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Mr. Dombey and Paul
Harold Copping
1893
"Little Paul Dombey," p. 103
Photographic reproduction of line drawing
5 ½ by 4 ½ inches (14 x 12 cm) vignetted.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Copping has taken a familiar scene, Paul and his father before the fire, and rendered it both more naturally, with Paul apparently asking his father the question, "What is money?" [Commentary continued below.]
Scanned image, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham
“Papa! what’s money?”
The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of Mr. Dombey’s thoughts, that Mr. Dombey was quite disconcerted.
“What is money, Paul?” he answered. “Money?”
“Yes,” said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his little chair, and turning the old face up towards Mr. Dombey’s; “what is money?”
Mr. Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms circulating-medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market, and so forth; but looking down at the little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered: “Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?” [Chapter VIII, "Paul’s Further Progress, Growth and Character"]
When he sat in his little arm-chair, with his father after dinner, as Mr. Dombey would have him do every day, they were a strange pair — so like, and so unlike each other.
"What is money, papa?" asked Paul pn one of these occasions, crossing his tiny arms as well as he could — just as his father's were crossed. [Mary Angela Dickens, 102]
Harold Copping had the considerable advantage in 1893 of knowing exactly how the story of the Dombey family would end; or, at least, it was a knowledge that Phiz, the original illustrator, at this point in the story did not possess. Copping would have known almost certainly of the Phiz and Fred Barnard illustrations, but clearly his aim was to foreground Paul and Florence, and throw such adults as Mr. Dombey, Mrs. Pipchin, and Cornelia Blimber into the background. Aware of Mr. Dombey's aloofness and his marked preference for the son over the daughter, Copping shows father and son conversing together before the fire after dinner. But this Mr. Dombey, still in his business attire, seems almost asleep in his throne-like armchair as Paul broaches the subject of money and demands that his father consider its limitations. Copping has graphed the relationship effectively through their respective chairs, for Paul's repeats some aspects of the design of the grownup's chair, but has a padded back and more pronounced arms. And Paul's body seems tiny compared to his head, as if his considerable intelligence is ill-matched with a frail physique; or, as the family physician remarks opposite the illustration, "The child is hardly so stout as we could wish," said the doctor; "his mind is too big for his body, he thinks too much" (103).
Left: W. H. C. Groome's derivative study of Dombey and his son before the fire: "Papa, what's money?" (1900). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Junior's portrait of the aloof widower and his uncomfortable boy, Dombey and Son in Ch. I. Right: Harry Furniss's frontispiece for the Charles Dickens Library volume, Dombey and Son (1910).
Left: Phiz's original serial illustration for December 1846, Paul and Mrs. Pipchin. Centre: W. L. Sheppard's version of this same scene in the American Household Edition: "I wonder why it didn't save my mamma!" (1873). Right: Fred Barnard's untitled vignette for the title-page of the 1877 British Household Edition.
Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). [1846-48] The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon and Company, 1862. Vols. 1-4.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr., and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. III.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by W. L. Sheppard. The Household Edition. 18 vols. New York: Harper & Co., 1873.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard [62 composite wood-block engravings]. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.
__________. Dombey and Son. With illustrations by H. K. Browne. The illustrated library Edition. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, c. 1880. II.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 61 wood-engravings. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by W. H. C. Groome. London and Glasgow, 1900, rpt. 1934. 2 vols. in one.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. IX.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). 8 coloured plates. London and Edinburgh: Caxton and Ballantyne, Hanson, 1910.
Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Chapter 10, "Little Paul Dombey," Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893. Pp. 101-109.
Created 25 January 2022