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"With an old broom softly swept the step"
Harold Copping
1924
Photographic reproduction of line drawing
15.6 x 11.5 cm (6 ⅛ by 4 ½ inches), vignetted
Portrait of Jo for "Poor Jo, The Crossing-Sweeper," p. 79.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The next day they buried the dead man in the churchyard hard by.
But that night there came a slouching figure through the court to the iron gate. It stood looking in for a little while, then with an old broom it softly swept the step and made the archway clean. It was poor Jo; and as he went away, he softly said to himself, "He was very good to me, he was." ["Poor Jo, The Crossing-Sweeper," Character Sketches from Dickens, pp. 78-80
Copping's treatment is realistic, but he offers little context about the menial job of a crossing sweeper: Jo makes his living by removing filth. Jo is, after all, purely a secondary figure in Phiz's 1852-53 narrative-pictorial program, in which he appears only three times: the engraved title-page (Part Nineteen) and Consecrated Ground (Part Five), and in the upper-left quadrant of the monthly wrapper. Fred Barnard in the Household Edition seems to have been far more interested in the pathetic street waif, for Joe appears seven times in the series of sixty-one illustrations: the frontispiece, Chapter XI, Chapter XVI, Chapter XXV, Chapter XXXI, Chapter XLVI, and, most significantly, the deathbed scene in Chapter XLVII, "Jo's Will." Dickens suggests that Jo is a barbaric throwback rather a member of modern society from his very introduction as a member of a "tribe," the urban homeless and houseless, the very embodiment of poverty and disease, and yet a servant of the society that takes no responsibility for him. His broom, prominent in Barnard's opening illustration of him and all three Copping illustrations, is the symbol of his social utility. In illustrating the pathetically sweet middle-class children whose stories Mar Angela Dickens foregrounds, this is as close to social realism as Copping gets.
Left: Clayton J. Clarke's Player's Cigarette Card No. 48: Jo, The Crossing-Sweeper (1910). Centre: Phiz's original serial version of the scene in which the illustrator focuses on Jo at work: Jo, The Crossing-Sweeper (September 1853). Right: Fred Barnard's Household Edition composite woodblock illustration of Jo after the inquest: "He wos wery good to me, he wos!" (1873).
Bentley, Nicolas, et al. The Dickens Index. Oxford & Troronto: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853.
Dickens, Mary Angela [Charles Dickens' grand-daughter]. Dickens' Dream Children. London, Paris New, York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd., 1924.
Dickens, Mary Angela et al. Children's Stories from Dickens. Introduction by Percy Fitzgerald. Illustrated by Harold Copping. London, Paris New, York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd., 1893.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
Created 8 October 2023