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Mr. Stryver
Harry Furniss
1910
13.5 cm high x 9 cm wide, vignetted
Eleventh illustration illustration for A Tale of Two Cities in A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing XIII, 128.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good fortune on the Doctor's daughter, resolved to make her happiness known to her before he left town for the long vacation. After some mental debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it and Hilary. [Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Twelve, "The Fellow of Delicacy," 132: the picture's original caption has been emphasized]
Just as, in The Marquis, the haughty French aristocrat looks out of the book, towards the right, in this illustration the insensitive representative of England's rising middle class, barrister Stryver, looks inward, as if regarding his French counterpart through the intervening twenty-four pages. Thus, through their juxtapositions and similar poses, Furniss asks the reader to compare the medodramatic foreign villain with the home-grown buffoon who ironically sees himself as a good catch for Lucie Manette. Dickens describes him eight chapters earlier, so that Furniss has in fact synthesized two disparate passages, that describing his actions as he contemplates proposing marriage to Lucie Manette, and the initial description: "Mr. Stryver, a man of little more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout, loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and conversations, that argued well for his shouldering his way up in life" (Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Four, "Congratulatory," 73).
Although the arrogant Marquis de St. Evrémonde and the pompous English attorney are equally self-centred and singularly lacking in self-perception, the former represents the serious and historical aspects of the narrative while the latter is present largely for comic relief — of which, as many have since remarked, the historical novel is sadly lacking. Both men, despite their differences in nationality and class, are what the great student of human nature, novelist Jane Austen, would have regarded as "False Wits," egotists incapable of intellectual or spiritual growth. Such introspective inflexibility, implies, Furniss, can be merely laughable, or utterly detestable, depending upon the actions of the egotist. An old school fellow of Carton's, Stryver (lacking even a Christian name) is a pasteboard, jingoistic attorney whose love of self in the text corresponds to his love of expensive, fashionable clothing in Harry Furniss's illustration of Carton's "stout, red, bluff" foil, a "fellow of no delicacy," in contrast to Jarvis Lorry, a bourgeois of an entirely different stripe.
Andrew Sanders A Companion to "A Tale of Two Cities" relates that Dickens based the character of Stryver, just a little over thirty and therefore Sydney Carton's near contemporary, on an actual attorney well-known even outside legal circles in the second half of the nineteenth century in London, and quite possibly recognized as the model by Phiz, if not by the New Man of the Sixties, Fred Barnard in the 1870s, and Harry Furniss at the fin de siecle:
In his Recollections and Experiences (1884) Edmund Yates suggests that Dickens based the character and physique of Stryver on that of the attorney Edwin John James (1812-82). James was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1836, appointed Queen's Counsel in 1853 and elected Member of Parliament for Marylebone in 1859-61. Declared bankrupt and disbarred for professional misconduct in 1861, he emigrated to America and practised at the New York Bar as well as playing on the stage. He died in London. Yates gives an account of his consultations with James in late 1858 or early 1859, describing him as 'a fat, florid man, with a large bland face . . . with chambers in the Temple . . . his practice was extensive, his fees enormous . . . he liked talking, but always directed the conversation in other channels'. [67]
Having accompanied Yates to just one of these legal consultations with the Lion of The Inner Temple, Dickens later admitted to his friend that James had severed as his model: "After reading the description, I [Yates] said to Dickens, 'Stryver is a good likeness.' He smiled. 'Not bad I think,' he said 'especially after only one sitting" (Yates 2.31-2, cited in Sanders, 67). That James was Phiz's model but not Barnard's is suggested merely by Stryver's bell-like girth in Phiz's Congratulations and his leanness in Barnard's street scene outside Tellson's, London, as the revolutionary tide rises in Paris, Among the talkers was Stryver, of the King's Bench Bar, . . . broaching to Monseigneur his devices for blowing the people up, and exterminating them from the face of the earth (see below: Book Two, Chapter 24). He is, of course, a pompous windbag, no matter what the edition in which one encounters him — but a relatively minor character with whom both Eytinge and Dixon, for the sake of economy, have dispensed.
Furniss's version is more arrogant and less pleasant than Phiz's, a caricature rather than a character, both large and florid, and suitably well dressed for the period with extensive, embroidered waistcoat, lace cuffs, wig, and walking stick — the English equivalent of the French fashion-plate the Marquis St. Evrémonde in the earlier Furniss illustration, but posing with a cane rather than carrying a rapier. For the perceptive, including his "jackal," Sydney Carton, and his putative bride, Lucie Manette, he poses no real threat, despite his pompous bluster and anti-democratic zenophobia. Whereas Barnard shows us Stryver "behind the scenes," fuelling his partner with alcohol, as well as publicly, remonstrating with French emigrées outside Tellson's London headquarters, Furniss contents himself with a single study of the public Stryver. The real-life counterpart of Stryver, barrister James, was Dickens's precise contemporary. It is not unlikely that Dickens mentioned to Phiz that James had served as the model for the textual Stryver, a bit of insight into the obtuse attorney that Phiz may well have retailed to young Fred Barnard, especially since James was still alive and living in London when Barnard was executing the drawings for this volume of the Household Edition. Whether Furniss knew of the connection between James and Stryver is unknown, but his version of the pompous young attorney accords well with those passages in the text describing his person and personality.
Left: McLenan's study of the alcohol-fuelled barristers, The Lion and The Jackal. Right: Phiz's Congratulations shows them with their clients (July 1859).
Above: Barnard's The Lion and The Jackal (1874).
Above: Barnard's Among the talkers was Stryver, of the King's Bench Bar (1874).
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. , 1988.
Bolton, H. Phili "A Tale of Two Cities." Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, 395-412.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. IX (1859-61).
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. All the Year Round. 30 April through 26 November 1859.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by John McLenan. Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. 7 May through 3 December 1859.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). London: Chapman and Hall, 1859.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London: Collins, 1905.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 13.
Sanders, Andrew. A Companion to "A Tale of Two Cities." London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.
Created 15 November 2013
Last modified 8 January 2020