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The Nuptials of Miss Pecksniff receive a temporary check
Phiz (Halbot K. Browne)
July 1844
Etching
The guests read Mr. Moddle's farewell letter greedily, while in the bitterness of her mortification, Miss Pecksniff fainted away. — Chapter 54
Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Reading that her prospective bridegroom on his way the Antipodes (in fact, Van Diemen's Land, now known as Tasmania, Australia), Miss Pecksniff throws his note to the ground before theatrically shrieking and fainting dead away. The cause of her mortification is not so much the loss of Augustus Moddle as the loss of status and control that the marriage would have conferred upon her. With a nice piece of irony, the return address is "Off Gravesend. Clipper Schooner, Cupid."
Last modified 26 April 2007