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Mrs. Gamp Propoges a Toast
Phiz
June 1844
Steel-engraving
11.9 cm high by 10.5 cm wide, vignetted
Frontispiece for Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit in the Gadshill Edition, Vol. 2. Chapter XLIX, facing page 563 in the 1844 edition.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The original 1844 edition of Dickens's Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit placed Mrs. Gamp Propoges a Toast (the thirty-fifth monthly illustration of the novel) facing p. 563 in the forty-ninth chapter (instalment XVIII). This serves as the frontispiece for the Gadshill Edition, Vol. 2. The descriptive headline in the 1867 and 1897 editions: "Mrs. Prig is designedly Offensive."
"Betsey," said Mrs. Gamp, filling her own glass, and passing the teapot, "I will now propoge a toast. My frequent pardner, Betsey Prig!"
"Which, altering the name to Sairah Gamp; I drink," said Mrs. Prig "with love and tenderness." [Chapter XLIX, In which Mrs. Harris, assisted by a teapot, is the Cause of a Division between friends," page 563 in the 1844 Edition]
Plate 35 (No. XVIII), Mrs. Gamp propoges a toast, is the third and last to feature Sairey Gamp in person. This famous illustration, depicting the moment immediately preceding the apostasy of Betsey Prig [the moment which Fred Barnard in the Household Edition chose instead: see below], is by and large a faithful reproduction of Dickens' description of the scene, down to the bursting bandboxes, the pattens, the pictures over the mantel, the umbrella, and the garments looking like a hanged double of Sairey. [Steig, DSA 2, 139.
Perhaps nowhere else in Phiz's narrative-pictorial sequence for t Martin Chuzzlewit did the text so stimulate his imagination. Inspired by the prose, Phiz describes not merely the outward and visible signs of the two sick-room nurses, but he also captures their milieu and ultimately the essence of the immortal Sairey herself. Phiz, who has realised every detail from Dickens's accompanying text, depicts the two nurses in proper relation to every detail, right down to the central object not merely of the room but of Sairey's inner life, the convivial teapot, the sacred chalice under whose influence Sairey's alcohol-tinged syllables take flight into the aether of world literature. She is here, like her visual and verbal creators, a great inimitable, doubled by the dresses that like angelic facsimile Saireys hover as attendants above their substantial original.
The cramped Kingsgate Street first-floor front room above Poll Sweedlepipe's barber shop is not, as we might expect, untidy, for the occupant has scrupulously prepared the room for the reception of fellow sick-room nurse Betsey Prig. The two nurses cement their mutual amity as they raise their glasses (which they have just taken from the open cabinet beside the fireplace) to one another. Shortly, however, their celebration of their close business and personal relationship terminates in unseemly bickering — a cataclysm caused by the imaginary friend and universal referee, Mrs. Harris. The French critic Sylvère Monod interprets this illustration as underscoring the lingering presence above the nurses of Mrs. Gamp's purely illusionary but rhetorically invaluable friend:
. . . the etching by 'Phiz' which illustrates that chapter (XLIX) and is called Mrs. Gamp propoges a toast is one of he best in the book; it is symbolical of Mrs. Harris's role in the story; for she is not a concrete presence, but the conscious reader can without difficulty imagine or almost visualize her, hovering above the two tipplers. And surely the dresses hanging from the top of the bed-frame are in sufficient number and of sufficient amplitude to clothe her; admittedly, they are Mrs Gamp's own spare dresses, but Mrs Harris herself also belongs to Mrs. Gamp and is clothed only by Mrs. Gamp's spare imaginary flights. [page 71]
In this iconic illustration, Phiz based Sairey Gamp on a French model — namely, Honoré Daumier's Sick-room Nurse ("La Garde-Malade"), which he published in the Parisian magazine Le Charivari on 22 May 1842. In the narrative-pictorial sequence for Martin Chuzzlewit it is one of the first engravings that signals Dickens's application of poetic justice to the rogues in the various plot strands. Phiz and Dickens begin their application of Nemisis with the novel's least objectionable charlatan, Mrs. Gamp, and her hypothetical friend, Mrs. Harris. Although Dickens initially aligned Sairey with the novel's blatant deceivers, confidence men, and hypocrites, the voluble alcoholic with the distinctive voice grew beyond the confines of Dickens's original sick-room nurse and midwife in the minds and hearts of generations of Victorian readers, becoming an enduring figure of Dickensian character comedy.
Dickens must have felt the necessity of exposing Mrs. Harris as a sham, but she is of a wholly different order of imposture compared to the Eden land-development and Anglo-Bengalee Life Assurance schemes. Despite her considerable bulk, inebriated manner of speaking, and obvious humbug, Sairey Gamp is (not to put too fine a point upon it) a lovable rascal. Like thirty-two-year-old Dickens ("Boz"), Mrs. Gamp has constructed her own character as a public persona, and has developed a life-affirming double. However, in Mrs. Gamp's case, the invented double confers upon her inventor a sterling character that she has done little or nothing to deserve. Dickens and Phiz can therefore afford to sacrifice Mrs. Harris because she exists largely for the sake of self-promotion and advertisement.
In Phiz's illustration, the corpulent, late middle-aged women appear as virtual twins. Phiz emphasizes the momentous nature of Bestey Prig's rebellion by a "shaft of light emanating from the window . . . [which] falls directly on Mrs. Gamp's ample stomach, thus hinting again at her function as a midwife, midwife of actual human beings on he one hand and — perhaps — imaginary human beings on he other" (Morgentaler 11). Above the mantle Sairey keeps a portrait of her friend, dressed for a ball in youth; the embedded image is therefore suitably improbable, but accordingly a piece of the occupant's character or a legitimate projection of it, exactly like the rest of the furnishings in the room. In pride of place Phiz has placed Mrs. Gamp's bird-headed umbrella which seems to smile upon her namesake.
Left: Harold Copping's 1924 colour lithograph of Betsey and Sairey sharing a convivial glass, in Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig(Chapter 39). Centre: Harry Furniss's realisation of the scene in which Betsey Prigg reaches the breaking point with Sairey's testimonials by Mrs. Harris, Betsey Prigg and Mrs. Gamp (1910). Right: Clayton J. Clarke's characterisation of Sairey as endearing rather than professionally irresponsible and thoroughly addicted to gin, Sairey Gamp (1910). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Above: Fred Barnard's realistic wood-engraving of the moment when Bestey Prig has the temerity to challenge the very existence of Mrs. Harris: Then Mrs. Gamp rose — morally and physically rose — and denounced her (Chapter XLIX).
Allingham, Philip V. "Phiz's Illustrations, Part Four." [Ch. 38-52] The Dickens Magazine: Martin Chuzzlewit. 5.4 (August, 2009): 8-13.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Edited by Andrew Lang. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). The Gadshill Edition: 34 volumes. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897. 2 vols.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Monod, Sylvère. "External and Additional Material." Martin Chuzzlewit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. Pp. 173-185.
Morgentaler, Goldie. "Mts. Gamp, Mrs. Harris and Mr. Dickens: Creativity and the Self Split in Two." Dickens Quarterly 26, 1 (March 2009): 3-14.
Steig, Michael. "From Caricature to Progress: Master Humphrey's Clock and Martin Chuzzlewit." Ch. 3, Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 51-85. [See e-text in Victorian Web.]
_____. "Martin Chuzzlewit's Progress by Dickens and Phiz." Dickens Studies Annual, 2 (1972): 119-149.
Vann, J. Don. "Martin Chuzzlewit, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, January 1843 — July 1844." New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Pp. 66-67.
Last modified 28 April 2019