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Two wretched people were more than once observed to crawl . . .
Charles Green
1874
13.8 cm high x 10.9 cm wide, framed
Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, the Household Edition, VI, "Chapter the Last," 272.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Of Sally Brass, conflicting rumours went abroad. Some said with confidence that she had gone down to the docks in male attire, and had become a female sailor; others darkly whispered that she had enlisted as a private in the second regiment of Foot Guards, and had been seen in uniform, and on duty, to wit, leaning on her musket and looking out of a sentry-box in St James’s Park, one evening. There were many such whispers as these in circulation; but the truth appears to be that, after the lapse of some five years (during which there is no direct evidence of her having been seen at all), two wretched people were more than once observed to crawl at dusk from the inmost recesses of St Giles’s, and to take their way along the streets, with shuffling steps and cowering shivering forms, looking into the roads and kennels as they went in search of refuse food or disregarded offal. These forms were never beheld but in those nights of cold and gloom, when the terrible spectres, who lie at all other times in the obscene hiding-places of London, in archways, dark vaults and cellars, venture to creep into the streets; the embodied spirits of Disease, and Vice, and Famine. It was whispered by those who should have known, that these were Sampson and his sister Sally; and to this day, it is said, they sometimes pass, on bad nights, in the same loathsome guise, close at the elbow of the shrinking passenger. [Chapter LXXIII, 270]
Green makes the manipulative brother and sister look physically repulsive, in contrast to his angelic descriptions of the novel's protagonist, Little Nell. Kyd's versions for the Player's Cigarette card series of Dickens's characters look for more engaging than the Neanderthals of Green's dark plate. Dickens punishes the sycophantal attorney Samson Brass and his amazonian sister and partner-in-crime, Sally, for their iniquities. Green's characterisation of the odious pair reflects Fate's inflicting upon them the one thing that has terrified them above all else: poverty.
Left: Sampson Brass by Kyd. Right: Sally Brass by Kyd.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. XII.
_____. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Thomas Worth. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1872. VI.
_____. The Dickens Souvenir Book. Illustrated by Fred Barnard and others. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1912.
Last modified 8 October 2020