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The Election for Beadle
Harry Furniss
1910
14.3 cm x 9.4 cm, framed
Dickens's Sketches by Boz, Vol. 1 of the Charles Dickens Library Edition, Chapter 4, "The Election for Beadle," facing the title-page.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The breath was scarcely out of the body of the deceased functionary, when the field was filled with competitors for the vacant office, each of whom rested his claims to public support, entirely on the number and extent of his family, as if the office of beadle were originally instituted as an encouragement for the propagation of the human species. 'Bung for Beadle. Five small children!' — 'Hopkins for Beadle. Seven small children!!' — 'Timkins for Beadle. Nine small children!!!' Such were the placards in large black letters on a white ground, which were plentifully pasted on the walls, and posted in the windows of the principal shops. Timkins’s success was considered certain: several mothers of families half promised their votes, and the nine small children would have run over the course, but for the production of another placard, announcing the appearance of a still more meritorious candidate. 'Spruggins for Beadle. Ten small children (two of them twins), and a wife!!!' There was no resisting this; ten small children would have been almost irresistible in themselves, without the twins, but the touching parenthesis about that interesting production of nature, and the still more touching allusion to Mrs. Spruggins, must ensure success. Spruggins was the favourite at once, and the appearance of his lady, as she went about to solicit votes (which encouraged confident hopes of a still further addition to the house of Spruggins at no remote period), increased the general prepossession in his favour. The other candidates, Bung alone excepted, resigned in despair. The day of election was fixed; and the canvass proceeded with briskness and perseverance on both sides.
The members of the vestry could not be supposed to escape the contagious excitement inseparable from the occasion. The majority of the lady inhabitants of the parish declared at once for Spruggins; and the quondam overseer took the same side, on the ground that men with large families always had been elected to the office, and that although he must admit, that, in other respects, Spruggins was the least qualified candidate of the two, still it was an old practice, and he saw no reason why an old practice should be departed from. This was enough for the captain. He immediately sided with Bung, canvassed for him personally in all directions, wrote squibs on Spruggins, and got his butcher to skewer them up on conspicuous joints in his shop-front; frightened his neighbour, the old lady, into a palpitation of the heart, by his awful denunciations of Spruggins's party; and bounced in and out, and up and down, and backwards and forwards, until all the sober inhabitants of the parish thought it inevitable that he must die of a brain fever, long before the election began. ["Our Parish," Chapter IV, "The Election for Beadle," 19-20]
This, the fourth of the Dickens "Parish" sketches, originally appeared without illustrations in the Evening Chronicle on 14 July 1835, one of the periodicals to which Charles Dickens, then a twenty-three-year-old reporter, occasionally contributed. This The election of the parish beadle provides a foretaste of the highly fractious, partisan Eatanswill Election described in the Pickwick Papers.
Fin-de-siécle illustrator Harry Furniss's interpretation of the fourth chapter includes both the Beadle himself and the scene in which the Parish officials, having suffered the death of their beadle, dare to hold an election rather than merely appointing a successor — and thereby triggering a contest between the forces of Tradition and those of Reform.
Several of the chief Victorian illustrators of the London sketches, George Cruikshank and Fred Barnard, and the first great Dickens illustrator of the twentieth, Harry Furniss have all singled out "The Election for Beadle" for visual comment — possibly because they recalled that when Dickens included this unimportant local contest in what became Sketches by Boz it commented on the major topical issue of electoral reform, recently fought in the House of Commons in the debates over The Great Reform Bill of 1832.
According to William Long and Paul Schlicke,
Boz, writing the "Election for Beadle" in 1835 and "Doctors' Commons" in 1836, draws on his knowledge of the political unrest in parishes that had been addressed by the Vestry Act earlier in the decade. By the time he came to write these sketches, however, the focus on widening enfranchisement had shifted from the local to the national level, with the Reform Bill eventually passing through both Houses of Parliament in 1832. And Boz makes clear at the start of the "Election" sketch that Bung against Spruggins is a more than sideways glance at that democratizing development. [ 8]
The election is actually somewhat unrealistic since most parishes appointed rather than elected their beadles. Dickens uses this parochial contest as yet another opportunity to pit traditionalists against reformers, in this case the Ladies' Bible and Prayer-book Distribution Society versus the Ladies' Child Examination Society; albeit a ridiculous and even venial contest between candidates Smuggins ("Ten Small Children and A Wife") and Bung ("Five Small Children") in which financial need rather than ability is the keynote that appears on the signs of the opposing factions. A new beadle is needed after the death — perhaps from heart-attack or stroke — of Simmons, who "had over-exerted himself, a day or two previously, in conveying an aged female, highly intoxicated, to the strong room of the work-house." The conservative, "official," or traditional party of the Vestry, headed by the elderly owner of a dozen houses in the district — "the steady advocate of the churchwardens, . . . [an] unflinching supporter of the overseers" (13), has aligned itself behind Spruggins (stage right); the reformist opposition, the local ratepayers, upholding the time-honoured principle of vociferously standing up to whomever or whatever the official party advocates, are the proponents of the ridiculously-named Bung.
Left: Cruikshank's original serial illustration of the same scene, with the supporters of the contestants, Spruggins and Bung, demonstrating outside the parish vestry, Election for Beadle (1835). Centre: Cruikshank's monthly wrapper design for the Chapman and Hall serialisation (November 1837 through June 1839). Right: Fred Barnard's 1876 Household Edition illustration of the half-pay captain who leads the Reformers, The half-pay Captain completely effaced the old lady's name from the brass door-plate in his attempts to polish it with aqua-fortis — "Our Parish," Ch. 2.
Above: A. B. Frost's 1876 wood-engraving of the parish beadle chastising a disruptive boy in church in the Harper and Brothers' Household Edition, The Beadle in Church" [uncaptioned headpiece]..
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_____. "The Election for the Beadle." "Our Parish."Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Vol. 13, 9-12.
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_____. Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 1.
_____. "The Election for the Beadle." Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-Day People. Ed. Thea Holme. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. , 1957; rpt., 1987, 18-24.
Long, William F., and Paul Schlicke. "Bung Against Spruggins: Reform in 'Our Parish.'" Dickens Quarterly 34, 1 (March 2017): 5-13.
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Created 2 April 2019
Last modified 29 January 2020