"It ain't a smokin' your way, Sir," I says. — from the Household Edition of Forster's "Life of Charles Dickens" (1879)

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"It ain't a smokin' your way, Sir," I says.

Fred Barnard

1879

Composite woodblock engraving by the Dalziels

14.1 by 11 cm (5 ½ by 4 ¼ inches), page 65, framed.

Full caption: "It ain't a smokin' your way, Sir, I says; well, he says, no more it is, coachman, and as long as it smokes anybody else's way, it's all right and I'm agreeable."

Pickwick Papers, Book 3, chap. viii. Extra illustration for The Life of Charles Dickens in the twenty-second volume of the Household Edition.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

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 in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Complemented: Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the Innyard of The George

I do not, for reasons to be hereafter stated, think the Pickwick Papers comparable to the later books; but, apart from the new vein of humour it opened, its wonderful freshness and its unflagging animal spirits, it has two characters that will probably continue to attract to it an unfading popularity. Its pre-eminent achievement is of course Sam Weller; one of those people that take their place among the supreme successes of fiction, as one that nobody ever saw but everybody recognizes, at once perfectly natural and intensely original. Who is there that has ever thought him tedious? Who is so familiar with him as not still to be finding something new in him? Who is so amazed by his inexhaustible resources, or so amused by his inextinguishable laughter, as to doubt of his being as ordinary and perfect a reality, nevertheless, as anything in the London streets? When indeed the relish has been dulled that makes such humor natural and appreciable, and not his native fun only, his ready and rich illustration, his imperturbable self-possession, but his devotion to his master, his chivalry and his gallantry, are no longer discovered, or believed no longer to exist, in the ranks of life to which he belongs, it will be worse for all of us than for the fame of his creator. Nor, when faith is lost in that possible combination of eccentricities and benevolences, shrewdness and simplicity, good sense and folly, all that suggests the ludicrous and nothing that suggests contempt for it, which form the delightful oddity of Pickwick, will the mistake committed be one merely of critical misjudgment. But of this there is small fear. Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick are the Sancho and the Quixote of Londoners, and as little likely to pass away as the old city itself. [Book the Second — First Five Years of Fame, Chapter 1, "Writing The Pickwick Papers," 35]

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. Page 564.

[The copy of the book from which these pictures were scanned is in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.]

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. 22 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879. Vol. XXII.

Created 8 October 2009

Last modified 5 January 2025