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Mr. John Dounce
George Cruikshank
8 February 1836
Etching on copper
11.3 x 8.9 cm
"The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce," Chapter 8 in "Characters," by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, originally published on 4 October 1835; illustration facing p. 181.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The decrees of Fate, and the means by which they are brought about, are mysterious and inscrutable. John Dounce had led this life for twenty years and upwards, without wish for change, or care for variety, when his whole social system was suddenly upset and turned completely topsy-turvy — not by an earthquake, or some other dreadful convulsion of nature, as the reader would be inclined to suppose, but by the simple agency of an oyster; and thus it happened.
Mr. John Dounce was returning one night from the Sir Somebody's Head, to his residence in Cursitor-street — not tipsy, but rather excited, for it was Mr. Jennings's birthday, and they had had a brace of partridges for supper, and a brace of extra glasses afterwards, and Jones had been more than ordinarily amusing — when his eyes rested on a newly-opened oyster-shop, on a magnificent scale, with natives laid, one deep, in circular marble basins in the windows, together with little round barrels of oysters directed to Lords and Baronets, and Colonels and Captains, in every part of the habitable globe.
Behind the natives were the barrels, and behind the barrels was a young lady of about five-and-twenty, all in blue, and all alone — splendid creature, charming face and lovely figure! It is difficult to say whether Mr. John Dounce's red countenance, illuminated as it was by the flickering gas-light in the window before which he paused, excited the lady's risibility, or whether a natural exuberance of animal spirits proved too much for that staidness of demeanour which the forms of society rather dictatorially prescribe. But certain it is, that the lady smiled; then put her finger upon her lip, with a striking recollection of what was due to herself; and finally retired, in oyster-like bashfulness, to the very back of the counter. The sad-dog sort of feeling came strongly upon John Dounce: he lingered — the lady in blue made no sign. He coughed — still she came not. He entered the shop.
"Can you open me an oyster, my dear?" said Mr. John Dounce.
"Dare say I can, sir," replied the lady in blue, with playfulness. And Mr. John Dounce eat [sic] one oyster, and then looked at the young lady, and then eat another, and then squeezed the young lady's hand as she was opening the third, and so forth, until he had devoured a dozen of those at eightpence in less than no time.
"Can you open me half-a-dozen more, my dear?" inquired Mr. John Dounce. — "The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce," p. 183-184.
"[The] Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce. . ." Originally published as "Scenes and Characters No. 5. Love and Oysters in Bell's Life in London (October 4, 1835), this sketch describes a steady "old boy" widower and his infatuation for a 25-year-old woman in a blue dress who sells oysters. He becomes ridiculous to his longtime male companions, has his proposal turned down by the young lady, and eventually marries his cook. — Paul Davis, p. 244.
Shops of all kinds appear in Dickens's fiction and journalism, most famously the old curiosity shop in the novel of the same name, although he seems to have been chiefly interested in inns, hotels, public-houses, and bake-shops. Nevertheless, he had a fondness for oysters throughout his life; on his second American tour, for example, his repast on the night of a public reading would consist solely of champagne and oysters. The British had been fond of "Colchester Natives" since Roman times, when barrels of oysters from the remote corner of the Empire were highly prized in Rome. When the legions pulled out in 410 A. D., the oyster farms were abandoned, and oysters disappeared from British recipes until the reign of King Richard the Second. Since meat was prohibited by the mediaeval church for up to one-third of the year, oysters were a popular alternative to fish, although the mixing of oysters with such meat dishes as steak-and-kidney pie (using stout and dropping the kidneys), steak, and roasted mutton occurred after the Reformation. Since beef-and-oyster pie was a classic Victorian dish, demand for the shellfish was high in nineteenth-century Britain: "as many as 80 million oysters a year being transported from Whitstable's nutrient-rich waters to London's Billingsgate Market alone" (Ysewijn). Although in Pickwick Papers the aphoristic Sam Weller observes that "Poverty and oysters always seem to go together" (a notion that Dickens would have derived as a child in Rochester and Chatham), undoubtedly, by the time that Dickens (under the pseudonym "Tibbs") wrote this sketch for Bell's Life in London set in a superior "oyster saloon," the native oyster beds were becoming exhausted, and the price of oysters was rising to such an extent that only the prosperous classes could afford to eat them "on the shell" by mid-century. Still a cheap source of protein, six oysters could still be used by poorer Londoners as the basis for the traditional pie with a suet crust, a pound of inferior steak, onions and carrots, and a rich sauce based on a pint of porter or stout.
