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Bottle-washing at Murdstone & Grinby's
W. H. C. Groome
1907
11.6 x 7.6 cm (4 ½ by 3 inches), framed
Lithograph
Dickens's David Copperfield, referencing page 158; facing page 320.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Murdstone and Grinby’s trade was among a good many kinds of people, but an important branch of it was the supply of wines and spirits to certain packet ships. I forget now where they chiefly went, but I think there were some among them that made voyages both to the East and West Indies. I know that a great many empty bottles were one of the consequences of this traffic, and that certain men and boys were employed to examine them against the light, and reject those that were flawed, and to rinse and wash them. When the empty bottles ran short, there were labels to be pasted on full ones, or corks to be fitted to them, or seals to be put upon the corks, or finished bottles to be packed in casks. All this work was my work, and of the boys employed upon it I was one.
There were three or four of us, counting me. My working place was established in a corner of the warehouse, where Mr. Quinion could see me, when he chose to stand up on the bottom rail of his stool in the counting-house, and look at me through a window above the desk. Hither, on the first morning of my so auspiciously beginning life on my own account, the oldest of the regular boys was summoned to show me my business. His name was Mick Walker, and he wore a ragged apron and a paper cap. He informed me that his father was a bargeman, and walked, in a black velvet head-dress, in the Lord Mayor’s Show. He also informed me that our principal associate would be another boy whom he introduced by the — to me — extraordinary name of Mealy Potatoes. I discovered, however, that this youth had not been christened by that name, but that it had been bestowed upon him in the warehouse, on account of his complexion, which was pale or mealy. Mealy’s father was a waterman, who had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was engaged as such at one of the large theatres; where some young relation of Mealy’s — I think his little sister — did Imps in the Pantomimes.
No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these henceforth everyday associates with those of my happier childhood — not to say with Steerforth, Traddles, and the rest of those boys; and felt my hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man, crushed in my bosom. [Chapter XI, "I Begin Life on my own Account, and don't Like it," 158]
The bottling-factory experience in the novel is Dickens's transmutation of his own youthful sojourn in the blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs on the Thames, where his parents arranged for Charles's employment after John Dickens was incarcerated in the Marshalsea for debt. Various editions of Forster's Life of Dickens (1872), including the Barnard-illustrated Household Edition, had made plain to readers after Dickens's death how indelibly etched on the author's memory was the experience, although it occupied scarcely a year of his childhood.
With a working-class background himself and a talent for capturing a boy's perspective, Groome here has produced his finest piece of work in this series. David appears glum in such an environment, cast out of home, school, and class; however, his working-class mates, Mealey Potatoes and Mick Walker in apron and cap, are making the most of the industrial drudgery, and appear to be enjoying themselves. David stares out of the frame, as if stunned, while his animated companions in sharp contrast play with the bottles and interact with each other.
Significantly, Phiz did not select the bottling factory as a subject for illustration, preferring instead to realize the more upbeat and comedic My Magnificent Order at the Public House. However, perhaps on account of having read the Dickens biography, Barnard and Groome have both elected to illustrate Chapter XI, "I Begin Life on my own Account, and don't Like it," with the telling contrast between the dejected David and the other boys, depicted exactly as in the letterpress and in Dickens's "autobiographical fragment."
Left: Fred Barnard's Household Edition study of Dickens as a child having fallen asleep at his desk in the blacking warehouse in the frontispiece to Forster's Life. Centre: Barnard depicts precisely the ame morose scene as Groome: I begin life on my own account, and don't like it (1872). Right: Phiz's original illustration for Chapter XI focuses on David's adventure at a tavern as an autonomous imbiber rather than a mere child, despite his diminutive size: My magnificent order at the public-house (August 1849).
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield, with 61 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872. Vol. 3.
_______. David Copperfield. Illustrated by W. H. C. Groome. London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-type Press, 1907.
Created 7 July 2022