"All the light and life of day came on; and amidst it all, and pressing down the grass whose every blade bore twenty tiny lives, lay the dead man, with his stark and rigid face turned upwards to the sky." — Chapter L, Fred Barnard's forty-seventh illustration for "Nicholas Nickleby" (1875)

All the light and life of day came on; and amidst it all, and pressing down the grass whose every blade bore twenty tiny lives, lay the dead man, with his stark and rigid face turned upwards to the sky., for Chap. L; forty-seventh illustration for the British Household Edition, illustrated by Fred Barnard with fifty-nine composite woodblock engravings (1875). The full-page, framed illustration is 13.3 cm high by 17.7 cm wide (5 ⅛ by 7 inches), facing p. 337. Running head: "Early Morning" (337). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Passage Illustrated: Hawk and the Seconds leave Verisopht's Corpse on the Field of Honour

Phiz introduces the chapter that sees Verisopht's death with a less distinguished scene involving The Hawk: The Last Brawl between Sir Mulbery and His Pupil (July 1839).

"He’s gone!" cried Westwood, who, with the other second, had run up to the body, and fallen on one knee beside it.

"His blood on his own head," said Sir Mulberry. "He brought this upon himself, and forced it upon me."

"Captain Adams," cried Westwood, hastily, "I call you to witness that this was fairly done. Hawk, we have not a moment to lose. We must leave this place immediately, push for Brighton, and cross to France with all speed. This has been a bad business, and may be worse, if we delay a moment. Adams, consult your own safety, and don’t remain here; the living before the dead; goodbye!"

With these words, he seized Sir Mulberry by the arm, and hurried him away. Captain Adams — only pausing to convince himself, beyond all question, of the fatal result — sped off in the same direction, to concert measures with his servant for removing the body, and securing his own safety likewise.

So died Lord Frederick Verisopht, by the hand which he had loaded with gifts, and clasped a thousand times; by the act of him, but for whom, and others like him, he might have lived a happy man, and died with children’s faces round his bed.

The sun came proudly up in all his majesty, the noble river ran its winding course, the leaves quivered and rustled in the air, the birds poured their cheerful songs from every tree, the short-lived butterfly fluttered its little wings; all the light and life of day came on; and, amidst it all, and pressing down the grass whose every blade bore twenty tiny lives, lay the dead man, with his stark and rigid face turned upwards to the sky. [Chapter L, "Involves a serious Catastrophe," 275]

Commentary: Illustrations Depicting Before and After the Duel

All three major illustrations for this chapter after the initial (July 1839) serial illustration touch upon some aspect of the aftermath of the duel between Sir Mulbrerry Hawk and his "pupil," Lord Frederic Verisopht. The cause of the quarrel lies in Hawk's cavalier treatment of Kate Nickleby, and his contempt for her brother when Nicholas attempts to protect her reputation and calls Hawk out in a London hotel. The upshot was Hawk's receiving a beating, for which he has formulated plans of vengeance. This has been the cause of the duel, after a day of excessive gambling and wine consumption at the Hampton races. Verisopht has objected to Hawk's plans to exact vengeance upon Nicholas, and has struck Hawk in the heat of the moment.

The Barnard sequence in the British Household Edition actually depicts the adversaries at each other's throats in "Two men, seizing each other by the throat, struggled into the middle of the room.", so that the artist depicts the before and After of the deadly duel between the ruthless gambler and his quondam dupe. Facing the final page of the chapter, the scene shows a recently risen sun brilliantly illuminating the heath below, and the corpse of the young aristocrat. His murderer and the seconds from the duel are not in evidence, and Verisopht seems strangely at rest, finally free of Hawk's devious manipulations, insinuations, financial spiongings, contemptuous and disparaging remarks. The panoramic, painterly view of the fields and the Thames smacks of the natural sublime.

Commentary: "Fashionable" duelling had been outlawed by the 1870s.

The first duel in Great Britain involving pistols rather than rapiers was fought at Tothill Fields, London, in 1711 between Colonel Richard Thornhill and Sir Cholmley Deering, but such affairs of honour between military officers and aristocrats rarely involved firearms until the early 1760s. Such scenes occur regularly in novels set in the eighteenth century, but far less frequently in Victorian novels with contemporary settings since duelling was officially outlawed in 1819. In fact, from the seventeenth century onward most European nations had attempted to ban duelling, and replace it (when necessary) with litigation. By the time that Dickens was writing this instalment of Nicholas Nickleby in 1839, duelling had definitely fallen out of favour even among the aristocracy, in part thanks to a concerted effort by Prince Albert and the Duke of Wellington to change both the law and society's attitudes. The last duel officially recorded between Englishmen in the United Kingdom occurred on the beach near Portsmouth on 20 May 1845. Prior to the nineteenth century, an officer or a "gentleman" risked social ostracism for not issuing a challenge when insulted, or for failing to respond to such a challenge. By the time that Verisopht and Hawk met on the field of honour such affairs had to be managed surreptitiously since killing another in a duel was legally judged homicide. However, an interesting coincidence is that the very last duels known to have occurred on British soil involved a pair of French political refugees, Lieutenant Hawkey and Emmanuel Barthélemy, in 1852. Both were tried for murder.

Other Duelling Scenes from Various Victorian Novels (1841-64)

Phiz's The Duel from Davenport Dunn (February 1858)
Cruikshank's The Duel in Tothill Fields from The Miser (July 1842)
Phiz's Sword Play from The Spendthrift (April 1855)
Phiz's The Duel on Crabtree Green from Mervyn Clitheroe (December 1857)
Walker's The Last Moments of the Count of Saverne from The Cornhill Magazine (April 1864)
Cattermole's Sir John Chester's End from Barnaby Rudge (November 1841)

Parallel Illustrations from Other Editions (1875 and 1910)

Left: Harry Furniss's 1910 lithograph of the aftermath of the duel, with violent undertones: Lord Frederick Verisopht falls in a Duel in the Charles Dickens Library Edition. Right: C. S. Reinhart's picturesque realisation of the same scene for American readers: Lay the dead man, with his stark and rigid face turned upward to the sky in the Household Edition, New York (1875).

Related material, including front matter and sketches, by other illustrators

Scanned image, colour correction, sizing, caption, and commentary 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.]

Bibliography

Barnard, J. "Fred" (il.). Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, with fifty-nine illustrations. The Works of Charles Dickens: The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1875. XV. Rpt. 1890.

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1988.

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 Nicholas Nickleby. With fifty-two illustrations by C. S. Reinhart. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1872. I.

__________. Nicholas Nickleby. With 39 illustrations by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). London: Chapman & Hall, 1839.

__________. Nicholas Nickleby. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 4.

__________. "Nicholas Nickleby." Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens, being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings by Fred Barnard et al. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1908.

Created 20 September 2021