Title-page and uncaptioned vignette for the twenty-second volume of the Household Edition: Asleep in the blacking factory. John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens: Dickens as a boy having fallen asleep over a desk, pasting labels. Composite woodblock engraving by Fred Barnard (1879). 8.5 by 6.1 cm (3 ¼ by 5 ¼ inches). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Passage Anticipated: Pasting Labels on Bottles at Hungerford Stairs

"The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old gray rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place,[52] rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist. [Chapter II, "Hard Experiences in Boyhood, 1822-1824," pp. 16-17]

Commentary: An Autobiographical Connection to David Copperfield, Pip, and Oliver

Left: F. A. Fraser's scene with Pip and the Convict on the marshes from the Household Edition illustrations for Great Expectations (1876). Left of centre: Barnard's vignette of David at the milestone, vignette for the Household Edition of David Copperfield (1872). Right of centre: James Mahoney's vignette of Oliver Twist at the milestone, vignette for the Household Edition of The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1871). Right: E. A. Abbey's American Household Edition title-page vignette featuring crutch-wielding Tiny Tim, "GOD Bless Us Every One" for Christmas Stories (1876).

In the first volume of The Life of Charles Dickens, published in the same year as the Household Edition of David Copperfield, 1872, John Forster revealed in Chapter 2, "Hard Experiences in Boyhood. 1822-1824," that the Murdstone and Grinby warehouse episode in the mid-century novel was but thinly disguised autobiography, and had originally been composed in the spring of 1847:

the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive nature, turned at the age of ten into a 'labouring hind' . . . and conscious already of what made it seem very strange to him that he could so easily have been thrown away at such an age, was indeed himself. [1872 edition: Vol. I, 15]

According to biographer Forster, Dickens soon afterward abandoned the notion of writing his autobiography in favour of David Copperfield. In fact, as the above vignettes suggest, throughout his career Dickens was absorbed by the problems of children of the working class, and often evoked reader sympathy through sentimental identification with such boys as Pip, Tiny Tim, Oliver Twist, and the highly autobiographical David Copperfield.

These "boys from Dickens" are not what they first seem: they are not "working class" boys at all; rather, like Dickens himself, they have solidly middle-class origins. Indeed, they are (with the exception of Timothy Cratchit) they are orphans with upper-middle class backgrounds who have been neglected or (as the case of Oliver, heir to a considerable fortune) lost. Here, even as Dickens's Micawber-like father languishes in the Marshalsea for debt, the boy who ought to be in an upper-middle-class school finds himself at quite another kind of desk, engaged in labour unbecoming one of his social background. The vignette thus conveys the boy's ennui, his exhaustion, and his sense of having been thrown away.

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

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Barnard, Fred, et al. Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings by Fred Barnard, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), J. Mahoney [and others] printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman & Hall, 1908. Pp. 561-584.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872 and 1874. 3 vols.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879. Vol. XXII.


Created 1 September 2009

Last modified 5 January 2024