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Mr. Pickwick's valuable Discovery. "I can discern," continued Mr. Pickwick, rubbing away with all his might, and gazing intently through his spectacles: "I can discern a cross, and a B, and then a J . . . ."
Harry Furniss
1910
14.4 cm x 9.2 cm (5 ⅝ by 3 ½ inches), partially framed
Dickens's Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, facing II, 140.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"There is an inscription here," said Mr. Pickwick.
"Is it possible?" said Mr. Tupman.
"I can discern," continued Mr. Pickwick, rubbing away with all his might, and gazing intently through his spectacles: "I can discern a cross, and a 13, and then a T. This is important," continued Mr. Pickwick, starting up. "This is some very old inscription, existing perhaps long before the ancient almshouses in this place. It must not be lost."
He tapped at the cottage door. A labouring man opened it.
"Do you know how this stone came here, my friend?" inquired the benevolent Mr. Pickwick.
"No, I doan’t, Sir,’ replied the man civilly. "It was here long afore I was born, or any on us."
Mr. Pickwick glanced triumphantly at his companion.
"You — you — are not particularly attached to it, I dare say," said Mr. Pickwick, trembling with anxiety. "You wouldn’t mind selling it, now?"
"Ah! but who’d buy it?" inquired the man, with an expression of face which he probably meant to be very cunning.
"I’ll give you ten shillings for it, at once," said Mr. Pickwick, "if you would take it up for me."
The astonishment of the village may be easily imagined, when (the little stone having been raised with one wrench of a spade) Mr. Pickwick, by dint of great personal exertion, bore it with his own hands to the inn, and after having carefully washed it, deposited it on the table. [Chapter XI, “Involving another Journey, and an Antiquarian Discovery. Recording Mr. Pickwick’s determination to be present at an Election; and containing a Manuscript of the Old Clergyman’s,” pp. 141-142]
Once again, Furniss offers a reinterpretation of an illustration by Hablot Knight Brown. However, instead of reinterpreting one of the original steel-engravings of 1836-37, Furniss offers his version of a large-scale Phiz wood-engraving from the British Household Edition (1874).
An incident which did not merit attention in the narrative-pictorial sequence of 1836-37 was Pickwick's discovery of a supposedly ancient artifact — a stone bearing an inscription — just outside the village of Cobham in Kent, where in the eleventh chapter he has just been reunited with the disconsolate lover, Tracy Tupman, after Rachael Wardle's elopement with Alfred Jingle. Having taken entertainment at the Leather Bottle, the local public house, and having consumed a quantity of the local ale, Winkle, Pickwick, and Snodgrass encounter the melancholy Tupman. Subsequently, the quartet stroll around the quaint village. Suddenly Pickwick makes what he feels is a significant discovery, a moment realised by both Phiz in his 1874 woodcut and Furniss in his 1910 lithograph. In the woodcut, Pickwick reverentially stoops with singular gaze as he discovers the stone at the door of a cottage, and immediately offers the cottager ten shillings for it. However, Furniss has deliberately made his goggle-eyed, be-spectacled antiquarian look faintly ridiculous as the cottager, wide-eyed, stares at Pickwick out of the leaded-paned bow-window. Subsequently, the amateur archaeologist writes a thirty-nine-page pamphlet about his find, corresponds about it with seventeen learned societies "native and foreign," and makes a presentation of a facsimile to the Royal Antiquarian Society.
Phiz's Household Edition contains this unique illustration which is without precedent in the original 1836-37 steel engravings: "God bless me, what's the matter?" (1874). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Robert Seymour, Robert Buss, and Phiz. London: Chapman and Hall, November 1837. With 32 additional illustrations by Thomas Onwhyn (London: E. Grattan, April-November 1837).
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873. Vol. 4.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. Vol. 6.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 2.
Created 15 March 2024