Clasping the iron railings with his hands, looked eagerly in, wondering which might be his grave
Fred Barnard
1875
13.8 x 10.5 cm (5 ⅜ by 4 ⅛ inches), vignetted, p. 408. For Chapter 62.
Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, The Household Edition, p. 408.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Creeping from the house, and slinking off like a thief; groping with his hands, when first he got into the street, as if he were a blind man; and looking often over his shoulder while he hurried away, as though he were followed in imagination or reality by someone anxious to question or detain him; Ralph Nickleby left the city behind him, and took the road to his own home.
The night was dark, and a cold wind blew, driving the clouds, furiously and fast, before it. There was one black, gloomy mass that seemed to follow him: not hurrying in the wild chase with the others, but lingering sullenly behind, and gliding darkly and stealthily on. He often looked back at this, and, more than once, stopped to let it pass over; but, somehow, when he went forward again, it was still behind him, coming mournfully and slowly up, like a shadowy funeral train.
He had to pass a poor, mean burial-ground — a dismal place, raised a few feet above the level of the street, and parted from it by a low parapet-wall and an iron railing; a rank, unwholesome, rotten spot, where the very grass and weeds seemed, in their frouzy growth, to tell that they had sprung from paupers’ bodies, and had struck their roots in the graves of men, sodden, while alive, in steaming courts and drunken hungry dens. And here, in truth, they lay, parted from the living by a little earth and a board or two — lay thick and close — corrupting in body as they had in mind — a dense and squalid crowd. Here they lay, cheek by jowl with life: no deeper down than the feet of the throng that passed there every day, and piled high as their throats. Here they lay, a grisly family, all these dear departed brothers and sisters of the ruddy clergyman who did his task so speedily when they were hidden in the ground! [Chapter LXII, "Ralph Makes One Last Appointment — And Keeps It," 405]
Above: C. S. Reinhart's 1875 American Household Editioncomposite woodblock engraving of Ralph at the gates of the local burial ground: And clasping the iron railings with his hands, looked eagerly in.
Having disappeared from the Cheerybles' house after learn that the son he thought he had lost infancy has turned out o the the boy Smike at Dotheboys Hall. Worse, after Brooker has revealed the secret of Smike's origins (which he had kept from Nickleby all this time), the brothers reveal that Smike has just died. Having lost his son all over again, Ralph, in a deep depression, has just stopped on his way home at the gates to the burial ground where a suicide who coroner's inquest he attended as a juryman lies buried. The illustrations by Barnard and Reinhart in the British and American Household Editions both emphasize Ralph's deep depression and prepare readers for his suicide in the front garret of the house in Golden Square. The American illustration, although very much a dark plate like its British counterpart, is more literal and less abstract, although undoubtedly the intention of both artists is psychological revelation. Both Reinhart and Barnard may be recalling two very specific dark plates, Consecrated Ground (July 1852) and The Morning (August 1853), both by Phiz or Hablot K. Browne in the serialisation of Bleak House. The latter illustration realises the suicude of Lady Deadlock, which follows the revelation that Esther Summerson is her daughter.
In the 1852-53 novel, Dickens's description of the graveyard and his characters reactions' to it almost certainly strike the twenty-first century reader as hysterically melodramatic, so we need a bit of Victorian social history to permit us to encounter this passage the way readers did in 1853 — a time, it turns out, when newspapers and parliamentary committees complained about the conditions of cemeteries, many of which were commercial enterprises. In his classic Death, Heaven and the Victorians, (1972) John Morley explains that contemporary medical beliefs about the nature of infectious disease provide yet another reason why the wretched condition of graveyards troubled so many people:
Overcrowded churchyards meant that recently interred corpses were constantly disturbed; it was this that made the system of interment a 'gross indecency towards the dead. In order to make room, corpses not a week buried were chopped up and burnt; choppers and saws for the purpose were kept in the graveyards. There was frequently a charnel house or 'bone house' in the churchyard. (Walker said, (! believe that bones, independently of their tegumentary appendages, may prove injurious to health'.) A grave-digger told the 1842 Select Committee [in Parliament] a hair-raising story of how the corpse of a woman, from which the head had been chopped, fell on him in the dark from the side of a grave he was digging. The grave-diggers stole lead from the coffins, and sold the bodies to surgeons; sextons were impelled to dispose of as many bodies as possible, since the more that were buried, the greater the profit. [37]
Dickens's use of the burial ground here in Nicholas Nickleby anticipates his development of this ominous setting in the later novel.
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.
Morley, John. Death, Heaven and the Victorians. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972.
Created 23 September 2021
