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The Burglary
Harry Furniss
lithograph from pen-and-ink
1910
14.3 x 9.3 cm, framed
Fifteenth illustration for The Adventures of Oliver Twist in the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing III, 161.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
In the short time he had had to collect his senses, the boy had firmly resolved that, whether he died in the attempt or not, he would make one effort to dart upstairs from the hall, and alarm the family. Filled with this idea, he advanced at once, but stealthily.
"Come back!" suddenly cried Sikes aloud. "Back! back!"
"Scared by the sudden breaking of the dead stillness of the place, and by a loud cry which followed it, Oliver let his lantern fall, and knew not whether to advance or fly.
The cry was repeated — a light appeared — a vision of two terrified half-dressed men at the top of the stairs swam before his eyes — a flash — a loud noise — a smoke — a crash somewhere, but where he knew not, — and he staggered back. [Chapter 22, "The Burglary," 166]
A light appeared — a vision of two terrified half-dressed men at the top of the stairs swam before his eyes — a flash — a loud noise — a smoke — a crash somewhere, but where he knew not, — and he staggered back. [166]
In the January 1838 number of Bentley's Miscellany, George Cruikshank, Dickens's original illustrator, depicted yet another turning point in Oliver's life as the boy fails to admit the gang to the house. In Cruikshank’s The Burglary, the serial reader encountered Oliver's discovery by the servants shortly after he had climbed in through a diminutive window in at the Maylies' home in Chertsey. In contrast, Furniss radically reconstructs the Cruikshank illustration, for by throwing Oliver off the central axis, he injects considerable emotion into both the terrified servants at the rear and wounded Oliver in the foreground while transforming Sikes's head from a framed portrait to a trophy mounted on the wall.The botched robbery is crucial to the plot because it transfers Oliver once again from the grip of the gang to those associated with his mother; before, the botched pickpocketing expedition had resulted in Oliver's being placed in Mr. Bownlow's custody; now, left for deadin a ditch, Oliver is recalled to life and taken in by the Maylies — his mother's family.
Above: the window of Pyrcroft House, Chertsey, which is thought to have been the model for the window featured in the burglary episode (photograph taken of the window in situ in August 2005 by Jackie Banerjee). The original of the home in Surrey, Lynch speculates, is either a building in Gogmore Lane or, as tradition has it, Pycroft House, in Pycroft Street, now a school. The window, known as "Oliver's Window," has been relocated to the Morning Room of the Charles Dickens Museum at 48 Doughty Street, Holborn, London.
Although Dickens's official illustrator for Oliver Twist, Cruikshank depicts the housebreaker Bill Sikes as the sordid, lower-class villain out of contemporary melodrama, the figure whom Felix Octavius Carr Darley in his 1888 series of Character Sketches from Dickens describes is much more of an individual (despite his characteristic long face and white top hat derived directly from Cruikshank) than a type. In the chapter 22 illustration which depicts Oliver's being surprised and shot at as soon as he has entered the Chertsey house that Sikes is attempting to rob, Cruikshank minimizes the previously intimidating bulk of the notorious housebreaker by confining him to a mere facial likeness in the frame window five-and-a-half feet off the ground outside — in a framed portrait, so to speak — as Sikes watches the unfolding scene with interest and relative impotence as he seems powerless to intervene to save Oliver or assault the servants who are discharging firearms. Effectively rendered, Cruikshank's ruffian is unshaven, unkempt, and full-faced — but the small window through which he peers would prevent him from firing his own weapon on the two servants, let alone haul Oliver out if harm's way by the collar in the text on the page facing the steel-engraving, which intensifies the suspense at the end of the monthly part, as the author reports the protagonist's sensations of being hauled up through the window, dragged across the ground, and left to die in a ditch. The same improbability associated with the window is apparent in Furniss's highly-charged rendition of the same dramatic moment.
With a greater number of plates to provide for the novel and a knowledge of the trajectory of the plot, both James Mahoney for the Household Edition and Harry Furniss for The Charles Dickens Library Edition emphasized the criminal career of the housebreaker and ultimately murderer Bill Sikes, brought brilliantly to twentieth-century cinema by Robert Newton, Oliver Reed, and a host of other actors — whereas Cruikshank has just four representations of Sikes in twenty-four illustrations, Mahoney has six out of twenty-nine, and Furniss nine thirty three. By the time that Cruikshank executed the monthly wrapper for the 1846 re-serialisation, he appreciated Sikes's importance, showing him in three of the the monthly wrapper's eleven vignettes; likewise, in Furniss's Characters in the Story, Sikes and his dog appear prominently in the middle of the right-hand frame, Sikes being the largest by far of the forty-four figures (the lifeless Nancy is also in a prominent position, the centre of the bottom frame).
However, instead of realizing the botched robbery itself as Cruikshank had done some thirty years earlier, Mahoney had focussed on two scenes immediately preceding the burglary, perhaps aware that his readers would inevitably compare his treatment of The Burglary to that by Cruikshank. Such a consideration, however, did not prevent Harry Furniss from attempting a much more dynamic composition in which the focus is the four servants who burst into the storeroom as Oliver is about to pass out. Seeing the picture before reading the accompanying text, one might expect the worst, but by the end of the closing narrative curtain Sikes has at least abstracted Oliver from the immediate danger posed by the armed servants — who become four in number in the Furniss illustration.
The rooms look entirely different in the 1838 and 1910 illustrations. Dickens himself is equivocal about the nature of the backroom into which Sikes lowers the terrified boy: "at the back of the house: which belonged to a scullery, or a small brewing-place, at the end of the passage" (164). Having to make a choice, Cruikshank decided it would be a "brewing-place" and accordingly inserted a wooden vat and long-handled implement on the wall, leaving the space uncluttered. The only chaos in his picture is the frightened servants, the discharge of a pistol, the smoke of the gunpowder, and the wounded boy, crying out. In contrast, transforming the room into a cluttered scullery, Furniss re-arranges the layout of the room and alters the juxtaposition of the figures (now six in number) in such a way that Oliver is no longer the obvious focus of the illustration. In the somewhat theatrical original in Bentley's (Part 10, January 1838), Cruikshank has the two frightened servants to the left, just entering through the open doorway; Oliver, holding his arm (centre); a large brewing-tub, lower right, and Sikes's troll-like face, upper right. Although he minimizes the clouds of gunpowder, Furniss provides considerably more clutter in the scullery, places the comic servants upper centre (one with a sword, a second with a pistol, a third with a raised lantern), and relegates an obviously wounded Oliver to the lower left and an angry Sikes to the upper left, leaving the centre of the composition vacant, so that the reader-viewer in anticipation must be read the plate proleptically; only five pages later will the reader find its textual equivalent and learn Oliver's fate.
Left: George Cruikshank's The Robbery. Right: Felix Octavius Carr Darley's 1888 portrait of the notorious housebreaker, abducting Oliver, Sikes, Nancy, and Oliver Twist.
Left: J. Clayton Clarke's 1890 portrait Bill Sikes. Right: Sol Eytinge, Junior's Bill Sikes and Nancy (1867).
Above: Mahoney's 1871 realisation of the scene immediately preceding the robbery, outside the house at Chertsey, "Directly I leave go of you, do your work. Hark!"
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Created 4 February 2015
Last modified 14 February 2020