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Miggs in the Sanctity of her Chamber
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
(Part V) 13 March 1841
4 ½ x 3 ¼ inches (11.2 cm by 8.3 cm), vignetted
Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, The Bradbury & Evans single-volume edition of December 1849, Vol. I, Chapter Nine, 286.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Miss Miggs deliberated within herself for some little time, looking hard at the shop-door while she did so, as though her eyes and thoughts were both upon it; and then, taking a sheet of paper from a drawer, twisted it into a long thin spiral tube. Having filled this instrument with a quantity of small coal-dust from the forge, she approached the door, and dropping on one knee before it, dexterously blew into the keyhole as much of these fine ashes as the lock would hold. When she had filled it to the brim in a very workmanlike and skilful manner, she crept upstairs again, and chuckled as she went.
"There!" cried Miggs, rubbing her hands, "now let’s see whether you won’t be glad to take some notice of me, mister. He, he, he! You’ll have eyes for somebody besides Miss Dolly now, I think. A fat-faced puss she is, as ever I come across!"
As she uttered this criticism, she glanced approvingly at her small mirror, as who should say, I thank my stars that can’t be said of me! — as it certainly could not; for Miss Miggs’s style of beauty was of that kind which Mr. Tappertit himself had not inaptly termed, in private, "scraggy."
"I don’t go to bed this night!" said Miggs, wrapping herself in a shawl, and drawing a couple of chairs near the window, flouncing down upon one, and putting her feet upon the other, ‘till you come home, my lad. I wouldn’t," said Miggs viciously, "no, not for five-and-forty pound!"
With that, and with an expression of face in which a great number of opposite ingredients, such as mischief, cunning, malice, triumph, and patient expectation, were all mixed up together in a kind of physiognomical punch, Miss Miggs composed herself to wait and listen, like some fair ogress who had set a trap and was watching for a nibble from a plump young traveller.
She sat there, with perfect composure, all night. At length, just upon break of day, there was a footstep in the street, and presently she could hear Mr Tappertit stop at the door. [Chapter the Ninth, 286-87]
The Vardens' sour, dessicated maid begins as a relatively minor character, supporting the contrariness and disagreeable nature of her mistress. Consequently, most illustrators do not provide portrait studies of Miggs, but are content (like Eytinge and Furniss) simply to include her in a scene or two as a supporting character. Phiz, on the other hand, possibly felt that Dickens was going to develop her as the Comic Woman of contemporary melodrama, and that she would attempt to obstruct the romance of Dolly and Joe. Although the quirky maid (later, a turnkey at Bridewell) remains a minor figure, Dickens does employ her ill-nature and plotting to contrast the more open and kinder natures of his heroines, Dolly Varden and Emma Haredale. Phiz is also utilizing in his characterization of the disconsolate Miggs the following passage:
Mrs. Varden's chief aider and abettor, and at the same time her principal victim and object of wrath, was her single domestic servant, one Miss Miggs; or as she was called, in conformity with those prejudices of society which lop and top from poor hand-maidens all such genteel excrescences, — Miggs. This Miggs was a tall young lady, very much addicted to pattens in private life; slender and shrewish, of a rather uncomfortable figure, and though not absolutely ill-looking, of a sharp and acid visage. [Chapter the Seventh, Vol. One, 273]
Miggs has, as the saying goes, "set her cap" on the apprentice who occupies the garret next to hers in the attic of the Varden house. Her case would seem hopeless at this point as her romantic rival, Dolly Varden, exceeds her considerably in youth and beauty. But Miggs has swiftly hatched a plan to put Sim in her debt. Having detected Sim's departing in the middle of the night and realising that the locksmith's apprentice has probably made himself a duplicate front-door key, Mrs. Varden's sycophantic maid lays a trap for Sim. She fills the keyhole with coal-soot, then waits to see whether this will force him to seek her cooperation in getting back into the house. Just before dawn he returns from his secret meeting in the Barbican near the London wall, and, just as she anticipated, finds that his key won't work and that he needs her help to get through the workshop window of the Clerkenwell establishment, central London, an area known in the eighteenth century as a centre for such trades as watchmaking and watch repair.
Here stood Ill-nature like an ancient maid, Her wrinkled form in black and white array'd; With store of pray'rs, for mornings, nights, and noons, Her hand is fill'd; her bosom with lampoons. [Pope, IV: 29-32]
Rodney Stenning Edgecombe has detected a strong resemblance between Phiz's portrait of Miggs at her window in Barnaby Rudge and William Hogarth's portrait of "the uncharitable Evangelical shrew" (129) in Canto IV of his illustrated edition of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. Although Pope's dour Evangelical is standing in the marketplace in Hogarth's print and painting Morning (from The Four Times of the Day) and Miggs is seated at her garret window in 18th c. London's commercial district of Clerkenwell, in both instances one sees the dessicating effect of spite, envy, and sexual frustration in the "wrinkled Form" of an aging spinster who feels deprived: "Barnaby Rudge places Miss Miggs firmly within this anti-apostolic succession of Evangelical shrews, and so do the illustrations with which Browne invested it. Dickens stresses the bony, uncontoured nature of her physiognomy — 'This Miggs was a tall young lady, very much addicted to pattens in private life; slender and shrewish, of a rather uncomfortable figure . . .' (Ch. VII, 273)" (Edgecombe, 129-130). Apparently Phiz reported that he had dispensed with a living model for his study of Miss Miggs; therefore, a print such as Hogarth's may well have furnished him with a model for her. Edgecombe describes Phiz's portrait of Miggs as shoving "a better-than-usual command of volumetric values, perhaps because he has a masterpiece to hand to inspire him" (131). The critic notes, for example, that both Hogarth's Evangelical spinster and Miggs wear identical caps, are both shown in profile, and have flying lappoets in place of curls. Both, moreover, represent a strident and uncharitable species of Protestantism that is Dickens's target in the historical novel about the anti-popery Gordon Riots. In her uncompromising dogma as well as her "skraggy" physiognomy (to quote Sim Tappertit) she serves as a sharp contrast to the novel's heroines, the intellectual Emma Haredale and the buxom Dolly Varden.
Left: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Diamond edition illustration: Mr. and Mrs. Varden and Miss Miggs in Chapter 18 (1867). Right: Harry Furniss's only representation of the Vardens' maid in a Varden family scene, The Dressing of Varden in his Regimentals (1910).
Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ('Phiz') and George Cattermole. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841; rpt., Bradbury & Evans, 1849.
________. Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. IX.
________. Barnaby Rudge. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. VI.
Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. "Sources for the Characterization of Miss Miggs in Barnaby Rudge." Dickens Quarterly, 32, 2 (June 2015): 129-38.
Vann, J. Don. "Charles Dickens. Barnaby Rudge in Master Humphrey's Clock, 13 February-27 November 1841." New York: MLA, 1985. 65-66.
Created 1 August 2015
Last modified 2 December 2020