And Having His Wet Pipe Presented to Him by A. B. Frost (engraved by Edward G. Dalziel), in Charles Dickens's Pictures from Italy and American Notes (1880), Chapter XV, "In Canada; Toronto; Kingston; Montreal; Quebec; St. John's. In the United States again; Lebanon; The Shaker Village; West Point," facing p. 394. Wood-engraving, 3 ⅞ by 5 ⅜ inches wide (9.8 cm high by 13.8 cm wide), framed.
Scanned image, colour correction, sizing, caption, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose, as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Passage Illustrated: An Amusing Incident on "British" Soil
I was standing on the wharf at this place, watching the passengers embarking in a steamboat which preceded that whose coming we awaited, and participating in the anxiety with which a sergeant’s wife was collecting her few goods together — keeping one distracted eye hard upon the porters, who were hurrying them on board, and the other on a hoopless washing-tub for which, as being the most utterly worthless of all her movables, she seemed to entertain particular affection — when three or four soldiers with a recruit came up and went on board.
The recruit was a likely young fellow enough, strongly built and well made, but by no means sober: indeed he had all the air of a man who had been more or less drunk for some days. He carried a small bundle over his shoulder, slung at the end of a walking-stick, and had a short pipe in his mouth. He was as dusty and dirty as recruits usually are, and his shoes betokened that he had travelled on foot some distance, but he was in a very jocose state, and shook hands with this soldier, and clapped that one on the back, and talked and laughed continually, like a roaring idle dog as he was.
The soldiers rather laughed at this blade than with him: seeming to say, as they stood straightening their canes in their hands, and looking coolly at him over their glazed stocks, "Go on, my boy, while you may! you’ll know better by-and-by:" when suddenly the novice, who had been backing towards the gangway in his noisy merriment, fell overboard before their eyes, and splashed heavily down into the river between the vessel and the dock.
I never saw such a good thing as the change that came over these soldiers in an instant. Almost before the man was down, their professional manner, their stiffness and constraint, were gone, and they were filled with the most violent energy. In less time than is required to tell it, they had him out again, feet first, with the tails of his coat flapping over his eyes, everything about him hanging the wrong way, and the water streaming off at every thread in his threadbare dress. But the moment they set him upright and found that he was none the worse, they were soldiers again, looking over their glazed stocks more composedly than ever.
The half-sobered recruit glanced round for a moment, as if his first impulse were to express some gratitude for his preservation, but seeing them with this air of total unconcern, and having his wet pipe presented to him with an oath by the soldier who had been by far the most anxious of the party, he stuck it in his mouth, thrust his hands into his moist pockets, and without even shaking the water off his clothes, walked on board whistling; not to say as if nothing had happened, but as if he had meant to do it, and it had been a perfect success. [Chapter XV, "In Canada; Toronto; Kingston; Montreal; Quebec; St. John's. In the United States again; Lebanon; The Shaker Village; West Point," pp. 299-300]
Commentary: On the Wharf at Queenston (Niagara-on-the-Lake)
Dickens specifically mentions the recruit's falling into the Niagara River at the steamboat wharf at Queenston (originally the "Lower Landing"), which in 1970 was absorbed into the township of Niagara-on-the-Lake, opposite Lewiston, New York. Frost has accurately depicted a wharf and a storehouse, and a party of soldiers, presumably from nearby Fort George, which contained a considerable garrison. Since he mentions the destruction of the statue on the monument to General Sir Isaac Brock on nearby Queenston Heights, Dickens may have been aware that here, in the first major battle of the War of 1812, despite a battery of canon at Barton Hill, across the river, the American forces suffered defeat because the Lewiston militia refused orders to fight on foreign soil.
Later in the war the Town was razed and burnt to the ground by American soldiers as they withdrew to Fort Niagara. Undaunted by this setback, the citizens rebuilt the Town after the War, with the residential quarter around Queen Street and toward King Street, where the new Court House was rebuilt out of firing range of the cannons of Fort Niagara. ["History," Niagara-on-the-Lake]
The scene occurs, then, in the rebuilt Queenston, that which rose from the ashes after the city's destruction on 10 December 1813. The town which Dickens visited was a transportation hub as it possessed a considerable wharf and warehouses, and had become the terminus for Upper Canada's first horse-drawn railway, the Erie and Ontario. The military presence must have obvious during Dickens's brief visit:
In 1814, the British rebuilt Fort George and began construction on 2 new posts - Fort Mississauga at the mouth of the river and Butler's Barracks further inland. Butler's Barracks served until 1965 as a training base for Canadian militia. [R. J. Dale]
Although Frost may not have visited the region himself prior to working on this illustration in London in 1878, he accurately conveys the mixed commercial and military activity on the Lower Landing, with the sergeant's wife holding a washing tub, several longshoremen looking on appreciatively, and a warehouseman hauling a barrel — all serving as visual foils to the four smartly dressed soldiers and the inebriated recruit just recovered from his dunking in the river. Although the natural backdrop of Niagara-on-the-Lake remains "beautiful and picturesque" (389), the illustrator has focussed on the human actors in the comic scene as Dickens describes it, rather than on the vista of the Niagara Gorge.
Related Material
Bibliography
Dale, Ronald J. "Niagara-on-the-Lake." The Canadian Encyclopedia 24 October 2012.
Dickens, Charles. Chapter XV, "In Canada; Toronto; Kingston; Montreal; Quebec; St. John's. In the United States again; Lebanon; The Shaker Village; West Point." American Notes, Sketches by Boz, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by A. B. Frost and Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877. Pp. 363-69.
Dickens, Charles. Chapter XV, "In Canada; Toronto; Kingston; Montreal; Quebec; St. John's. In the United States again; Lebanon; The Shaker Village; West Point." American Notes and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by A. B. Frost and Gordon Thomson. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880. Pp. 387-404.
Historical Association of Lewiston Inc. Historic Lewiston, New York 20 June 2016.
History of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Niagara-on-the-Lake 1999.
Last modified 29 March 2019