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Mr. Crackit's 'good natur'
Frederic W. Pailthorpe
1886
9 cm high by 7.8 cm wide (3 ½ inches by 3 inches)
Dickens's Oliver Twist
[Click on image to enlarge it. See below for passage illustrated, commentary and comparisons with other illustrators' work; mouse over the text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
In due course, they arrived at Fagin’s abode, where they found Toby Crackit and Mr. Chitling intent upon their fifteenth game at cribbage, which it is scarcely necessary to say the latter gentleman lost, and with it, his fifteenth and last sixpence: much to the amusement of his young friends. Mr. Crackit, apparently somewhat ashamed at being found relaxing himself with a gentleman so much his inferior in station and mental endowments, yawned, and inquiring after Sikes, took up his hat to go.
“Has nobody been, Toby?” asked Fagin.
“Not a living leg,” answered Mr. Crackit, pulling up his collar; “it’s been as dull as swipes. You ought to stand something handsome, Fagin, to recompense me for keeping house so long. Damme, I’m as flat as a juryman; and should have gone to sleep, as fast as Newgate, if I hadn’t had the good natur’ to amuse this youngster. Horrid dull, I’m blessed if I an’t!”
With these and other ejaculations of the same kind, Mr. Toby Crackit swept up his winnings, and crammed them into his waistcoat pocket with a haughty air, as though such small pieces of silver were wholly beneath the consideration of a man of his figure; this done, he swaggered out of the room, with so much elegance and gentility, that Mr. Chitling, bestowing numerous admiring glances on his legs and boots till they were out of sight, assured the company that he considered his acquaintance cheap at fifteen sixpences an interview, and that he didn’t value his losses the snap of his little finger. [Chapter XXXIX, pp. 218-219 in the 1846 edition]
He may be a minor character, but he has always been among the readers' favourites in Dickens's second novel, perhaps because, unlike Sikes, he is always even-tempered and self-controlled. And n the final scenes he erxpresses revulsion at Sikes's having murdered Nancy. Toby Crackit, the "flash" or fashionably (and somewhat ostentatiously) dressed member of Fagin's gang and resident lock-picking expert, appears in very few narrative-pictorial sequences for Oliver Twist. However, Toby does appear at least twice in the Cruikshank 1846 Chapman and Hall wrapper vignettes: at the top, left, standing immediately behind Bill Sikes as the burglar prepares to lower Oliver through the window, and again among the gang members being apprehended by the Bow Street Runners (upper right). One can see a little of him in Mahoney's 1871 wood-engraving "Directly I leave go of you, do your work. Hark!" in the runup to the robbery in the first volume in the Household Edition. Unfortunately, the most extensive treatment of him, in Frederic W. Pailthorpe's 1886 series — Mr. Crackit's 'good natur' (in which at the thieves' kitchen the fashionably dressed lock-picker is playing cribbage with callow gang member Tom Chitling), is a colourful caricature rather than the realistic portraiture provided by Furniss in his 1910 illustration, which captures exactly Toby's exuberant, expansive nature. In terms of binary opposites, then, he is a sharp contrast in terms of personality and sartorial taste to the crude Bill Sikes, but is consistently not as bright as his criminal associates. He is, however, smart enough to have recourse to a fortified hideout on Jacob's Island.
Left: Sol Eytinge, Junior's depiction of the cracksman as an habitual smoker: Toby Crackit. Right: Harry Furniss's Toby Crackit begins to exasperate Fagin (Chapter 25, 1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
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Cohen, Jane Rabb. "George Cruikshank." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980. Pp. 15-38.
Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Character Sketches from Dickens. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1888.
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Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1838; Chapman and Hall, 1846.
_______. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Angus Eassone. The Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Vol. 1 (1820-1839).
_______. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1865.
_______. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Vol. XI.
_______. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 22 vols. Illustrated by James Mahoney. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. Vol. I.
_______. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. III.
_______. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. The Waverley Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Charles Pears. London: Waverley, 1912.
Grego, Joseph (intro). Cruikshank's Water Colours. [27 Oliver Twist illustrations, including the wrapper and the 13-vignette title-page produced for F. W. Cosens; 20 plates for William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter: A Tale of the Year 1774; 20 plates plus the proofcover the work for W. H. Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 and Emmetts Insurrection in 1803]. London: A & C Black, 1903. OT = pp. 1-106]. Book in the Rare Book Collection of the University of Toronto.
Pailthorpe, Frederic W. (Illustrator). Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. London: Robson & Kerslake, 1886. Set No. 118 (coloured) of 200 sets of proof impressions.
Created 11 February 2015 Last modified 6 December 2021