Mrs. Gamp favours the company with an exhibition of professional skill. — Fred Barnard's fifty-first illustration for Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1872)

Mrs. Gamp favours the company with an exhibition of professional skill. (1872). Fifty-first composite woodblock engraving by Fred Barnard for Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (Chapter XLVI), page 361. 9.4 x 13.7 cm, or 4 ¼ high by 5 ½ inches, framed, engraved by the Dalziels. Running head: “The Master of the House." [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Passage Illustrated: Rough Nursing

With these words the worthy woman, who appeared to have dropped in to take tea as a delicate little attention, rather than to have any engagement on the premises in an official capacity, crossed to Mr. Chuffey, who was seated in the same corner as of old, and shook him by the shoulder.

"Rouge yourself, and look up! Come!" said Mrs Gamp. "Here’s company, Mr Chuffey."

"I am sorry for it," cried the old man, looking humbly round the room. "I know I’m in the way. I ask pardon, but I’ve nowhere else to go to. Where is she?"

Merry went to him.

"Ah!" said the old man, patting her on the check. "Here she is. Here she is! She’s never hard on poor old Chuffey. Poor old Chuff!"

As she took her seat upon a low chair by the old man’s side, and put herself within the reach of his hand, she looked up once at Tom. It was a sad look that she cast upon him, though there was a faint smile trembling on her face. It was a speaking look, and Tom knew what it said. "You see how misery has changed me. I can feel for a dependant now, and set some value on his attachment."

"Ay, ay!" cried Chuffey in a soothing tone. "Ay, ay, ay! Never mind him. It’s hard to hear, but never mind him. He’ll die one day. There are three hundred and sixty-five days in the year — three hundred and sixty-six in leap year — and he may die on any one of ‘em." [Chapter XLVI, "In Which Miss Pecksniff Makes Love, Mr. Jonas Makes Wrath, Mrs. Gamp Makes Tea, and Mr. Chuffey Makes Business," pp. 356-357. Running Head: "Mrs. Gamp Presides over a Tea Party."]

Commentary: Mrs. Gamp Takes Charge of the Patient and the Tea-table

Left: Phiz's May 1844 illustration for this chapter focuses on the tea-table scene rather than on Old Chuffey's mental deterioration, Mrs. Gamp Makes Tea.

Convinced that Mrs. Mercy Chuzzlewit is being too permissive with "the old victim," the old clerk Chuffey, Mrs. Gamp shakes her patient into semi-consciousness as a "triumph of her art."

The scene advances the character comedy of the bibulous Mrs. Gamp and her rough nursing of the Chuzzlewits' elderly dementia patient, even as it suggests the increasing pressure on Jonas, who fears that his having murdered his father will somehow be revealed, perhaps through the ravings of Old Chuffey, the lifetime clerk of Anthony Chuzzlewit & Co. The fireplace and tea-table realia make the scene in Jonas's parlour highly plausible. In the background Barnard has included a concerned Tom Pinch and his sister, Ruth; Mercy and her sister, Charity; Mrs. Todgers; and (tearing his hair out) Augustus Moddle. His anxiety in attending this extended family gathering of his fiancee's relatives is yet another factor in his decision to escape Charity's domestic dictatorship for the wilds of Van Dieman's Land (modern-day Tasmania).

Related Materials

Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use the 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

Barnard, Fred. Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman and Hall, 1908.

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.

_____. Martin Chuzzlewit. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1863. Vol. 2 of 4.

_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, with 59 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition, 22 volumes. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872. Vol. 2. [The copy of the Household Edition from which these pictures were scanned was the gift of George Gorniak, proprietor of The Dickens Magazine, whose subject for the fifth series, beginning in January 2008, was this 1843-44 novel.

_____. Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 7.

Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 15: Martin Chuzzlewit." The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 17. Pp. 267-294.

Kyd [Clayton J. Clarke]. Characters from Dickens. Nottingham: John Player & Sons, 1910.

"The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit: Fifty-nine Illustrations by Fred Barnard." Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens, Being Eight Hundred and Sixty-Six Drawings by Fred Barnard, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), J. Mahoney, Charles Green, A. B. Frost, Gordon Thomson, J. McL. Ralston, H. French, E. G. Dalziel, F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes. Printed from the Original Woodblocks Engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman and Hall, 1908. Pp. 185-216.

Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924.

Steig, Michael. "From Caricature to Progress: Master Humphrey's Clock and Martin Chuzzlewit." Ch. 3, Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U.P., 1978. Pp. 51-85. [See e-text in Victorian Web.]

Steig, Michael. "Martin Chuzzlewit's Progress by Dickens and Phiz. Dickens Studies Annual 2 (1972): 119-149.

4 February 2008

Last modified 26 November 2024