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"The Stroller's Tale" — Dismal Jemmy
Harry Furniss
1910
13.6 cm x 9.3 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing II, 40.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
It was a careworn-looking man, whose sallow face, and deeply-sunken eyes, were rendered still more striking than Nature had made them, by the straight black hair which hung in matted disorder half-way down his face. His eyes were almost unnaturally bright and piercing; his cheek-bones were high and prominent; and his jaws were so long and lank, that an observer would have supposed that he was drawing the flesh of his face in, for a moment, by some contraction of the muscles, if his half-opened mouth and immovable expression had not announced that it was his ordinary appearance. Round his neck he wore a green shawl, with the large ends straggling over his chest, and making their appearance occasionally beneath the worn button-holes of his old waistcoat. His upper garment was a long black surtout; and below it he wore wide drab trousers, and large boots, running rapidly to seed.
It was on this uncouth-looking person that Mr. Winkle's eye rested, and it was towards him that Mr. Pickwick extended his hand when he said, "A friend of our friend's here. We discovered this morning that our friend was connected with the theatre in this place, though he is not desirous to have it generally known, and this gentleman is a member of the same profession. He was about to favour us with a little anecdote connected with it, when you entered."
"Lots of anecdote," said the green-coated stranger of the day before, advancing to Mr. Winkle and speaking in a low and confidential tone. "Rum fellow — does the heavy business — no actor — strange man — all sorts of miseries — Dismal Jemmy, we call him on the circuit." Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass politely welcomed the gentleman, elegantly designated as "Dismal Jemmy"; and calling for brandy-and-water, in imitation of the remainder of the company, seated themselves at the table.
"Now sir," said Mr. Pickwick, "will you oblige us by proceeding with what you were going to relate?"
The dismal individual took a dirty roll of paper from his pocket, and turning to Mr. Snodgrass, who had just taken out his note-book, said in a hollow voice, perfectly in keeping with his outward man — "Are you the poet?" [Chapter III, ". . . The Stroller's Tale . . ." 34-35]
Harry Furniss provides just one illustration for an interpolated tale, a portrait which foregrounds the teller of "The Stroller's Tale," Dismal Jemmy (as the cynical Jingle describes him), but includes thumbnails of scenes from the story in the background. Of Furniss's forty-two regular plates, seven (including Dismal Jemmy) are essentially character studies or portraits; the remainder include six rather congested crowd scenes and twenty-nine group or duo scenes. Furniss has elected to depict the narrator, the actor Jem (Jeremy) Hutley, through whose "singular appearance" (given on 34) Furniss has completed an effective portrait of the writer and oral teller of the tale, and minimized his realisation of the story's death-bed scene. However, series editor J. A. Hammerton has mistakenly identified the scene illustrated as being on page 36, which involves the narrator's describing John, the alcoholic clown, rather than Mr. Hutley, the clown's friend and colleague who attends his beside as the clown dies wracked by pain and horrible delusions. The line which Furniss has chosen as his subject describes the demeanour of the tale-teller as he "opened the roll of paper and proceeded, partly to read and partly to relate, the following incident" (35-36).
In Dickens's text, then, the writer presents Dismal Jemmy's narrative as a hybrid, something between an oral tale and a sketch, a written form popular in magazine of the Regency. However, Furniss does not depict any "dirty roll of paper"; instead, he shows Snodgrass, pencil poised to record "on the Transactions of the club" (36) the story that the illustrator describes as a strictly traditional, oral tale of the macabre. But Furniss's interest lies more in the hypnotic eye of the narrator than in the cautionary tale itself, as he relegates the scene of the medicine bottles, the suffering wife, and the abused child to the position of an obscurely sketched in thumbnail above Dismal Jemmy's head, as if emanating from his memory. Pickwick, the other auditor, is merely a disembodied head, and the reader's eye quickly passes upward from the brandy-and-water and the tale-teller's Ancient Mariner gesture of command to listen.
Moreover, this is the only one among the novel's nine interpolated tales that Furniss has to illustrated, perhaps because these stories were for him mere extraneous digressions rather than integral features of the picaresque novel. Of the three basic types of illustrations that Furniss has provided for this volume, The Stroller's Tale is something between a portrait (such as we have of Alfred Jingle) and a small group study, the type into which twenty-nine of the book's forty-two illustrations in fact fall. The original edition contains illustrations for four of the nine tales, including Seymour's The Dying Clown in "The Stroller's Tale" (heading off serial instalment two, May 1836); although Furniss may also have studied the four illustrations for interpolated tales in the 1874 Household Edition, none of these concerns "The Stroller's Tale." No other major illustration and not even a thumbnail in the Characters in the Story refers to the nine interpolated tales that enrich the narrative texture of Dickens's first novel.
Although there are four major programs of illustration by nineteenth-century artists, the interpolated tales in the episodic novel have only been infrequently illustrated. The stories are as follows (with the number of available illustrations in parentheses):
Left: In the May 1836 serial instalment of the novel Seymour provided a standard Victorian death-bed scene, The Dying Clown. Centre: Thomas Nast's Household Edition characterisation of the pantomime clown, "Never shall I forget the repulsive sight that met my eyes I turned round." (1873). Right: Clayton J. Clarke's Player's Cigarette card shows the moody tale-teller entirely wrapped up in a closed posture: Dismal Jemmy (1910).
Clarke, Clayton J. ('Kyd'). The Characters of Charles Dickens portrayed in a series of original watercolours by "Kyd." London, Paris, and New York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, n. d.
Clarke, Clayton J. ('Kyd'). "Dismal Jemmy." John Player Cigarette Cards. Nottingham, 1910. No. 22.
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Robert Seymour, R. W. Buss, and Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman and Hall, 1836-37.
_____. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The Household Edition. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers 1873. Vol. 4.
_____. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 2.
Created 20 July 2019
Last modified 5 February 2020