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The Toast-Master
Harry Furniss
1910
13 cm x 8 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Sketches by Boz, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, Chapter 19, "Public Dinners," facing I, 160.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The moment the noise ceases, up starts the toast-master: — "Gentlemen, charge your glasses, if you please!" Decanters having been handed about, and glasses filled, the toast-master proceeds, in a regular ascending scale:— "Gentlemen— air— you — all charged? Pray— silence— gentlemen — for— the cha—i—r!" The chairman rises, and, after stating that he feels it quite unnecessary to preface the toast he is about to propose, with any observations whatever, wanders into a maze of sentences, and flounders about in the most extraordinary manner, presenting a lamentable spectacle of mystified humanity, until he arrives at the words, "constitutional sovereign of these realms," at which elderly gentlemen exclaim "Bravo!" and hammer the table tremendously with their knife-handles. "Under any circumstances, it would give him the greatest pride, it would give him the greatest pleasure — he might almost say, it would afford him satisfaction [cheers] to propose that toast. What must be his feelings, then, when he has the gratification of announcing, that he has received her Majesty's commands to apply to the Treasurer of her Majesty's Household, for her Majesty's annual donation of 25l. in aid of the funds of this charity!" This announcement (which has been regularly made by every chairman, since the first foundation of the charity, forty-two years ago) calls forth the most vociferous applause; the toast is drunk with a great deal of cheering and knocking; and "God save the Queen" is sung by the "professional gentlemen;"the unprofessional gentlemen joining in the chorus, and giving the national anthem an effect which the newspapers, with great justice, describe as "perfectly electrical."["Public Dinners," 157-58: the wording of picture's original caption has been emphasized]
Fin-de-siécle illustrator Harry Furniss focuses on the single (and singular) figure of the Master of Ceremonies for the chapter in which upper-middle-class businessmen and urban professionals participate in a banquet whose proceeds will go to a worthy charity — Dickens's "Indigent Orphgans Fund."
It is probably no accident that Harry Furniss's approach to the sketch "Public Dinners" (that is, dinners organised to benefit some worthy charity such as "the indigent orphans" in Dickens's hypothetical example) complements rather than repeats treatments by George Cruikshank in 1839 and Fred Barnard in 1876. Whereas the earlier illustrators had depicted the entrance to the formal dinner (with the "indigent orphans" as unlikely diners being ushered into the hall by Dickens, Cruikshank, Chapman, and Hall) and the progress of the banquet from fish (turbot in lobster sauce) to soup, Furniss presents a more or less decontextualized image of the toast-master, who interrupts the proceedings to acknowledge the chair of the banquet. Dickens uses punctuation to capture the speaker's idiosyncratic rhetorical style; Furniss depicts him as a large, formally dressed bourgeois akin to the diners in Barnard's Tureens of soup are emptied with awful rapidity (see below), which contrasts the "in joke" of the Cruikshank original, Public Dinners (1839).
Above: Barnard's realistic wood-engraving of theupper-middle-class diners and their waiter as the soup course is served, Tureens of soup disappear with startling rapidity (1876).
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Created 26 April 2017
Last modified 29 January 2020