Those were the days of supper, for at that time a beneficent Legislature had not ordained that, at a certain hour, no matter how soberly we may be enjoying ourselves in a house of public entertainment, we were to be turned into the streets. There were many houses which combined a supper with a dinner business; there were some which only took down their shutters when ordinary hard-working people were going to bed. Among the former were the oyster-shops — Quinn's in the Haymarket; Scott's, facing that broad-awake thoroughfare; a little house (name forgotten) in Ryder Street — not Wilton, who closed at twelve; Godwin's, with the celebrated Charlotte as its attendant Hebe, in the Strand near St. Mary's Church. Godwin's was occasionally patronized by journalists and senators who lived in the Temple precincts: the beaming face of Morgan John O'Connell was frequently to be seen there; and Douglas Jerrold would sometimes look in. Charlotte was supposed to be one of the few who had ever silenced the great wit: he had been asking for some time for a glass of brandy-and-water; and when at length Charlotte placed before him the steaming jorum, she said, "There it is, you troublesome little man; mind you don't fall into it and drown yourself." Jerrold, who was very sensitive to any remarks upon his small and bent figure, collapsed.
Other famous oyster-houses of that day, as they are of this, were Lynn's in Fleet Street, Pimm's in the Poultry, and Sweeting's in Cheapside; but they were all closed at night. Restaurants where the presence of ladies at supper was encouraged rather than objected to were the Café de l'Europe, in the large room at the back (the front room, entered immediately from the street, was reserved for gentlemen, and will be mentioned elsewhere), and Dubourg's, already mentioned, the proprietor of which —a fat elderly Frenchman, his portly presence much girt with gold watch-chain — was a constant attendant at the Opera, and was well known to the rouésof the day. — Edmund Yates, "1847-1852."
In Furniss's illustration (clearly a realistic response to Cruikshank's original), Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce, 1910), the jovial elderly bachelor in fashionable middle-class garb is rather more animated than the stiff, portly buffoon in the Cruikshank plate. Whereas the shopgirl merely serves her rotund customer an oyster in Cruikshank's "Oyster Saloon" (designated by large sign in the window), in the Furniss lithograph she bats her eyes at him, displays her dimples to advantage, and flirts outrageously — and she is much more youthful and pretty under Furniss's pen. Although the plain-faced shopgirl in the 1836 illustration is not plausibly the sort of nubile female over whom an elderly widower would be likely to make a fool of himself, Furniss's charming Edwardian beauty is virtually a magazine fashion-plate. On the other hand, although he has improved on the figures in the Cruikshank plate, Furniss has taken no pains to display the kinds of commercial signs that one would likely have seen in such an Ostrea edulis emporium in the 1830s: "Purts Ginger Beer" and Webb's Soda Water." A great many other London shops of the period appear in one of Dickens's earliest journalistic pieces, "Shops and Their Tenants," originally published in the Morning Chronicle on 10 October 1834 as "Street Sketches No. 12," and collected as the third article under the heading "Scenes" (Series 1, 8 February 1836). On 15 December 1834 he followed up with another description of commercial establishments in "Brokers' and Marine Store Shops" in the Morning Chronicle.
As Frederic G. Kitton notes, Cruikshank had to re-engrave this illustration for the Chapman and Hall serialisation, and the subsequent 1839 anthology:
During the following year (1837) Macrone published a Second Series of the "Sketches" in one volume, uniform in size and character with its predecessors, and containing ten etchings by Cruikshank; for the second edition of this extra volume two additional illustrations were done, viz., "The Last Cab-Driver" and "May-day in the Evening." It was at this time that Dickens repurchased from Macrone the entire copyright of the "Sketches," and arranged with Chapman & Hall for a complete edition, to be issued in shilling monthly parts, octavo size, the first number appearing in November of that year. The completed work contained all the Cruikshank plates (except that entitled "The Free and Easy," which, for some unexplained reason, was cancelled) and the following [twelve] new subjects: "The Parish Engine," "The Broker's Man," "Our Next-door Neighbours" [sic], "Early Coaches," "Public Dinners," "The Gin-Shop," "Making a Night of It," "The Boarding-House," "The Tuggses at Ramsgate," "The Steam Excursion," "Mrs. Joseph Porter," and "Mr. Watkins Tottle." — "George Cruikshank, p. 4.
Above: Harry Furniss's theatrical lithograph of the flirtatious widower at the newly-opened oyster-shop, on a magnificent scale, Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce (1910). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Last modified 11 April 2017