Mr. Pecksniff by J. Clayton Clarke ("Kyd") for the watercolour series (1910): reproduced on John Player cigarette card no. 23: Ninety-two Characters from Dickens: The Old Curiosity Shop. 2 ½ inches high by 1 ¼ inches wide (6.3 cm high by 3.3 cm wide). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
MR. PECKSNIFF (Martin Chuzzlewit.)
Pecksniff the Humbug; Pecksniff the Hangdog; Pecksniff the Rascal; Pecksniff the Ghoul; Pecksniff the English Tartuffe; the servile, smooth-tongued crawling knave: Seth Pecksniff, architect and Arch-Hypocrite — is not his moral career chronicled in the pages of “Chuzzlewit,” and his name incorporated in the English language as a synonym for Hypocrisy? [verso of Card No. 23]
Passage in The Household Edition (1872) Describing Seth Pecksniff
It has been remarked that Mr. Pecksniff was a moral man. So he was. Perhaps there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff, especially in his conversation and correspondence. It was once said of him by a homely admirer, that he had a Fortunatus’s purse of good sentiments in his inside. In this particular he was like the girl in the fairy tale, except that if they were not actual diamonds which fell from his lips, they were the very brightest paste, and shone prodigiously. He was a most exemplary man; fuller of virtuous precept than a copy book. Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there; but these were his enemies, the shadows cast by his brightness; that was all. His very throat was moral. You saw a good deal of it. You looked over a very low fence of white cravat (whereof no man had ever beheld the tie for he fastened it behind), and there it lay, a valley between two jutting heights of collar, serene and whiskerless before you. It seemed to say, on the part of Mr Pecksniff, ‘There is no deception, ladies and gentlemen, all is peace, a holy calm pervades me.’ So did his hair, just grizzled with an iron-grey which was all brushed off his forehead, and stood bolt upright, or slightly drooped in kindred action with his heavy eyelids. So did his person, which was sleek though free from corpulency. So did his manner, which was soft and oily. In a word, even his plain black suit, and state of widower and dangling double eye-glass, all tended to the same purpose, and cried aloud, ‘Behold the moral Pecksniff!’
The brazen plate upon the door (which being Mr Pecksniff’s, could not lie) bore this inscription, ‘PECKSNIFF, ARCHITECT,’ to which Mr Pecksniff, on his cards of business, added, AND LAND SURVEYOR.’ In one sense, and only one, he may be said to have been a Land Surveyor on a pretty large scale, as an extensive prospect lay stretched out before the windows of his house. Of his architectural doings, nothing was clearly known, except that he had never designed or built anything; but it was generally understood that his knowledge of the science was almost awful in its profundity. [Chapter II, "Wherein Certain Persons are Presented to the Reader, with Whom He May, If He Please, Become Better Acquainted," 9]
Commentary: Kyd's Interpretation versus Those in His Sources (1843-1874)
The oily hypocrite who steals young Martin Chuzzlewit's architectural designs and attempts to steal his girl, Mary Graham, Seth Pecksniff is a pious fraud from start to finish in The Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (January 1843 through July 1844). At the close of the Victorian era, Kyd had two principal sets upon which to model his study of the unctuous professional man in the tailcoat, notably Phiz's serial plate Mr. Pecksniff Discharges a Duty Which He Owes to Society (Chapter 31), and Fred Barnard's Rustling among last year's leaves, whose scent woke memory of the past, the placid Pecksniff strolled in Chapter 30 of the Household Edition volume. Kyd deviates from these models, however, in that in this illustration the humbug's distinctive hairstyle is not nearly so apparent as, for example, in the Household Edition's Uncaptioned title-page vignette of Pecksniff contemplating his bust. The 1867 Diamond Edition volume, an American series which Kyd is not likely to have seen, contains an illustration entitled Mr. Pecksniff and his Daughters, in which Ticknor Fields' house illustrator, Sol Eytinge, Junior, reveals by the sanctimonious architect's long chin and tonsorial peak that he had studied the Phiz originals to produce a congruent image for the American series in 1867. Far more animated and charming than Felix Octavius Carr Darley's lithographic frontispiece Mr. Pecksniff's Courtship (1863), Kyd's interpretation of the arch hypocrite is as sleek and unctuous as Phiz's original, even if Kyd's portrait is not as visually amusing as those of his predecessors.
Relevant Images of the Self-Satisfied Pecksniff from Other Editions (1843-1924)
Left: Hablot Knight Browne's Mr. Pecksniff Discharges a Duty Which He Owes Society (February 1843). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Mr. Pecksniff and his Daughters (1867). Right: John Gilbert's polished Mr. Pecksniff's Courtship (1863). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Left: Fred Barnard's study of the humbug for the title-page vignette of the 1872 Household Edition: Mr. Pecksniff contemplating his bust (uncaptioned). Centre: Harry Furniss's study of Pecksniff as a masher, Mr. Pecksniff Makes Love (1910). Right: Harold Copping's synthesis of all former Pecksniffs, Mr. Seth Pecksniff and Old Martin Chuzzlewit (1924). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Artists Who Worked on Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844)
- Hablot Knight Browne (40 steel engravings)
- Felix Octavius Carr Darley (3 lithographs)
- Sol Eytinge, Jr. (15 wood engravings)
- Fred Barnard (59 wood engravings)
- Harry Furniss (29 lithographs plus engraved title)
- Harold Copping (3 chromolithographs selected)
Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned them and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography: Martin Chuzzlewit
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
The Characters of Charles Dickens Pourtrayed in a Series of Original Water Colour Sketches by “Kyd.” London, Paris, and New York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, 1898[?].
Dickens, Charles. The Dickens Souvenir Book. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871-1880. The copy of The Dickens Souvenir Book from which these pictures were scanned is in the collection of the Main Library of The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B. C.
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, illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Vol. II.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872. Vol. II.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. VII.
Hammerton, J. A. "XVI. Martin Chuzzlewit." The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. XVI, pp. 266-293.
Vann, J. Don. "Martin Chuzzlewit, . . . January 1843 — July 1844." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985. 66-67.
Created 11 January 2015
Last updated 18 July 2025