peregrine Mucklewrath, known as Mr. Touchwood. Mulready's engagement with Scott reflects the broader enthusiasm for Scottish literary subjects in the early Victorian period and his own participation in the tradition of literary genre painting associated with Leslie, Wilkie, and later Frith. The theatrical character types in Scott's novels suited Mulready's interest in rendered expression and carefully differentiated social types.

Mulready's literary genre scenes deploy costume and setting to establish the fictional world while concentrating most pictorial energy on the expressive faces of the interacting characters. His handling of the specific textures of early nineteenth-century Scottish provincial life — the fabrics, the furniture, the light — reflects careful study of the source novel.