"Peggotty Searching for Little Emily" by Fred Barnard — second series for "Character Sketches" (1884)

Peggotty Searching for Little Emily

Fred Barnard

1884

11.1 x 9 cm framed

One of six lithographs in A Series of Character Sketches from Dickens, from the Original Drawings by Frederick Barnard.... Series 2: Tony and Sam Weller; Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter, Bertha; Little Nell and her grandfather, and Rogue Riderhood, Dan'l Peggotty, and Seth Pecksniff. (1884)

Dickens does not actually describe Dan'l Peggotty's searching for his runaway niece in France in the text of the novel. Consequently, the illustration is a departure from earlier Victorian practices. However, perhaps Barnard felt empowered because he was not actually having to collaborate on the narrative-pictorial sequence with a living novelist. [Click on illustration to enlarge it.]

Passages Complemented

‘When Em’ly got strong again,’ said Mr. Peggotty, after another short interval of silence, ‘she cast about to leave that good young creetur, and get to her own country. The husband was come home, then; and the two together put her aboard a small trader bound to Leghorn, and from that to France. She had a little money, but it was less than little as they would take for all they done. I’m a’most glad on it, though they was so poor! What they done, is laid up wheer neither moth or rust doth corrupt, and wheer thieves do not break through nor steal. Mas’r Davy, it’ll outlast all the treasure in the wureld.

‘Em’ly got to France, and took service to wait on travelling ladies at a inn in the port. Theer, theer come, one day, that snake. — Let him never come nigh me. I doen’t know what hurt I might do him!—Soon as she see him, without him seeing her, all her fear and wildness returned upon her, and she fled afore the very breath he draw’d. She come to England, and was set ashore at Dover. [Chapter LI, "The Beginning of a Longer Journey"]

Commentary: A Question of Emphasis

Clearly Barnard as a social realist was fascinated by Dickens's treatment of the Fallen Woman, which he has foreground in this study of the old Yarmouth sailor searching throughout coastal France for his lost niece, Little Em'ly, who has been seduced by David Copperfield's childhood friend, the rake James Steerforth. If a publisher such as Cassell, Petter, and Galpin (1884) chose to use this image as a frontispiece, the volume thus constituted intimated that the subject matter of this interesting plate (Peggotty's search for his niece) with its foreign costumes and buildings is of greater importance than the main plot, which involves David, Agnes, and Uriah Heep. However, the motif of the Fallen Woman constitutes an important strain of social realism in the mid-century Bildungsroman that New Man of the Sixties Fred Barnard could hardly overlook. Indeed, among his sixty-two large-scale composite woodblock illustrations for the 1872 volume in the Household Edition version of the novel, he devoted a significant proportion to the figures of Steerforth, Em'ly, and Dan'l Peggotty, as well as to the novel's other Fallen Woman, Martha. The 1884 colour lithograph is visually far more engaging than the scene in the 1872 Chapman and Hall volume in which David suddenly encounters the stalwart wanderer returned from abroad, "I stood face to face with Mr. Peggotty!" (Chapter XL).

David encounters Mr. Peggotty in the snow at The Golden Cross (1872 & 1910 Editions)

Left: Kyd's elegant watercolour of Mr. Peggotty, a possible study for the Player's Cigarette Card series (1889-1910). Centre: Hablot Knight Browne's (Phiz's) original serial illustration for the May 1850 number emphasizes the confidential discussion between David and Mr. Peggotty, as overheard by Martha Endell at The Golden Key public house: The Wanderer. Right: Harry Furnss's atmospheric treatment of the meeting focuses far more on the snow-chilled figure of the "Lost Woman" in Martha, the Wanderer (1910).

Relevant Material

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 them and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield, with 61 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872. Vol. III.

A Series of Character Sketches from Dickens, from the Original Drawings by Frederick Barnard, Being Facsimiles of Original Drawings by Fred. Barnard. Series 2: Tony and Sam Weller; Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter, Bertha; Little Nell and her grandfather, and Rogue Riderhood, Dan'l Peggotty, and Seth Pecksniff. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1884.

Created 25 January 2025