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Martha
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
9.8 high x 7.4 cm wide (framed)
Fourteenth full-page illustration for Dickens's David Copperfield in the Ticknor and Fields (Boston), 1867, Diamond Edition, Vol. V. See below for commentary. [Mouse over the text for links.]
Scanned image and text 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.]
The fourteenth illustration — Martha — captures the moment in Chapter 47 when Martha stands on the brink of the Thames at Westminster: “I think she was talking to herself. I am sure, although absorbed in gazing at the water, that her shawl was off her shoulders, and that she was muffling her hands in it, in an unsettled and bewildered way, more like the action of a sleep-walker than a waking person (384). Eytinge's version of the character study of a would-be suicide, a woman driven to the extreme by social ostracism and economic privation, reflects Phiz's serial treatment of the same subject in The River, but Eytinge depicts nobody else in the scene, only of four single character studies in his sequence of sixteen studies, the others being the frontispiece of Little Em'ly as a child on the Yarmouth Dunes, Steerforth sailing, and the ebullient Miss Mowcher.
The scene sketchily suggests the river water and a piece of detritus on the shore, but focuses the reader's attention on the skeletal, wind-swept figure and haggard visage of the woman lost morally and socially in the great metropolis. Were this a Phiz composition, we would almost certainly label it a "dark plate" since it conveys effectively the atmosphere of a night scene.
Dickens, Charles. The Personal History of David Copperfield, illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The Centenary Edition. 2 vols. London & New York: Chapman & Hall, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911.
_______. The Personal History of David Copperfield. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. Vol. V.
Created 25 January 2011 Last modified 11 July 2022