"Stiggins" — Harry Furniss's twenty-eighth illustration for Dickens's "Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" (1910)

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Stiggins

Harry Furniss

1910

13.6 cm x 7.9 cm, vignetted

Dickens's Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, facing II, 384.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Illustrated: Sam Weller's Appraisal of the Rev. Stiggins

Sam looked round in the direction whence the voice proceeded. It came from a rather stout lady of comfortable appearance, who was seated beside the fireplace in the bar, blowing the fire to make the kettle boil for tea. She was not alone; for on the other side of the fireplace, sitting bolt upright in a high-backed chair, was a man in threadbare black clothes, with a back almost as long and stiff as that of the chair itself, who caught Sam's most particular and especial attention at once.

He was a prim-faced, red-nosed man, with a long, thin countenance, and a semi-rattlesnake sort of eye — rather sharp, but decidedly bad. He wore very short trousers, and black cotton stockings, which, like the rest of his apparel, were particularly rusty. His looks were starched, but his white neckerchief was not, and its long limp ends straggled over his closely-buttoned waistcoat in a very uncouth and unpicturesque fashion. A pair of old, worn, beaver gloves, a broad-brimmed hat, and a faded green umbrella, with plenty of whalebone sticking through the bottom, as if to counterbalance the want of a handle at the top, lay on a chair beside him; and, being disposed in a very tidy and careful manner, seemed to imply that the red-nosed man, whoever he was, had no intention of going away in a hurry. [Chapter XXVII, "Samuel Weller makes a pilgrimage to Dorking, and beholds his mother-in-law," page 372]

Commentary: The Reverend Stiggins — The Hypocrite Whom Readers Love to Revile

Harry Furniss's illustration, which continues the comic subplot, has no precedent in the original serial instalments and the first volume edition (1837). He has set the portrait in the same place where the confrontation between the Wellers and the local Nonconformist minister will later occur, in the bar of the Marquis of Granby, Dorking, Surrey, Mrs. Weller's public house. This specific location, however, Furniss merely suggests by the presence of the steaming glass and small side-tables; the bar and taproom exist within the reader's imagination. As Dickens introduces the comic subplot of the hypocritical pastor (a parody of the Good Shepherd), the illustrator provides a caricatural study of the bibulous Reverend Stiggins, who looks every inch an alcoholic, with his chief feature being a swollen nose. To emphasize his hypocrisy, Furniss stations him next a steaming glass of rum, even as he adopts a prayerful posture, and casts his bleary eyes upward. Oddly enough, however, the illustration in the chapter after that in which Mrs. Weller prevails upon the cleric "to take another glass of the hot pine-apple rum, and a second, and a third" (378). The picture therefore takes the reader from the jolly Christmass chapter back to the earlier satirical portrait of the hypocrite, readily identified by his broad-brimmed hat, umbrella, clerical neckcloth, and respectable gloves.

Furniss provides an appropriate visual complement to a chapter which Dickens has styled "good-humoured" (Ch. 28, page 380), even though this account of yuletide sports and customs has absolutely nothing to do with the arrival in the text of the dissenting minister whom Dickens had introduced in Chapter 22, and recently brought back as somebody readers would love to see 'dropped in the water-butt' (Ch. 27, 380) in front of the public house. This sentiment, uttered by Sam, proves to be foreshadowing the reader's final view of a mock-baptism of the corrupt pastor.

Stiggins now replaces Alfred Jingle as the principal antagonist of the novel. Dickens conveniently ridicules Stiggins as "the red-nosed man," making it relatively easy for illustrators to depict an obvious alcoholic in clerical garb. Whereas Dickens has created Jingle as lovable rogue, the "deputy shepherd of Dorking's Emmanuel Chapel" is thoroughly despicable. That the second Mrs. Weller is absolutely devoted to the dissenting preacher implies that she is imperceptive and easily deluded, especially since Stiggins spends much of his time eating and drinking at her expense at Mrs. Weller's public house. Tony, Sam's father, plots to render Stiggins incapable of conducting the next meeting of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association. Dickens climaxes this satirical "methodistical" plot by having Tony Weller's ducking him in the horse-trough outside the inn at the close of the book as a comic climax to this plot thread.

Other artists who illustrated this work, 1836-1910

Portraits of Stiggins by Other Illustrators, 1837 to 1910

Left: The August 1837 serial instalment of the novel gave later illustrators a model for the alcoholic minister, Phiz's The Red-nosed Man Discourseth. Right: Clayton J. Clarke's extra-illustration in colour for Player;s Cigarettes, Stiggins (1910). [Click on images to enlarge them.]

Above: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Diamond Edition dual portrait of the naive publican and the dissenting minister whom she unreservedly pampers, provoking her husband's ire, "The Rev. Mr. Stiggins and Mrs. Weller (1867).

Other artists who illustrated this work, 1836-1910

Bibliography

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.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.

Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Robert Seymour and Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman & Hall, 1836-37.

_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. 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 10 December 2019

Last modified 5 February 2020