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The Girl Joe left behind him
He was gone, actually gone.Dolly waited a little while, thinking he would return.
Harry Furniss
1910
13.8 cm x 9 cm (5 ½ by 3 ½ inches), vignetted
Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing VI, 256.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"I have said good-bye," said Dolly, "twice. Take your arm away directly, Mr. Joseph, or I’ll call Miggs."
"I’ll not reproach you," answered Joe, "it’s my fault, no doubt. I have thought sometimes that you didn’t quite despise me, but I was a fool to think so. Every one must, who has seen the life I have led—you most of all. God bless you!"
He was gone, actually gone. Dolly waited a little while, thinking he would return, peeped out at the door, looked up the street and down as well as the increasing darkness would allow, came in again, waited a little longer, went upstairs humming a tune, bolted herself in, laid her head down on her bed, and cried as if her heart would break. And yet such natures are made up of so many contradictions, that if Joe Willet had come back that night, next day, next week, next month, the odds are a hundred to one she would have treated him in the very same manner, and have wept for it afterwards with the very same distress. [Chapter XXXI, 245]
Furniss follows the precedent of Cattermole in the original serial by excluding Mr. Chester from the frame and focussing exclusively on Emma Haredale, again merely suggesting The Warren in the background. Fred Barnard in the Household Edition illustration chose the alternative of including a suave, almost artificially made up Chester urbanely arrest her attention in "I beg pardon — do I address Miss Haredale?" (1874). He is quite at odds with his rural surroundings in his powdered wig and fashionable, London clothes. In Furniss's interpretation, we see (presumably) what Mr. Chester sees, and he has yet tointerrupt her.
Dickens reads Dolly's contradictory thoughts here in free indirect speech; that is, the narrator tells us what is passing through Dolly's somewhat self-absorbed mind even as she and Joe are speaking. By dwelling upon her vanity, Dickens compels the reader to side with Joe; and yet, the narrator lets the reader know that Dolly is not quite how she should react as it feels as if Joe, running away from a dictatorial father, is abandoning her. The wistful look with which Furniss invests Dolly's face as she leans out of the window, half-expecting Joe to return, conveys something of this inner conflict. Barnard's approach to illustrating this chapter in the Household Edition is quite different as he focuses instead upon the comic figure of Sim Tappertit. Overhearing the lovers' farewell, Sim now fancies his chances of marrying his master's daughter after all in "If they’re a dream," said Sim, "let sculptures have such wisions, and chisel ‘em out when they wake. This is reality. Sleep has no such limbs as them" (1874).
Above: Phiz's more romantic illustration involving Joe and Dolly in the forge at The Golden Key: Joe Bids Dolly Good-bye (5 June 1841).
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. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. VI.
Created 24 July 2020
Last modified 15 December 2020