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Mr. Tapley is Recognised by Some Fellow-Citizens of Eden
Phiz
January 1844
Steel-engraving
12 cm high by 9.9 cm wide (4 ⅝ high by 2 ¾ inches), vignetted
Illustration for Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, facing p. 386 (1844) in Ch. XXXIII; headline: "Mark Tapley among friends" (1867).
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
He paused to look round, uncertain to which of the log-houses he should repair.
"I don't know which to take," he observed; "that's the truth. They're equally prepossessing outside, and equally commodious, no doubt, within; being fitted up with every convenience that a Alligator, in a state of natur', could possibly require. Let me see! The citizen as turned out last night, lives under water, in the right hand dog-kennel at the corner. I don't want to trouble him if I can help it, poor man, for he is a melancholy object; a reg'lar Settler in every respect. There's house with a winder, but I am afraid of their being proud. I don't know whether a door ain't too aristocratic; but here goes for the first one!"
He went up to the nearest cabin, and knocked with his hand. Being desired to enter, he complied.
"Neighbour," said Mark; "for I am a neighbour, though you don't know me; I've come a-begging. Hallo! hal—lo! Am I a-bed, and dreaming!"
He made this exclamation on hearing his own name pronounced, and finding himself clasped about the skirts by two little boys, whose faces he had often washed, and whose suppers he had often cooked, on board of that noble and fast-sailing line-of-packet ship, the Screw.
"My eyes is wrong!" said Mark. "I don’t believe ‘em. That ain’t my fellow-passenger younder, a-nursing her little girl, who, I am sorry to see, is so delicate; and that ain’t her husband as come to New York to fetch her. Nor these," he added, looking down upon the boys, "ain’t them two young shavers as was so familiar to me; though they are uncommon like ‘em. That I must confess."
The woman shed tears, in very joy to see him; the man shook both his hands and would not let them go; the two boys hugged his legs; the sick child in the mother’s arms stretched out her burning little fingers, and muttered, in her hoarse, dry throat, his well-remembered name.
It was the same family, sure enough. Altered by the salubrious air of Eden. But the same. [Ch. XXXIII, "Further Proceedings in Eden, and a Proceeding out of it. Martin makes a Discovery of some Importance," facing page 386 in the 1844 edition]
In American Notes, a woman travelling on the steamboat with her new-born infant is happily re-united with her husband, who has never seen the child, born while his wife was in New York. In contrast, in Martin Chuzzlewit, the young woman and her children from steerage find her husband worn out by the hellish heat and disease of the Mississippi at Eden, a cautionary tale for would-be English emigrants. — Allingham, "America's Eden," 8.
By the time that Chapman and Hall had published Chapter 33 in Part XIII of Martin Chuzzlewit, a great event in the history of English literature and Victorian publishing had transpired: Chapman and Hall's issuing the first and most famous of the Christmas Books, A Christmas Carol, in December 1843. In that celebrated yuletide novella, Dickens contrasts the jollity and abundance of the season which the upper-middle class enjoy with the privations of the poor and the terrors of the future which confront the misanthropic, self-centred Ebenezer Scrooge. In this final American scene by Phiz, we observe a similar contrast, with the jovial Mark Tapley, despite the tribulations of Eden, standing in for the Spirit of Christmas Present and the suffering colonist family from The Screw standing in for the ever-jovial Cratchits. Like that cheerful family, they are happy just to be in each other's company — and like them they are about to lose their youngest child. Ironically, Dickens may have based the immigrant family upon the reunion of a young husband and wife that he witnessed aboard a steamboat at St. Louis during his 1842 tour, a far more positive, upbeat moment than that which Phiz has depicted in Mr. Tapley is Recognised by Some Fellow-Citizens of Eden. Here, the immigrant wife holds the dying child on her lap as the ebullient Mark Tapley enters the squalid log-cabin. In contrast to Phiz's ragged immigrant couple, Marcus Stone's husband and wife in his realisation of "The Little Wife" in American Notes for General Circulation (1842) are substantial, well-dressed figures whose health and prosperity betoken a bright future in America.
Although it is hardly the exposé of the appalling conditions endured by English immigrants that Dickens delivers, Phiz's twenty-fifth illustration for Martin Chuzzlewit shows us those squalid quarters, with rough shelves and flour cask in the corner, as described by Dickens. The artist, however, focuses our attentions on the ever-cheerful Mark and the "young shavers" who respond with undiluted joy to Mark's sudden arrival in their unhealthy cabin, as Mark unexpectedly renews his acquaintance with his fellow passengers from steerage. Mark has just announced himself their "neighbour," and has just recognized them as the boys in glee hug his legs. As yet, the wraith-like, ill-kempt, and ill-clad father has yet to respond as he holds the door. This is therefore not a true tableau or moment of stasis, but rather a snapshot catching its figures in the midst of action: shortly the mother (decorously holding rather than "nursing" the sick child on her lap) will be overwhelmed by tears of gladness. In the illustration, we do not have a real sense of the feverous child's perilous state of health, but the letterpress makes clear the fate of the youngest member of the little family apparently foreshadows a similar tribulation for the named partner of Chuzzlewit and Co.
Left: Marcus Stone's Household edition of American Notes illustration of a domestic reunion, The Little Wife in Chapter 12 (1866). Centre: Harry Furniss's panoramic view of Eden — in which a colossal Mark seems momentarily bestrides the landscape like a colossus, "Eden!" in Chapter 23 (1910). Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s, study the effect of malaria on Martin, Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley (1867). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Fred Barnard's realisation of the jovial Mark acting as nanny for the immigrant family in steerage on the packet-ship, On board the "Screw" in Chapter 15 (1872).
Above: Fred Barnard's realisation of Mark's nursing Martin through malarial fever in Eden, "Jolly!" in Chapter 33 (1872).
Allingham, Philip V. "Historical Background: America's Eden." The Dickens Magazine: Martin Chuzzlewit. 5.2 (August 2008): 8.
_____. "Phiz's Illustrations, Part Three." [Ch. 29-35] The Dickens Magazine: Martin Chuzzlewit. 5.3 (February, 2009): 8-11.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy in Works. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall: 1866, rpt. 1874.
_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.
_____. Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872. Vol. 2.
_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Edited by Andrew Lang. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). The Gadshill Edition: 34 volumes. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897. 2 vols.
_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Edited by Margaret Cardwell. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). The Clarendon Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Monod, Sylvère. "External and Additional Material." Martin Chuzzlewit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. Pp. 173-185.
Steig, Michael. "From Caricature to Progress: Master Humphrey's Clock and Martin Chuzzlewit." Ch. 3, Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 51-85.
_____. "Martin Chuzzlewit's Progress by Dickens and Phiz." Dickens Studies Annual, 2 (1972): 119-149.
Vann, J. Don. "Martin Chuzzlewit, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, January 1843 — July 1844." New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Pp. 66-67.
Last modified 28 March 2019
Last updated 14 November 2024