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The Dead-Cart
Phiz
1847
Steel-engraving
13.5 cm high by 10 cm wide, vignetted
Title-page image for W. H. Ainsworth's Old Saint Paul's: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire (1847), facing frontispiece.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image by Simon Cooke and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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"What is the matter?" he asked.
"The devil's the matter," replied the man — "the piper's ghost has appeared in that cart, and is playing his old tunes again."
"Ay, it's either his spirit, or he is come to life again," observed the other man, stopping likewise. "I tossed him into the cart myself, and will swear he was dead enough then."
"You have committed a dreadful mistake," cried Leonard. "You have tossed a living man into the cart instead of a dead one. Do you not hear those sounds?" And as he spoke, the notes of the pipe swelled to a louder strain than ever.
"I tell you it is the devil — or a ghost," replied the driver; "I will stay here no longer."
"Lend me your lantern, and I will go to the cart," rejoined Leonard.
"Take it," replied the man; "but I caution you to stay where you are. You may receive a shock you will never survive."
Paying no attention to what was said, Leonard ran towards the cart, and found the piper seated upon a pile of dead bodies, most of them stripped of their covering, with Bell by his side, and playing away at a prodigious rate. [Book III, Chapter 2, "How Fires were lighted in the Streets," pages 184-185]
In 1847, Phiz was called in to provide two additional plates for a new
edition of
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 which the pest-cart, surmounted by the lively piper, makes its way to the plague-pit through Bartholomew-lane towards Moorgate and its final destination, Finsbury-fields. Although Ainsworth uses Leonard's pursuit of the cart containing a living person among the victims of the plague to create suspense, Phiz sees the essential humour in the piper's playing his tunes. Bystanders misinterpret the jolly piper as an apparition, but Phiz makes him insistently real. To make his design more compact and emphasize the scene realised, Phiz has reduced the title to three styllized words in crazy script ("Old St. Paul's") from the book's full title, given on the next page: Old Saint Paul's: A Tale of the Plague and the Fire, prominently displaying his full name as an archway through which the reader will enter the text. Leonard, surprised at what the lantern reveals, stands at the head of the cart, and the appalled driver behind it. Mirroring the mass panic and social chaos, Phiz's seventeenth-century houses in ramshackle condition form a suitable backdrop to the nightmarish scene.
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.
Last modified 6 November 2018
