Mrs. Gamp Propoges a Toast
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
June 1844
Etching
"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 49
Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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], 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 the initial serialisation of Martin Chuzzlewit is the illustrator's imagination so stimulated by the letterpress, with the result that Phiz describes not merely the outward and visible signs of the two sick-room nurses, but also captures their milieu and ultimately the essence of the immortal Sairey herself. Every detail from Dickens's letterpress is present and is depicted in proper relation to every other object, 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 above their original.
The cramped Kingsgate Street first-floor front room above Poll Sweedlepipe's shop is not, as we would expect, untidy, for the occupant has scrupulously prepared them for the reception of fellow sick-room nurse Betsey Prig. All is amity as the two nurses raise their glasses (just taken from the open cabinet beside the fireplace) to one another in celebration of their close business and personal relationship; shortly will come the cataclysm.
Last modified 18 May 2009