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The Beadle
Sol Eytinge, Jr.
1867
Wood-engraving
10 by 7.9 cm (3 ⅞ by 3 ⅛ inches), framed
Dickens's Christmas Books & Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People (Diamond Edition).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned images and texts by Philip V. Allingham.
After the heart-warming, sentimental seasonal tales which Dickens wrote between 1843 and 1848, the Diamond Edition commemorating Dickens's Second American Reading Tour features seven scenes from Dickens's earliest work, "Our Parish," the twenty-five chapters from "Scenes," and twelve chapters from "Characters," the text established by Chapman and Hall in 1839.
The parish beadle is one of the most, perhaps the most important member of the local administration . . . .
See him again on Sunday in his state-coat and cocked-hat, with a large-headed staff for show in his left hand, and a small cane for use in his right. How pompously he marshals the children into their places! and how demurely the little urchins look at him askance as he surveys them when they are all seated, with a glare of the eye peculiar to beadles! The churchwardens and overseers being duly installed in their curtained pews, he seats himself on a mahogany bracket, erected expressly for him at the top of the aisle, and divides his attention between his prayer-book and the boys. Suddenly, just at the commencement of the communion service, when the whole congregation is hushed into a profound silence, broken only by the voice of the officiating clergyman, a penny is heard to ring on the stone floor of the aisle with astounding clearness. Observe the generalship of the beadle. His involuntary look of horror is instantly changed into one of perfect indifference, as if he were the only person present who had not heard the noise. The artifice succeeds. After putting forth his right leg now and then, as a feeler, the victim who dropped the money ventures to make one or two distinct dives after it; and the beadle, gliding softly round, salutes his little round head, when it again appears above the seat, with divers double knocks, administered with the cane before noticed, to the intense delight of three young men in an adjacent pew, who cough violently at intervals until the conclusion of the sermon.
Such are a few traits of the importance and gravity of a parish beadle —a gravity which has never been disturbed in any case that has come under our observation, except when the services of that particularly useful machine, a parish fire-engine, are required: then indeed all is bustle. — "Scenes," Chapter 1, "The Beadle. The Parish Engine. The Schoolmaster," pp. 231-232.
Eytinge likely based his notions about an essentially English figure, the parish beadle, on the Oliver Twist steel engravings by George Cruikshank of the haughty humbug, Mr. Bumble. Indeed, a likeness of the parochial beadle would have been almost entirely superfluous for English readers. It is likely (given the presence of the children whom the beadle appears to be leading) that Eytinge intended the full-page wood engraving that serves as a sort of frontispiece to the second half of the volume to do "double duty," since it is also probably an illustration for the initial sketch in the 1867 volume's "Our Parish" — rather than that in which the vestry committee must choose a successor upon the death of the former beadle in "The Election for Beadle," the subject of the frontispiece for the 1839 Chapman and Hall volume. Rather, Eytinge's principal interest is prefacing the first chapter in "Our Parish," in which the local Beadle appears prominently in his capacity as manager of the fire-engine. Another image of a beadle produced shortly after Eytinge's is also a wood-engraving, that for the Chapman and Hall Household Edition, James Mahoney's dual study of the parish undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry, and Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, "Liberal terms, Mr. Sowerberry, liberal terms!" As the Dickens scenes suggest, the beadle was a parish officer in previous centuries charged with enforcing morality and the law. His "signs of office" (given by Eytinge) include the tricorn hat and two canes.
Left: The original Cruikshank engraving of Bumble which likely influenced later illustrators' notions about the figure of the Beadle generally, Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney taking tea (February 1838). Centre: Kyd's derivative chromolithograph, Mr. Bumble (1910). Right: The Cruikshank illustration of another parish beadle in The Parish Engine (1839). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Left: Kyd's Player's cigarette card no. 3, Mr. Bumble (1910). Centre: Harry Furniss's The Election of Beadle, frontispiece and illustration for Chapter 4 (1910). Centre right: Charles Pears' Mr.Bumble and Mrs. Corney (1910). Dickens's "Then you're a tramp," he ses. "I'd rather be that than a beadle," I ses. from "Tramps," Chapter Eleven in The Uncommercial Traveller (1877). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: James Mahoney's 1871 wood-engraving of the fatuous beadle in full uniform consoling the tearful matron of the workhouse, "Don't sigh, Mrs. Corney." [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Created 3 May 2017
Last updated 16 August 2026