[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Phiz (Hablot K. Browne) —> Illustrations of Bleak House —> Next]
The Lord Chancellor Copies from Memory
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
April 1852
Etching
4 1/8 x 4 1/8 inches
Facing p. 41, the close of the fifth chapter of Dickens's Bleak House [for text illustrated, see below]
[detail]
Scanned image and text by George P. Landow; additional text by Philip V. Allingham.
Passing through the shop on our way out, as we had passed through it on our way in, we found the old man storing a quantity of packets of waste-paper in a kind of well in the floor. He seemed to be working hard, with the perspiration standing on his forehead, and had a piece of chalk by him, with which, as he put each separate package or bundle down, he made a crooked mark on the panelling of the wall.
Richard and Ada, and Miss Jellyby, and the little old lady had gone by him, and I was going when he touched me on the arm to stay me, and chalked the letter J upon the wall — in a very curious manner, beginning with the end of the letter and shaping it backward. It was a capital letter, not a printed one, but just such a letter as any clerk in Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's office would have made.
"Can you read it?" he asked me with a keen glance.
"Surely," said I. "It's very plain."
"What is it?"
"J."
With another glance at me, and a glance at the door, he rubbed it out and turned an "a" in its place (not a capital letter this time), and said, "What's that?"
I told him. He then rubbed that out and turned the letter "r," and asked me the same question. He went on quickly until he had formed in the same curious manner, beginning at the ends and bottoms of the letters, the word Jarndyce, without once leaving two letters on the wall together.
"What does that spell?" he asked me.
When I told him, he laughed. In the same odd way, yet with the same rapidity, he then produced singly, and rubbed out singly, the letters forming the words BLEAK HOUSE. These, in some astonishment, I also read; and he laughed again.
"Hi!" said the old man, laying aside the chalk. "I have a turn for copying from memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor write."
He looked so disagreeable and his cat looked so wickedly at me, as if I were a blood-relation of the birds upstairs, that I was quite relieved by Richard's appearing at the door and saying, "Miss Summerson, I hope you are not bargaining for the sale of your hair. Don't be tempted. Three sacks below are quite enough for Mr. Krook!" [Chapter V, "A Morning Adventure," 40-41; Project Gutenberg etext (see bibliography below)]
Harry Furniss's version of the same scene, Mr. Krook and His Cat (1910). Centre: Fred Barnard's scene set in Krook's shop in the Household Edition (1873): The Lord Chancellor relates the death of Tom Jarndyce. Right of centre: Sol Eytinge, Junior's dual portrait of the rag-and-bone shop proprietor and his genteel tenant: Miss Flite and Krook (1867). Right: Sir John Gilbert's derivative illustration in the Sheldon & Co. [New York] edition (1863) as the frontisopiece for the first volume, A large grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). London: Bradbury & Evans. Bouverie Street, 1853.
_______. Bleak House. Project Gutenberg etext prepared by Donald Lainson, Toronto, Canada (charlie@idirect.com), with revision and corrections by Thomas Berger and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D. Seen 9 November 2007.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Project Gutenberg etext prepared by Donald Lainson, Toronto, Canada (charlie@idirect.com), with revision and corrections by Thomas Berger and Joseph E. Loewenstein, M. D. Seen 9 November 2007.
_____. Bleak House. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. XI.
Steig, Michael. Chapter 6. "Bleak House and Little Dorrit: Iconography of Darkness." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 131-172.
Vann, J. Don. "Bleak House, twenty parts in nineteen monthly instalments, October 1846—April 1848." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985. 69-70./
Created 26 April 2007 Last modified 3 March 2021