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The Goblin and The Sexton
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
January 1837 (Part Ten)
Steel Engraving
13 cm high by 11 cm wide — 5 ¼ by 4 ¼ inches
Dickens's Pickwick Papers, from Chapter 29, facing p. 247.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
See below for passage illustrated and commentary.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Seated on an upright tombstone, close to him, was a strange, unearthly figure, whom Gabriel felt at once, was no being of this world. His long, fantastic legs which might have reached the ground, were cocked up, and crossed after a quaint, fantastic fashion; his sinewy arms were bare; and his hands rested on his knees. On his short, round body, he wore a close covering, ornamented with small slashes; a short cloak dangled at his back; the collar was cut into curious peaks, which served the goblin in lieu of ruff or neckerchief; and his shoes curled up at his toes into long points. On his head, he wore a broad-brimmed sugar-loaf hat, garnished with a single feather. The hat was covered with the white frost; and the goblin looked as if he had sat on the same tombstone very comfortably, for two or three hundred years. He was sitting perfectly still; his tongue was put out, as if in derision; and he was grinning at Gabriel Grub with such a grin as only a goblin could call up. [Chapter 29, "The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton," p. 247]
"The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton," Dickens's version of Washington Irving's humorous tale of the supernatural, "Rip Van Winkle," from The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819), is not merely an enjoyable little Christmas ghost story. Rather, through the yuletide interpolated tale Dickens provides a premonitory treatment of the theme of spiritual and social renewal for a misanthrope found in A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Chimes (1844), which together established the nineteenth-century British vogue for Christmas Books. Unlike those fuller treatments of the regenerative theme, however, Dickens narrates this inset narrative or interpolated tale through the voice of one of the novel's characters, Mr. Wardle, rather than that of a detached omniscient narrator that one finds in the five Christmas Books of the 1840s.
The Phiz illustration acts as the perfect complement to the dramatic tale, blending a gothic setting — note the gnarled, leafless tree whose arms seem to reach out for the quivering sexton, and the venerable ecclesiastical building that serves as the backdrop — and a caricature of a goblin in a gigantic hat and mediaeval clothing. Phiz realises the leering goblin most effectively through his posture and wrestler's forearms, contrasting his contortionist's posture with the rigid, terrified human being in the churchyard. Tellingly, Phiz shows Grub's knees buckling beneath him as he quails before the supernatural visitor with the grossly distorted visage. The Gothic backdrop of the square church tower and choir contrasts sharply with the weirdly shaped supernatural agent in the outlandish sugarloaf hat and pointed boots.
As Frederic Kitton has noted in his appraisal of Phiz's sketch for this illustration, with respect to the church tower and choir, the country church in the background, supposedly not far from Rochester, Kent (according to Dickens's narrator), "bears some resemblance to St. Alban's Abbey" (p. 69). Phiz utilizes a similar ecclesiastical backdrop in the frontispiece in W. H. Ainsworth's Life and Adventures of Mervyn Clitheroe (June 1858) and The Stranger by the Grave (March 1858). The Gothic window and square tower with a flagpole create a strong vertical, but contrast the other vertical element, the writhing yew tree which reflects the appalled Grub's terror and dismay. However, Phiz has sketched in this backdrop so lightly that in some printings of this etching it is barely discernible. The remarkable feature of the etching is Phiz's almost Cruikshankian handling of the bizarre figures; as John Buchan-Brown has remarked of this illustration, this early work shows Browne's "taste for and a mastery of the grotesque, the sinister and the macabre" (15). As he places his wicker bottle to his lips as he breaks off from his unseemly singing over the freshly-dug grave, Grub turns to confront the apparition whose voice has interrupted his song, making, as Dickens remarks, "his blood run cold" (246). The intervening illustration and the subsequent dialogue between the muscular goblin and the puny sexton delay the revelation of the pregnant moment, when the sexton witnesses a horde of goblins leap-frogging through the graveyard over the tombstones. In the cavern of the playful spirits, the Goblin King's minions bring their master and Grub an alcoholic beverage to prepare the mortal for a series of heart-rending scenes that will lead to Grub's spiritual rehabilitation.
Above: In the 1873 American Household Edition of the novel Thomas Nast used his cartooning talents to provide a whimsical version of the Goblin king: His eyes rested on a form that made his blood run cold. [Gabriel Grub and the Goblin]. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Above: In the British Household Edition of the novel Phiz seems to have
used the earlier illustration as the basis for describing the supernatural meeting in the
more realistic and modelled style of the sixties: his cartooning talents provide a
whimsical version of the Goblin king in
Over the course of the nineteenth century leading artists on either side of the Atlantic produced four major programs of illustration; however, in none of these are the interpolated tales consistently illustrated. Even the great comic re-interpreter of Dickens for the twentieth century, Harry Furniss, did not attempt to illustrate this story. However, not surprisingly, given its strong visual appeal, out of all nine interpolated tales "The Story of the Goblins who stole a Sexton" has been the subject preferred among Dickens's nineteenth-century illustrators.
Buchanan-Brown, John. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (serialised in 1836-37). London: Chapman & Hall, 1837.
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The Household Edition. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. New York: Harper and Brothers 1873.
Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
Kitton, Frederic G. "Hablot K. Browne." Dickens and His Illustrators. Rept. from the 1899 edition. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004. Pp. 58-120.
Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book. London: Educational Book Co., 1910.
Steig, Michael. Chapter 2. "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24-50.
Thomas, Deborah A. Chapter 2: "Imaginative Overindulgence." Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Pp. 7-31.
Last modified 12 November 2019