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The Last Brawl between Sir Mulberry and His Pupil
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby
July 1839
Etching
Source: Steig, plate 32; reproduced by permission of the author
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
It was nearly midnight when they rushed out, wild, burning with wine, their blood boiling, and their brains on fire, to the gaming-table.
Here, they encountered another party, mad like themselves. The excitement of play, hot rooms, and glaring lights, was not calculated to allay the fever of the time. In that giddy whirl of noise and confusion, the men were delirious. Who thought of money, ruin, or the morrow, in the savage intoxication of the moment? More wine was called for, glass after glass was drained, their parched and scalding mouths were cracked with thirst. Down poured the wine like oil on blazing fire. And still the riot went on. The debauchery gained its height; glasses were dashed upon the floor by hands that could not carry them to lips; oaths were shouted out by lips which could scarcely form the words to vent them in; drunker losers cursed and roared; some mounted on the tables, waving bottles above their heads, and bidding defiance to the rest; some danced, some sang, some tore the cards and raved. Tumult and frenzy reigned supreme; when a noise arose that drowned all others, and two men, seizing each other by the throat, struggled into the middle of the room.
A dozen voices, until now unheard, called aloud to part them. Those who had kept themselves cool, to win, and who earned their living in such scenes, threw themselves upon the combatants, and, forcing them asunder, dragged them some space apart.
"Let me go!" cried Sir Mulberry, in a thick hoarse voice. "He struck me! Do you hear? I say, he struck me. Have I a friend here? Who is this? Westwood. Do you hear me say he struck me!"
"I hear, I hear," replied one of those who held him. "Come away, for to-night!"
"I will not, by G—" he replied. "A dozen men about us saw the blow."
"To-morrow will be ample timer" said the friend.
"It will not be ample time!" cried Sir Mulberry. "To-night at once, here!" His passion was so great, that he could not articulate, but stood clenching his fist, tearing his hair, and stamping on the ground. [Chapter L, "Involves a serious Catastrophe"]
The action here, as in Phiz's riot scenes for Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, swirls around a central vortex, here the savage mask of the antagonist, Sir Mulberry Hawk, impassioned, irrational, and vengeful. Infuriated still by his being reproved and injured by Nicholas before he decamped for Belgium to recover, Sir Mulberry assaults his dupe, Lord Frederick Verisopht, after the latter has begun to see his former friend in a more reasonable and realistic light, thanks to Nicholas. Dickens's rhetoric of debauched combat amidst a crowd of inebriates is well matched by Phiz's exuberant composition, capturing effectively in the second medium the spirit of "Tumult and frenzy" in the letterpress. Later illustrators seem to have made far more of the opportunity to graph the disastrous consequences of the falling out between Hawk and Verisopht.
Left: Fred Barnard's full-page illustration of Verisopht laid out on the field of honour: All the light and life of day came on; and amidst it all, and pressing down the grass whose every blade bore twenty tiny lives, lay the dead man, with his stark and rigid face turned upwards to the sky (1875). Centre: Harry Furniss's 1910 lithograph of the same scene with violent undertones: Lord Frederick Verisopht falls in a Duel in the Charles Dickens Library Edition. Right: C. S. Reinhart's picturesque realisation of the same scene for American readers: Lay the dead man, with his stark and rigid face turned upward to the sky in the Household Edition, New York (1875).
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1839.
_______. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Ed. Andrew Lang. Illustrated by 'Phiz' (Hablot Knight Browne). The Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897. 2 vols.
Steig, Michael. Chapter 2. "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 24-50.
Thomas, Deborah A. "Chapter 2: Imaginative Overindulgence." Dickens and the Short Story. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. 7-31.
Vann, J. Don. "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, April 1838-October 1839." New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. 63.
Created 9 May 2092 Last modified 20 September 2021