"Dick Swiveller hears the Marchioness say 'No'" — Furniss's nineteenth illustration for Dickens's "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1910)

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Dick Swiveller hears the Marchioness say "No!"

"You have been helped once to meat," said Miss Brass, to the small servant; "you have had as much as you can eat, and you've asked if you want any more, and you answer, "No!" Then don't you ever go and say you were never allowanced, mind that."

Harry Furniss

1910

14 x 8.6 cm, vignetted

Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, facing V, facing 272.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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The Context for the Illustration: The Small Servant's Dinner

First peeping over the handrail and allowing the head-dress to disappear in the darkness below, he groped his way down, and arrived at the door of a back kitchen immediately after Miss Brass had entered the same, bearing in her hand a cold leg of mutton. It was a very dark miserable place, very low and very damp: the walls disfigured by a thousand rents and blotches. The water was trickling out of a leaky butt, and a most wretched cat was lapping up the drops with the sickly eagerness of starvation. The grate, which was a wide one, was wound and screwed up tight, so as to hold no more than a little thin sandwich of fire. Everything was locked up; the coal-cellar, the candle-box, the salt-box, the meat-safe, were all padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle could have lunched upon. The pinched and meagre aspect of the place would have killed a chameleon. He would have known, at the first mouthful, that the air was not eatable, and must have given up the ghost in despair. The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally, and hung her head.

"Are you there?" said Miss Sally.

"Yes, ma’am," was the answer in a weak voice.

"Go further away from the leg of mutton, or you’ll be picking it, I know," said Miss Sally.

The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key from her pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste of cold potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed before the small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up a great carving-knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it upon the carving-fork.

"Do you see this?" said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square inches of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out on the point of the fork.

The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see every shred of it, small as it was, and answered, "yes."

"Then don’t you ever go and say," retorted Miss Sally, "that you hadn’t meat here. There, eat it up."

This was soon done. "Now, do you want any more?" said Miss Sally.

The hungry creature answered with a faint "No." They were evidently going through an established form. [Chapter XXXVI, 269-70]

Related Material about The Old Curiosity Shop

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. V.

Created 8 May 2020

Last modified 27 November 2020