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Ornate initial capital "O"
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
8 May 1841
2.8 x 2.5 cm (approximately one inch square), framed
Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, The Bradbury & Evans single-volume edition of December 1849, Chapter Thirty-three, Vol. III, 120.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.].
ONE wintry evening, early in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty, a keen north wind arose as it grew dark, and night came on with black and dismal looks. A bitter storm of sleet, sharp, dense, and icy-cold, swept the wet streets, and rattled on the trembling windows. Signboards, shaken past endurance in their creaking frames, fell crashing on the pavement; old tottering chimneys reeled and staggered in the blast; and many a steeple rocked again that night, as though the earth were troubled. [Chapter the Thirty-third, 121]
The portly figure in the vignette represents no one member of the Maypole's cronies, but the process of aging that all four members of group have undergone in the past five years. This aging process, however, is not evident so much in their girth as in their faces: Daisey and Parkes (the lon g-headed man) have grown thinner and bonier, whereas Willet and Cobb have added pounds, and considerable flesh and wrinkles to their visages.
Whereas the initial letter vignette is typically intended to mark the beginning of monthly instalments, the last being Initial letter "P", Chapter XXXI (the initial June 1841 instalment), this image seems intended to mark the story's entering a different phase. The first thirty-chapters involve the fraught relationships between fathers and sons (the Willets, the Chesters, and the Rudges) and challenged romantic relationships (Joe and Dolly, and Edward and Emma), but the remaining forty-eight chapters, spread out over twenty-five weekly instalments (12 June through 27 November) explore the sources, progress, and outcomes of the political conflicts that Dickens has barely touched on up to this point.
Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ('Phiz') and George Cattermole. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841; rpt., Bradbury & Evans, 1849.
________. Barnaby Rudge. Ed. Kathleen Tillotson. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ('Phiz') and George Cattermole. The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens. London: Oxford University Press. 1954, rpt. 1987.
Hammerton, J. A. "Ch. XIV. Barnaby Rudge." The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition, illustrated by Harry Furniss. London: Educational Book Co., 1910. 213-55.
Vann, J. Don. "Charles Dickens. Barnaby Rudge in Master Humphrey's Clock, 13 February-27 November 1841." New York: MLA, 1985. 65-66.
Created 5 July 2002
Last modified 17 December 2020
