Harry Furniss's eighteen-volume edition of The Charles Dickens Library (London: Educational Book Company, 1910) contains some 500 special plates (part of the total of 1200 illustrations) and two volumes of commentary. Volume XVII, edited by J. A. Hammerton, is entitled The Dickens Picture Book: A Record of the Dickens Illustrators. Since the order of the volumes is roughly chronological, the seventh volume, entitled The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, precedes the eighth volume, Christmas Books, the sixth volume being Barnaby Rudge. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit was Dickens's sixth complete novel, a work so long (a nineteen-month serialisation) that Hammerton did not need to fill out the volume with short stories or journalistic pieces. This was the first novel written after Dickens's first American reading tour, probably begun in November 1842, although the first instalment did not appear until January 1843.
The final volume of the 1910 Charles Dickens Library Edition is The Dickens Companion: A Book of Anecdote and Reference. Whereas the muti-volumed Household Edition, issued in tandem by Chapman and Hall and Harper and Brothers throughout the 1870s involved some sixteen American and British illustrators working in the new mode of the Sixties and providing more than a thousand wood-engravings for the thirty-eight volumes, Furniss produced five hundred full-page lithographs — a prolific output and a singular achievement for a single artist. Furniss was fortunate in illustrating Artin Chuzzlewit that he had as precedents for his twenty-nine lithographs (based on staccato pen-and-ink drawing) both the serial program of forty illustrations by Dickens's collaborator of twenty-two years, Hablot Knight Brown, and the wholly new, generally half-page composite woodblock illustrations by the gifted caricaturist Fred Barnard in the Household Edition of 1872, which as one of the longest volumes in that edition contains sixty illustrations. Furniss's standard throughout the 1910 edition, even for the longest novels in the canon, is twenty-eight full-page lithographs plus the coloured engraved-title.
For all twenty-nine of the illustrations for the Martin Chuzzlewit illustrations in volume 7, the series editor, J. A. Hammerton, has included both succinct captions (given in full below) and extended quotations to demonstrate the textual moment realised in each; moreover, each quotation refers to a specific page number, thereby enabling the reader to find the passage illustrated. The exception to this standard mode of presentation and captioning is the pair of character studies (without benefit of setting or backdrop) of Mark Tapley and Sairey Gamp; a third study, of Old Chuffey, however, does possess both a caption and a page number. As usual in the volumes of The Charles Dickens Library Edition Furniss provides an ornately bordered title-page, listed as Characters in the Story in the "List of Special Plates" (xi). Although each page is 12.2 by 18.4 cm (4.75 by 7.25 inches) and the caption below each in upper-case, and below that occurs a multi-line quotation in upper and lower case, each plate is effectively 14.3 cm by 9.2 cm (5.5 inches by 3.25 inches), the vertically-mounted illustrations usually being framed, and the horizontally-mounted illustrations being vignetted. Aside from the thirty-four title-page vignettes surrounding the book's title, of the twenty-eight full-page illustrations, Furniss devotes only three to the wonderfully satirical American episodes, which by 1910 had lost so much of their topicality. A long-time comic favourite, the hypocritical humbug Seth Pecksniff, appears in eight of the illustrations, and the indefatigably jolly picaresque companion Mark Tapley in eight, whereas the eponymous hero of the narrative, the eiron Young Martin, occurs in but ten of the twenty-eight regular plates.
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
- 1. "It was She!" (Frontispiece)
- 2. Characters in the Stories
- 3. Old Martin and the Will
- 4. Mr. Spottletoe stands up to Mr. Pecksniff
- 5. Mark Tapley and Tom Pinch
- 6. The Pecksniffs posing to receive Martin
- 7. The sad state of Mr. Pecksniff
- 8. Old Chuffey
- 9. Martin meets Mr. Tigg at the Pawnbroker's
- 10. Mark Tapley's sympathetic sneeze
- 11. "The Rowdy Journal" Office
- 12. Mark Tapley
- 13. Mrs. Gamp
- 14. "Eden!"
- 15. Mr. Pecksniff makes love
- 16. The Dismissal of Tom Pinch
- 17. Mr. Chollop visits Martin
- 18. The Laying of the Foundation Stone
- 19. Tom Pinch at the Brass and Copper Founder's
- 20. Jonas Chuzzlewit and Montagu Tigg
- 21. Ruth makes a Pudding
- 22. Mrs. Gamp at the Docks
- 23. On the Road to Salisbury
- 24. Mr. Pecksniff leaving the Dragon
- 25. Ruth and Westlock in Fountain Court
- 26. Jonas at the Alehouse
- 27. Bestey Prigg and Mrs. Gamp
- 28. The Fall of Mr. Pecksniff
- 29. "Touch the notes lightly, Tom."
Related Materials
- Illustrations by Phiz (40 plates from the Chapman and Hall edition of January 1843 through July 1844)
- Illustrations by Sol Eytinge, Jr. (16 plates from the Ticknor and Fields' Diamond Edition of 1867)
- Fred Barnard (60 plates from the Chapman and Hall Household Edition of 1872)
- Clayton J. Clarke (five studies from three sources, 1910)
- Harrold Copping (three illustrations of six characters, 1924)
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 the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.
_____. Martin Chuzzlewit. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1863. Vol. II of IV.
_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. The Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Vol. II.
_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, with 59 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition, 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871-1880. Vol. II. The copy of the Household Edition from which the Victorian Web pictures were scanned was the gift of George Gorniak, proprietor of The Dickens Magazine, whose subject for the fifth series, beginning in January 2008, was this novel.
_____. Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. VII.
Kyd [Clayton J. Clarke]. Characters from Dickens. Nottingham: John Player & Sons, 1910.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924.
Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.
Vann, J. Don. "Martin Chuzzlewit, twenty parts in nineteen monthly instalments, January 1843-July 1844." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985, pp. 66-67.
Created 17 February 2016
Last modified 17 August 2025