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The Bloomsbury Christening
George Cruikshank
1839
Etching on copper
10.3 x 8.5 cm, vignetted
"The Bloomsbury Christening," Chapter 11 in "Tales" by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, originally published in the April 1834 number of The Monthly Magazine; illustration facing p. 355.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Jane, tell nurse to bring down baby,’ said Mrs. Kitterbell, addressing the servant. Mrs. Kitterbell was a tall, thin young lady, with very light hair, and a particularly white face — one of those young women who almost invariably, though one hardly knows why, recall to one’s mind the idea of a cold fillet of veal. Out went the servant, and in came the nurse, with a remarkably small parcel in her arms, packed up in a blue mantle trimmed with white fur. — This was the baby.
"Now, uncle," said Mr. Kitterbell, lifting up that part of the mantle which covered the infant’s face, with an air of great triumph, "Who do you think he’s like?"
"He! he! Yes, who?" said Mrs. K., putting her arm through her husband's, and looking up into Dumps's face with an expression of as much interest as she was capable of displaying.
"Good God, how small he is!" cried the amiable uncle, starting back with well-feigned surprise; "remarkably small indeed."
"Do you think so?" inquired poor little Kitterbell, rather alarmed. "He's a monster to what he was — ain't he, nurse?"
"He's a dear," said the nurse, squeezing the child, and evading the question — not because she scrupled to disguise the fact, but because she couldn't afford to throw away the chance of Dumps's half-crown.
"Well, but who is he like?" inquired little Kitterbell.
Dumps looked at the little pink heap before him, and only thought at the moment of the best mode of mortifying the youthful parents.
"I really don't know who he's like," he answered, very well knowing the reply expected of him.
"Don't you think he’s like me?" inquired his nephew with a knowing air.
"Oh, decidedly not!" returned Dumps, with an emphasis not to be misunderstood. "Decidedly not like you. — Oh, certainly not."
"Like Jemima?" asked Kitterbell, faintly.
"Oh, dear no; not in the least. I'm no judge, of course, in such cases; but I really think he's more like one of those little carved representations that one sometimes sees blowing a trumpet on a tombstone!" The nurse stooped down over the child, and with great difficulty prevented an explosion of mirth. Pa and ma looked almost as miserable as their amiable uncle.
"Well!" said the disappointed little father, "you'll be better able to tell what he's like by-and-by. You shall see him this evening with his mantle off."
"Thank you," said Dumps, feeling particularly grateful. — "The Bloomsbury Christening," Chapter 11 in "Tales," running head, "A Liberal Offer," pp. 361-62.
Story of the christening of Frederick Charles William Kitterbell, whose godfather, Nicodemus Dumps, "the most miserable man in the world," disrupts the christening party by losing the silver mug he bought for the child and by giving a speech listing the hazards that might afflict the child, thus driving the infant's mother into hysterics. — Paul Davis, p. 38.
Although it is one of the last stories in the 1839 volume, "The Bloomsbury Christening" was one of seven early stories first published in The Monthly Magazine, the other six being "Sentiment" (January 1834), "Horatio Sparkins" (February 1834), "The Boarding House" (two parts: May and August 1834), "The Steam Excursion" (October 1834), and "A Passage in the Life of Watkins Tottle" (two parts: January and February 1835).
The Monthly requested more, but because they were '"rather backward in coming forward" with the needful', he ceased sending contributions there once he could earn money by placing them elsewhere (to H. W. Kolle, ?10 December 1833). Except for 'The Boarding House', these farcical tales deal with a social sphere higher than the one he knew personally at the time, and as a result are largely unoriginal, lacking a distinctively Dickensian touch. — Paul Schlicke, 532.
Here, once again, is the same familiar setting of the Sketches: a small, carpeted room with family paintings on the walls as assertions of bourgeois pedigree and respectability — an assertion of affluence in that the rising income of the Kitterbells has permitted them to own and display oil-paintings in ornate, heavy gilt frames. The dignified progenitor above the dumpy nurse contrasts the gangly Dumps and his expression of surprise at being asked whom the infant resembles. Cruikshank has so arranged the figures that the viewer inevitably compares the cross-eyed Kitterbell with the cross-eyed gentleman in the portrait (the resemblance being strong, this is likely the child's grandfather, although it may be Kitterbell himself) and the singularly plain (but also wealthy) uncle at the left. Although this is one of Dickens's earliest short stories, it seems to fit nicely towards the end of the book as a statement that the English middle-class is thriving, and that it has an assured future. The issue in both "The Bloomsbury Christening" and Mr. Minns and His Cousin, for example, is the recognition of an heir; and the pictures share heavy, elegant furnishings and patterned carpet, also seen in Mr. Watkins Tottle and Miss Lillerton. However, an antidote to the excessive bourgeois complacency and materialism evidenced in many of these brief farces in prose in the final section, "Tales," is the ultimate, more weighty and socially realistic selection, "The Drunkard's Death," not illustrated and therefore not emphasized as a memento mori in the 1839 edition.
Above: Fred Barnard's wood-engraving of the same peculiar curmudgeon, but showing him as an isolated, truculent figure rather than a member of the christening party in Cross, cadaverous, odd, and ill-natured. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Last modified 30 May 2017