"Mr. Pickwick in Chase of His Hat" by Harold Copping (1924)

Mr. Pickwick in Chase of His Hat

Harold Copping

12.7 cm by 13 cm (5 ⅛ by 5 ⅜ inches), vignetted.

Photographic reproduction of line drawing

Dickens' Dream Children

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. .]

Commentary: "Here he did very little work and ate and drank prodigiously" (120)

Mary Angela Dickens and her lead illustrator, Harold Copping, have naturally chosen Samuel Pickwick, founder of the Pickwick Club, as the initial image for the colour lithographs and line drawings associated with Joe, the Fat Boy, for the twelfth chapter entitled not "Mr. Samuel Pickwick," but (as this is a segment of Children's Stories from Dickens) "The Fat Boy. From The Pickwick Papers." Although this was Dickens's first real novel, the somnolent "Fat Boy" is hardly Dickens's most famous child character. He is certainly not a "Dream Child" in the sense that Oliver Twist, Jenny Wren, Tiny Tim, or David Copperfield are. He is, however, the only significant child in Dickens's first novel. Mr. Wardle's perpetually sleepy page in his few waking hours is devoted to eating and drinking; however, so much a fixture is he that others do not notice Joe's observing them — a case in point is Mrs. Wardle's spinster daughter, whom Joe sees kissing Tupman in the summer-house. And, indeed, his observing the couple and confronting them is the subject of Copping's full-page colour lithograph for this chapter, The Fat Boy Awake (facing p. 120).

Bibliography

Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893.

Dickens, Mary Angela [Charles Dickens' grand-daughter]. Dickens' Dream Children. London, Paris New, York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd., 1924.

Created 20 September 2023