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Strangers at the Maypole Inn
"Do you suppose highwaymen don’t dress handsomer than that?" replied Parkes. "It’s a better business than you think for, Tom, and highwaymen don’t need or use to be shabby, take my word for it."
Harry Furniss
1910
14 cm x 9.3 cm (5 ½ by 3 ¾ inches), partially vignetted
Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing VI, 8.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The stranger took off his hat, and disclosed the hard features of a man of sixty or thereabouts, much weatherbeaten and worn by time, and the naturally harsh expression of which was not improved by a dark handkerchief which was bound tightly round his head, and, while it served the purpose of a wig, shaded his forehead, and almost hid his eyebrows. If it were intended to conceal or divert attention from a deep gash, now healed into an ugly seam, which when it was first inflicted must have laid bare his cheekbone, the object was but indifferently attained, for it could scarcely fail to be noted at a glance. His complexion was of a cadaverous hue, and he had a grizzly jagged beard of some three weeks’ date. Such was the figure (very meanly and poorly clad) that now rose from the seat, and stalking across the room sat down in a corner of the chimney, which the politeness or fears of the little clerk very readily assigned to him.
"A highwayman!" whispered Tom Cobb to Parkes the ranger.
"Do you suppose highwaymen don’t dress handsomer than that?" replied Parkes. "It’s a better business than you think for, Tom, and highwaymen don’t need or use to be shabby, take my word for it." [Chapter I, 8]
Left: Phiz's original realisation of the same scene with an emphasis on the mysterious stranger and Joe Willet: An Unsociable Stranger (13 February 1841). Right: Sol Eytinge, Junior's version focuses on John Willet and Solomon Daisy, and excludes the Stranger (Barnaby Rudge, Senior): John Willet and his Cronies (1867).
Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge in Master Humphrey's Clock. Illustrated by Phiz and George Cattermole. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841; rpt., Bradbury and Evans, 1849.
________. Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. IX.
________. Barnaby Rudge. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. VI.
Created 24 May 2020
Last modified 5 December 2020