[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Victorian Illustrators —> Phiz —> Illustrations of Bleak House —> Charles Dickens —> Next]

Passage Illustrated: Chesney Wold

The day waned into a gloomy evening, overcast and sad, and I still contended with the same distress. I went out alone, and after walking a little in the park, watching the dark shades falling on the trees and the fitful flight of the bats,  which sometimes almost touched me, was attracted to the house for the first time. Perhaps I might not have gone near it if I had been in a stronger frame of mind. As it was, I took the path that led close by it.

I did not dare to linger or to look up, but I passed before the terrace garden with its fragrant odours, and its broad walks, and its well-kept beds and smooth turf; and I saw how beautiful and grave it was, and how the old stone balustrades and parapets, and  wide flights of shallow steps, were seamed by time and weather; and how the trained moss and ivy grew about them, and around the old stone pedestal of the sun-dial; and I heard the fountain falling. Then the way went by long lines of dark windows diversified by turreted towers and porches of eccentric shapes, where old stone lions and grotesque  monsters bristled outside dens of shadow and snarled at the evening gloom over the  escutcheons they held in their grip. Thence the path wound underneath a gateway, and  through a court-yard where the principal entrance was (I hurried quickly on), and by the  stables where none but deep voices seemed to be, whether in the murmuring of the wind  through the strong mass of ivy holding to a high red wall, or in the low complaining of the weathercock, or in the barking of the dogs, or in the slow striking of a clock. So,  encountering presently a sweet smell of limes, whose rustling I could hear, I turned with  the turning of the path to the south front, and there above me were the balustrades of the Ghost's Walk and one lighted window that might be my mother's. [Esther Summerson's  account of the Dedlock Manson, Chapter 36, "Chesney Wold"]

Pertinent Comments by Michael Steig regarding these Contrasting Plates

Above: Furniss's derivative frontispiece for the 1910 Charles Dickens Library edition of Bleak House (Vol. XI) with Phiz's original illustration of the Dedlock ancestral seat in Lincolnshire: Bleak House, and Chesney Wold.

The frontispiece and title page, although published originally with the two plates just discussed, were planned with their ultimate position at the opening of the bound edition in mind. The frontispiece shows the manor of Chesney Wold in the distance, evidently at such time as "the waters are out in Lincolnshire" (ch. 2, p. 6), for the foreground shows — with fine dark plate technique — murky, marshy ground, while the trees are blown about in the wind and the sky is full of dark clouds. The manor itself almost bears the aspect of a haunted house; there is no specific indication that this haziness is meant to convey an explicit idea like the fading of the nobility, but the effect of the etching — for me, anyway — is one of ambiguous unpleasantness: loneliness, sterility, the lack of human connection are all suggested. The charcoal working drawing is itself quite different in tone from either steel, having been done with free, broad lines, but it is equally effective in its spooky way.

As a complement to the manor, the small title page vignette shows the opposite end of society — urban humanity in its lowest aspect. The subject is taken from chapter 16 (pp. 156-58), the first description of Jo the crossing-sweeper, and the comparison between the conditions of boy and dog in which the narrator argues that the "brute" is in most respects "far above the human" (p. 158). In the background, to add a touch of urban squalor, Phiz has drawn tiny figures of two ragged women quarrelling, with a shabby man watching idly. In the context of the novel, the contrast between these two etchings emphasizes the indifference of the powerful classes toward the powerless, but also conveys the feeling that the former, especially the nobility, are to be associated with death, the lower classes with life. The original appearance of these plates with those of the Dedlock mausoleum (in the double part) surely strengthens the point. [156-57]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Illustrated by Phiz. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853.

_____. Bleak House. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 11.

Steig, Michael. Chapter 6. "Bleak House and Little Dorrit: Iconography of Darkness." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978, 131-172.

---

Victorian
Web

Illustra-
tion

Phiz

Bleak
House

Next

Created 22 November 2019

Last modified 31 January 2021