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Mark Tapley
Harry Furniss
1910
14.5 x 5.5 cm vignetted
Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, Chapter 18, "Does Business with the House of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son, from Which One of the Partners Retires Unexpectedly," facing VII, 320.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Mr. Pinch was jogging along, full of pleasant thoughts and cheerful influences, when he saw, upon the path before him, going in the same direction with himself, a traveller on foot, who walked with a light quick step, and sang as he went — for certain in a very loud voice, but not unmusically. He was a young fellow, of some five or six- and-twenty perhaps, and was dressed in such a free and fly-away fashion, that the long ends of his loose red neckcloth were streaming out behind him quite as often as before; and the bunch of bright winter berries in the buttonhole of his velveteen coat was as visible to Mr Pinch's rearward observation, as if he had worn that garment wrong side foremost. He continued to sing with so much energy, that he did not hear the sound of wheels until it was close behind him; when he turned a whimsical face and a very merry pair of blue eyes on Mr Pinch, and checked himself directly. [Chapter 5, "Containing a Full Account of the Installation of Mr. Pecksniff's New Pupil . . . ," 69]
"Lord love you, sir!" cried Mark, "you don't know me. My chest don't want no warming. Even if it did, what would no waistcoat bring it to? Inflammation of the lungs, perhaps? Well, there'd be some credit in being jolly, with a inflammation of the lungs."
As Mr. Pinch returned no other answer than such as was conveyed in his breathing very hard, and opening his eyes very wide, and nodding his head very much, Mark thanked him for his ride, and without troubling him to stop, jumped lightly down. And away he fluttered, with his red neckerchief, and his open coat, down a cross-lane; turning back from time to time to nod to Mr. Pinch, and looking one of the most careless, good-humoured comical fellows in life. His late companion, with a thoughtful face pursued his way to Salisbury. [Chapter 5, "Containing a Full Account of the Installation of Mr. Pecksniff's New Pupil . . . ," 73]
This situation in the sleepy Wiltshire was re-enacted again and again in nineteenth-century Europe as young men left the country village for the better wages and increased opportunities of the cities and of the colonies, as well as of America. The 1910 Furniss illustration is his re-interpretation of Hablot Knight Browne's March 1843 Mark Begins to be Jolly Under Creditable Circumstances (see below) for Chapter 7. However, whereas the scene in the serial plays out against the backdrop of the marketplace, traditional local inn, and finger-post indicating the distances to Salisbury and London, in Furniss the archetypal figure of Mark Tapley, who becomes young Martin's confidant and companion, appears in this full-length portrait in a chapter which has nothing to do with him. By Mark's gesture of farewell and his hail-fellow-well-met posture and expression the picture would seem to be referring to his dialogue with Tom Pinch in Pecksniff's gig some 240 pages earlier. The reader, accordingly, must consider the Mark Tapley that existed as an indefatigably "jolly" Sam Weller figure, and compare those initial impressions with the Mark that Dickens has developed through the American episodes, a vehicle for young Martin's physical and social rehabilitation.
Ticknor-Fields mid-nineteenth-century American illustrator Sol Eytinge, Jr., depicted Mark with young Martin outside their ramshackle log-cabin in the ironically named township of Eden on the banks of the pestilential Mississippi River, Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley (see below) — a dual character study that, like the second American "Household" Edition frontispiece by Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1863), seems to be based on the figure of Mark one sees in Phiz's steel-engravings. However, in "Jolly sort of lodgings," said Mark (see below), Darley has made Mark a sharper dresser, his sporting clothing contrasting the more sober, professional and bourgeois clothing of his partner in adversity, young Martin. The " flash" waistcoat and top-boots reference perhaps his having served as an hostler at the Blue Dragon Inn.
However, the direct source for Harry Furniss's realisation of Mark's farewell to the comforts and limitations of village life is the vital image of the hostler in Barnard's Household Edition wood-engraving He turned a whimsical face and a very merry pair of blue eyes on Mr. Pinch (1872: see below). Having, like Harry Furniss and other later illustrators, read the entire text in advance and therefore having realized the importance of the jovial Mark to the subsequent narrative, social realist and humorist Barnard divides the focus of the composition between a full-length study of Mark, blocking our view of Pecksniff's horse and a representation of a substantial gig.
Whereas Phiz has realised a moment later in Chapter 5 in order to introduce young Martin, Barnard has chosen to depict the initial appearance of the Dickensian Sancho Panza in a rustic setting. Prominent here are Mark's neck-cloth, its long ends giving his figure a dashing quality, and the winter berries and greenery in his buttonhole, imbuing him with the life-force of a woodland deity or the spirit of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol (1843), a novella which Barnard also illustrated in the 1878 Chapman and Hall Household Edition volume Christmas Books. The slouchy-brimmed hat and riding pants (not specified by the authorial voice) contribute to an overall impression of the whimsical character's jauntiness, and contribute to Furniss's "Go West, young man" interpretation of the ebullient Mark Tapley.
Furniss reiterates the jaunty figure of Mark in this later chapter without reference to any particular context, an example of character portraiture not unlike that of turn-of-the-century commercial illustrator Clayton J. Clarke (otherwise, "Kyd"), who provided a fetching portrait of the jolly ostler, again without reference to any particular textual moment, in number 34 of the Players' Cigarette card series, Mark Tapley (1910). One of Dickens's most beloved comic characters, Mark's arrival in the narrative nonetheless failed to buoy up monthly sales of the picaresque novel in serialisation during the Hungry Forties. Dickens even tried the expedient of sending Mark and young Martin to America to test their mettle and effect an epiphany in the protagonist. Dickens must have felt that this master-stroke would enable him to capitalise on his recent American reading tour. The more trying the circumstances, the more jolly does Mark become, so that, under the tribulations of swamp fever in the inappropriately-named Eden on the mosquito-plagued Mississippi, he becomes a model of cheerful endurance for the heretofore self-centred young Martin. On returning to England with his friend, Mark helps to unmask the thorough-going hypocrite Seth Pecksniff, and is rewarded for his virtue and constancy with the hand of Mrs. Lupin, the comely widow who runs the Blue Dragon Inn in the little Wiltshire village which he left at the beginning of the novel.
Left: Phiz's Mark Begins to be Jolly Under Creditable Circumstances (March 1843). Centre: Eytinge's Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley (1867). Right: Kyd's cigarette card image of the inveterate optimist, Mark Tapley (1910).
Left: F. O. C. Darley's frontispiece for volume two, "Jolly sort of lodgings", alluding to Mark's deciding to join young Martin on the voyage to America. Right: Furniss's realisation of Mark's departure from the Wiltshire village, Mark Tapley and Tom Pinch, depicting Mark's cheerfully waving good-bye to all he has known. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Barnard's characterisation of jolly Mark Tapley, He turned a whimsical face and a very merry pair of blue eyes on Mr. Pinch in the Household Edition (1872).
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Created 24 November 2015
Last modified 15 January 2020