Joe
Sol Eytinge, Jr.
1867
Wood-engraving
10 x 7.4 cm (framed)
Dickens's Bleak House (Diamond Edition), facing VI, 87.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Passage Illustrated: The Waif who stirred the Social Conscience of a Nation
Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch! It is well that you should call to every passerby, "Look here!"
With the night comes a slouching figure through the tunnel-court to the outside of the iron gate. It holds the gate with its hands and looks in between the bars, stands looking in for a little while.
It then, with an old broom it carries, softly sweeps the step and makes the archway clean. It does so very busily and trimly, looks in again a little while, and so departs.
Jo, is it thou? Well, well! Though a rejected witness, who "can't exactly say" what will be done to him in greater hands than men's, thou art not quite in outer darkness. There is something like a distant ray of light in thy muttered reason for this: "He wos wery good to me, he wos!" [Chapter XI, "Our Dear Brother," 86-87]
Commentary: Walter Savage Landor, Poet and Model for Boythorn
Again, as is the case with Harold Skimpole, everyone in the Dickens Circle recognized the correspondence between the pre-Victorian poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1860) and John Jardyce's gruff old friend Lawrence Boythorn. Whether Eytinge knew of this association, however, is unclear — and his image of Boythorn here does not much resemble the aged poet, who had died seven years earlier.
At the beginning of Chapter 9, Jarndyce's Chancery wards are enjoying settling into his estate, Bleak House, when one day at breakfast, Mr. Jarndyce shares the contents of a letter from his old friend, the curmudgeonly Lawrence Boythorn, who is to be expected at Bleak House shortly for an extended visit. According to Mr. Jarndyce, Mr. Boythorn is a strapping man whose good nature is characterized by a booming laugh and a heart of gold. The illustrator's challenge is to present the two Boythorn's simultaneously, and this objective Eytinge has achieved by placing the canary on the opinionated old man's head. Eytinge relies on Dickens's text to convey Boythorn's contrary nature, which is closely based on Dickens's experiences of Landor:
Landor’s most prominent moral and intellectual qualities: his mighty self-will, his arrogant audacity, his capacity of destructive rage, his fine imagination and fastidious taste, his delicate perception, his want of speculative power, his proneness to paradoxical views, his tendency to run into extremes, and whatever else would be ascribed to him by the discerning critic of his works. [ILN 15 October 1864): 385].
As the passage associated with the illustration suggests, Jarndyce's old friend, a former soldier, tends to speak in superlatives; his good-heartedness contradicts his very loud and harsh demeanour. As the fractious neighbour of Sir Leicester Dedlock, Boythorn is currently waging a legal campaign against the Dedlocks over a right-of-way across Boythorn's property that Sir Leicester has asserted his right to close.
Other Illustrations involving Jo, 1852-1910
Left: Phiz's September 1853 engraving serves as the title-page vignette for the volume edition: Jo, The Crossing-sweeper. Centre: Fred Barnard's 1873 Household Edition full-page composite woodblock wood-engraving of Joe in a crowd on London Bridge: Frontispiece: Jo. Right: Harry Furniss's study of Joe places him against a blank wall, as if to suggest his alienation: Jo (1910) in the Charles Dickens Library Edition.
Related material, including front matter and sketches, by other illustrators for Bleak House (1852-1910)
- Bleak House (homepage)
- Phiz's monthly illustrations for the novel, March 1852 through September 1853.
- Cover for monthly parts
- John Gilbert: A large
grey cat leaped from some neighbouring shelf from
- F. O. C. Darley: A female
figure, closely veiled, stands in the middle of the room . . . . from
- F. O. C. Darley: "For, on a low bed opposite the fire. . . the lawyer hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man." — Vol. 1, Page 96 [actually, p. 200, from Bleak House] Vol. 3
- F. O. C. Darley: Springing a Mine, from Bleak House, Sheldon & Co. (New York) Household Edition (1863) Vol. 4
- The Diamond Edition of Charles Dickens’s Works
- Fred Barnard's 61 Illustrations for the Household Edition (1873)
- Harry Furniss's illustrations for the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910)
- Kyd's four Player's Cigarette Cards (1910)
Bibliography
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853.
_______. Bleak House. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. New York: Sheldon and Company, 1863. Vols. 1-4.
_______. Bleak House. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr, and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. VI.
_______. Bleak House, with 61 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition, volume IV. London: Chapman and Hall, 1873.
_______. Bleak House. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. XI.
Hammerton, J. A. "Ch. XVIII. Bleak House." The Dickens Picture-Book. London: Educational Book Co., [1910], 294-338.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Steig, Michael. Chapter 6. "Bleak House and Little Dorrit: Iconography of Darkness." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 131-172.
Vann, J. Don. "Bleak House, twenty parts in nineteen monthly instalments, October 1846—April 1848." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985. 69-70./
Last modified 17 February 2021