A Young Man Named Guppy

Mr. William Guppy - a clerk at the office of Kenge and Carboys.

Mr. Guppy is perhaps one of the best of all the characters that Dickens created for his serial novel, Bleak House. He is awkward, but punctual, intellectual, opinionated---and desperately in love with one of the main characters. Throughout the entire novel, he devotes himself to whatever he thinks will make her happy, until he finds out that her face is terribly scarred after a bout of smallpox. Then, he declares himself to be completely cured of his love sickness.

"Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy's office of entertaining, as a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains to counterplot when there is no plot, and plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary." --Bleak House

Mr. Guppy is one of my favorite characters as well. Even though his personality is superficial and shallow, he is clever enough to get himself out of awkward situations and solve mysteries and secrets that were carefully hidden for years.

Here is a link to the complete text of Bleak House online.