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The Pawnbroker's Shop
George Cruikshank
1839
Etching on copper
11.8 x 9.7 cm
"The Pawnbroker's Shop," Chapter 23 in "Scenes," by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, facing p. 138.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
It is a low, dirty-looking, dusty shop, the door of which stands always doubtfully, a little way open: half inviting, half repelling the hesitating visitor, who, if he be as yet uninitiated, examines one of the old garnet brooches in the window for a minute or two with affected eagerness, as if he contemplated making a purchase; and then looking cautiously round to ascertain that no one watches him, hastily slinks in: the door closing of itself after him, to just its former width. . . .
If the outside of the pawnbroker's shop be calculated to attract the attention, or excite the interest, of the speculative pedestrian, its interior cannot fail to produce the same effect in an increased degree. The front door, which we have before noticed, opens into the common shop, which is the resort of all those customers whose habitual acquaintance with such scenes renders them indifferent to the observation of their companions in poverty. The side door opens into a small passage from which some half-dozen doors (which may be secured on the inside by bolts) open into a corresponding number of little dens, or closets, which face the counter. Here, the more timid or respectable portion of the crowd shroud themselves from the notice of the remainder, and patiently wait until the gentleman behind the counter, with the curly black hair, diamond ring, and double silver watch-guard, shall feel disposed to favour them with his notice — a consummation which depends considerably on the temper of the aforesaid gentleman for the time being.
At the present moment, this elegantly-attired individual is in the act of entering the duplicate he has just made out, in a thick book: a process from which he is diverted occasionally, by a conversation he is carrying on with another young man similarly employed at a little distance from him, whose allusions to "that last bottle of soda-water last night," and "how regularly round my hat he felt himself when the young 'ooman gave 'em in charge," would appear to refer to the consequences of some stolen joviality of the preceding evening. The customers generally, however, seem unable to participate in the amusement derivable from this source, for an old sallow-looking woman, who has been leaning with both arms on the counter with a small bundle before her, for half an hour previously, suddenly interrupts the conversation by addressing the jewelled shopman. . . . — "The Pawnbroker's Shop," p. 139-140.
In 'The Pawnbroker's Shop' (Evening Chronicle, 30 June) Boz moves still further towards being a novelist as he imagines the story that two middle-class female customers seem doomed to enact as he observes them in their private box juxtaposed with two other women, a gaudily-dressed young prostitute in an adjacent box and a slovenly drunkard in the 'common shop'. — Michael Slater, p. 49-50.
In 'The Hospital Patient' he comments on the 'miserable creatures' who can be seen lingering about the streets late at night and the sketch culminates in his third deathbed scene, one that is rather more complex in its effect than its predecessors. A woman lies dying in a hospital having been savagely beaten by her partner, but the scene is neither simply pathetic as at the end of 'Our Next Door Neighbour' nor simply horrific as in 'The Stroller's Tale'. The description of the woman's continued love for the man and her frantic attempts to save him from the gallows touches on the tragic, for all the melodramatic expression involved. Its power derives from Dickens's horrified fascination with the subject of brutal treatment of loving and submissive women by their partners — he had already dramatised this once in 'The Pawnbroker's Shop' (Evening Chronicle, 30 June 1835) and was to revisit the subject in spectacular fashion in Oliver Twist two years later. — Michael Slater, p. 76-77.
What is now Scene 23 is another of those sketches first published in the Evening Chronicle "Sketches of London, No. 15"). In it, Dickens as the observer of the life of London's streets continues the downward trajectory of the previous essay, "Gin-Shops" (originally,"Sketches of London, No. 2," published 19 February 1835). Bentley et al. describe the characters succinctly as clients typical of the squalid neighbourhood which the shop serves: "a harridan, a drunken brute who abuses his wife [his presence is emphasized in Fred Barnard's version, in which his paper cap implies that he is a carpenter: see below], a genteel mother and daughter just becoming inured to poverty, a prostitute, and a drunken old woman" (192) who is accustomed to making do by regularly pawning pieces of clothing. Through them Dickens forces his essentially middle-class reader to descend to the depths of financial insecurity and despair in order to appreciate the plight of the working poor. Dickens's example is not a quasi-respectable establishment, but one of those sordid, shabby shops in the vicinity of the Drury Lane Theatre. We enter where many a reluctant customer before us has entered. The sketch involves a social range of clients, from the aged woman who often resort to the pawnbroker's in order to survive to drunks hoping to acquire enough coin for their next tipple of gin.
Nineteenth-century London had about as many pawnshops as it did public houses since the working poor did not have access to banks and money-lenders, and lived in constant dread of becoming destitute and being sent to the workhouse.
The word pawn comes from the Latin word pignus or 'pledge', and the items being pawned to the broker are called pledges or pawns. Pawnbrokers came to England with the Normans and the settlement of Jews in England. Ostracized from most professions, they had been pushed into unpopular occupations such as money lending and pawnbrokering which, as interest was charged on the loan, was condemned by Christians. — Johnson, 1.
Not immediately evident in the interior scene by Barnard (although it may be seen outside the window, rear, as in the Cruikshank plate), but prominent in the 1910 Harry Furniss lithograph The Pawnbroker's Shop is the traditional pawnbroker's sign, the three golden balls, which supposedly references an episode in the legend of St. Nicholas' in which the kindly bishop saved the three daughters of a poor knight from a life of prostitution by providing each girl with a suitable dowery — a bag of gold. According to Ben Johnson in his article for Historic UK, the children's song
"Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle, That’s the way the money goes, Pop goes the weasel!"
. . . from around 1850 is reputedly about pawning ("popping") a coat or "weasel" (from the rhyming slang "weasel and stoat") in order to get money to buy simple foodstuffs.
Above: Fred Barnard's realistic wood-engraving of the broker's assessing some clothing being pawned by a washerwoman in The Pawnbroker's Shop (1876). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.
Bentley, Nicholas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens: Index. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Part One, "Dickens and His Early Illustrators: 1. George Cruikshank. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1980. Pp. 15-38.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z. The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. "The Pawnbroker's Shop," Chapter 23 in "Scenes." Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890. Pp. 138-144.
Dickens, Charles. "The Pawnbroker's Shop," Chapter 23 in "Scenes." Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Pp. 88-92.
Dickens, Charles. "The Pawnbroker's Shop," Chapter 23 in "Scenes." Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. 177-185.
Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. Pp. 12-15.
Johnson, Ben. "The Pawnbroker." Historic UK: History Magazine. Accessed 9 April 2017. http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Pawnbroker/
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.
Last modified 5 May 2017