Uncaptioned illustration to begin Chapter One
Fred Barnard
1870s
10.7 cm x 13.8 cm.
Illustration for Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit.
[Pecksniff prostrate at the foot of his own stairs, incident from second chapter.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
Fred Barnard's narrative-pictorial sequence for the thirty-year- old picaresque novel begins earlier than Phiz's. The chief illustrator of the Household Edition begins, as it were, almost at the beginning, immediately after the rambling, almost Swiftian Chuzzlewit genealogy of the opening chapter. For this, the story's first comic scene, Barnard prepares the reader a full chapter in advance, seizing upon the most engaging moment with which to lead off his pictorial sequence.
An undignified, partly stunned Seth Pecksniff has just been knocked off his feet at his own front-door steps by the boisterous Wiltshire wind, and his daughter, shading her candle, unable to discern his prostrate figure on the ground in the darkness, is operating under the delusion that she is the victim of some practical-joking street-boy who, having knocked, has ducked around the corner to observe the fun from hiding. Realizing the text's first piece of real action, the uncaptioned woodcut sits above the opening of the first chapter but pertains to the second.
Dressed in the respectable garb of the English bourgeoisie circa 1840, in tailcoat, collar, his immaculate beaver lying by his feet, Pecksniff struggles to get up on his left elbow. This attire Barnard has borrowed directly from Phiz's early illustrations for the novel, notably "Pleasant little family party at Mr. Pecksniff's." Whereas Phiz's initial Pecksniff plates depict the antagonist as a self-satisfied and collected hypocrite, Barnard cannot resist the comic possibilities of the novel's opening scene, in which the usually loquacious architect has been momentarily stunned into speechlessness by his fall. As in the text, his daughter shields her candle from the raging wind which scatters leaves above her parent, whom she cannot see in the dusk. Instead of the brass knob on the street-door, Barnard focuses on the wrought- iron railings which connect Miss Pecksniff at the top of the stairs, her skirt and apron blowing vigorously towards stage left and her fallen father. Rather than struggle with the pictorial impossibilities of the first chapter, Barnard has utilized this key page in the text to introduce the self-important humbug who will present himself as a rival to young Martin as a potential husband for Mary Graham and a potential heir for old Martin.
References
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, with 59 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871-1880. The copy of the Household Edition from which this picture was scanned was the gift of George Gorniak, Editor of The Dickens Magazine, whose subject for the fifth series, beginning in January 2008, was this novel.
Last modified 28 January 2008