Martha

Sol Eytinge

Wood engraving

9.8 high x 7.4 cm wide (framed)

Fourteenth full-page illustration for Dickens's David Copperfield in the Ticknor and Fields (Boston), 1867, Diamond Edition.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]

The fourteenth illustration — "Martha" — captures the moment in Chapter 47 when Martha stands on the brink of the Thames in Westminster: “I think she was talking to herself. I am sure, although absorbed in gazing at the water, that her shawl was off her shoulders, and that she was muffling her hands in it, in an unsettled and bewildered way, more like the action of a sleep-walker than a waking person (384). Eytinge's version of the character study of a would-be suicide, a woman driven to the extreme by social ostracism and economic privation, reflects Phiz's treatment of the same subject in "The River" , but Eytinge depicts nobody else in the scene, only of four single character studies in his sequence of sixteen studies, the others being the frontispiece of Little Em'ly as a child on the Yarmouth Denes, Steerforth sailing, and the ebullient Miss Mowcher.

The scene sketchily suggests the river water and a piece of detritus on the shore, but focuses the reader's attention on the skeletal, wind-swept figure and haggard visage of the woman lost morally and socially in the great metropolis. Were this a Phiz composition, we would almost certainly label it a "dark plate" since it conveys effectively the atmosphere of a night scene.

Reference

Dickens, Charles. The Personal History of David Copperfield. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.

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Last modified 25 January 2011