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Passage Illustrated: "Drink the Plague!"

Song of The Plague

I.

To others the Plague a foe may be,
To me 'tis a friend — not an enemy;
My coffins and coffers alike it fills,
And the richer I grow the more it kills.
Drink the Plague! Drink the Plague!

II.

For months, for years, may it spend its rage
On lusty manhood and trembling age;
Though half mankind of the scourge should die,
My coffins will sell — so what care I?
Drink the Plague! Drink the Plague!

Loud acclamations followed the song, and the doctor, who was filled with disgust and astonishment, opened the door. He absolutely recoiled at the scene presented to his gaze. In the midst of a large room, the sides of which were crowded with coffins, piled to the very ceiling, sat about a dozen personages, with pipes in their mouths, and flasks and glasses before them. Their seats were coffins, and their table was a coffin set upon a bier. Perched on a pyramid of coffins, gradually diminishing in size as the pile approached its apex, Chowles was waving a glass in one hand, and a bottle in the other, when the doctor made his appearance.

A more hideous personage cannot be imagined than the coffin-maker. He was clothed in a suit of rusty black, which made his skeleton limbs look yet more lean and cadaverous. His head was perfectly bald, and its yellow skin, divested of any artificial covering, glistened like polished ivory. His throat was long and scraggy, and supported a head unrivalled for ugliness. His nose had been broken in his youth, and was almost compressed flat with his face. His few remaining teeth were yellow and discoloured with large gaps between them. His eyes were bright, and set in deep cavernous recesses, and, now that he was more than half-intoxicated, gleamed with unnatural lustre. The friends by whom he was surrounded were congenial spirits, — searchers, watchmen, buriers, apothecaries, and other wretches, who, like himself, rejoiced in the pestilence, because it was a source of profit to them.

At one corner of the room, with a part-emptied glass before her, and several articles in her lap, which she hastily pocketed on the entrance of the doctor, sat the plague-nurse, Mother Malmayns; and Leonard thought her, if possible, more villainous-looking than her companions. She was a rough, raw-boned woman, with sandy hair and light brows, a sallow, freckled complexion, a nose with wide nostrils, and a large, thick-lipped mouth. She had, moreover, a look of mingled cunning and ferocity inexpressibly revolting. [Book the First — "April, 1665," Chapter Two, "The Coffin Maker," pp. 24-25]

Commentary: Phiz reacts to the 1841 Franklin illustrations

In 1847, Phiz was called in to provide two additional plates for a new edition of Old St. Paul's 'Excellent illustrations', cries Thomson [quote p. 177], adding, 'The remaining etchings by another illustrator [Franklin] do not add much to the value of the book'. — Valerie Browne Lester, p. 138.

Receiving the commission some six years after the initial publication of the serial and triple-decker, Phiz, working with steel-engravings for the frontispiece and title-page vignette, took a very different approach from Franklin's noir scenes engraved on wood. Undoubtedly, the publishers were concerned the 1847 required some value-added feature to make it marketable, and Phiz was then at the height of his artistic powers of invention and, through his work for Dickens's Dombey and Son (October 1846-April 1848), at the height of his popularity. No wonder, then, that Parry, Blenkarn & Co. enlisted him to set the book's keynote in the frontispiece involving the grotesque coffin-maker and title-page vignette showing the dead-cart scene in the third book. Ainsworth himself, doubtless tired of feuding with George Cruikshank over control of the narrative-pictorial programs of his earlier novels, and obviously pleased with Phiz's contributions to the new edition and recalling his lively engravings for Revellations of London (i. e., Auriol; or, The Elixir of Life) in his own magazine in 1844, commissioned Phiz for a new edition of Crichton in 1849.

Working in the caricatural style of the previous era as represented by the work of Cruikshank, Hablot Knight Browne realised the scene in the coffin-maker's shop with dynamic humour rather than the staid drinking-scene of Chowles and his debauched cronies in The Coffin-Maker's Carousal (Chapter II). In contrast to the dozen figures statically disposed around the coffin which is serving as their table, Phiz stations the hideous coffin-maker, who seems of another species than homo sapiens, at the apex of the composition, dominating the scene as he roars out the plague song and raises his glass to toast his eleven mates. Phiz also individualises the ten boosey figures in the composition in a way that the symbolist Franklin does not, using period costumes and entirely different poses for each of these thoroughly but variously inebriated characters. Phiz characterizes the chaos wrought upon the social fabric of London through the miniature coffin in the foreground, filed with tableware.

Related Material

• Franklin's Illustrations of Old St. Paul's (1841)

Bibliography

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Old Saint Paul's: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire. Illustrated by Phiz and John Franklin. London & New York: George Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, n. d. [re-print of 1847 edition published by Parry, Blenkarn & Co.].

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Thomson, David Croal. Life and Labours of Hablột Knight Browne, "Phiz". London: Chapman and Hall, 1884.

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Last modified 6 November 2018