"Mr. Wardle looked on, in silent wonder" — eighth illustration by Phiz for Charles Dickens's "Pickwick Papers" (1874)

Mr. Wardle looked on, in silent wonder. by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne). British Household Edition (1874) of Dickens's Pickwick Papers, p. 41. Engraved by one of the Dalziels. Chapter VII, “How Mr. Winkle, instead of shooting at the pigeon and killing the crow, shot at the crow and wounded the pigeon; how the Dingley Dell Cricket Club played All Muggleton, and how All Muggleton dined at the Dingley Dell expense; with other interesting and instructive matters,” page 41. The illustration is 11.2 cm high by 14.3 cm wide (4 ¼ by 5 ½ inches), framed. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Passage Illustrated: Jingle appears at the Entertainment for the Rival Cricket Team

‘This way,’ said the first speaker; ‘they notch in here — it’s the best place in the whole field;’ and the cricketer, panting on before, preceded them to the tent.

‘Capital game — smart sport — fine exercise — very,’ were the words which fell upon Mr. Pickwick’s ear as he entered the tent; and the first object that met his eyes was his green-coated friend of the Rochester coach, holding forth, to the no small delight and edification of a select circle of the chosen of All-Muggleton. His dress was slightly improved, and he wore boots; but there was no mistaking him.

The stranger recognised his friends immediately; and, darting forward and seizing Mr. Pickwick by the hand, dragged him to a seat with his usual impetuosity, talking all the while as if the whole of the arrangements were under his especial patronage and direction.

‘This way — this way — capital fun — lots of beer — hogsheads; rounds of beef — bullocks; mustard — cart-loads; glorious day — down with you — make yourself at home — glad to see you — very.’

Mr. Pickwick sat down as he was bid, and Mr. Winkle and Mr. Snodgrass also complied with the directions of their mysterious friend. Mr. Wardle looked on in silent wonder.

‘Mr. Wardle — a friend of mine,’ said Mr. Pickwick.

‘Friend of yours! — My dear sir, how are you? — Friend of my friend’s — give me your hand, sir’ — and the stranger grasped Mr. Wardle’s hand with all the fervour of a close intimacy of many years, and then stepped back a pace or two as if to take a full survey of his face and figure, and then shook hands with him again, if possible, more warmly than before. [Chapter VII, “How Mr. Winkle, instead of shooting at the pigeon and killing the crow, shot at the crow and wounded the pigeon; how the Dingley Dell Cricket Club played All Muggleton, and how All Muggleton dined at the Dingley Dell expense; with other interesting and instructive matters,” 46]

Commentary: The Roguish Jingle Resurfaces in Better Attire

J. Clayton Clarke's caricature of the affable confidence man, Alfred Jingle (1910, 1923) in Kyd's fifty Player's Cigarette Cards series.

Although Phiz seems to have been quite prepared to revisit his own work, he tended to avoid re-drafting Seymour's early illustrations. Here, Phiz provides a fresh interpretation of one the original four Seymour illustrations (numbers 3, 5, 7, and 8), and adds twenty-one scenes that he did not originally attempt. In the second of these is Mr. Wardle looked on, in silent wonder (p. 41), the fourth in which Alfred Jingle appears, to be seen just once more; there, the persuasive actor with the staccato mode of speech will be despondent and ill-dressed, a far cry from his dapper, self-confident persona, in utter despondency in the Fleet Prison (the thirty-fourth illustration in the original serial, but the forty-second in the British Household Edition).

As Pickwick observes the scene of male camaraderie in the Dingley Dell cricketers' tent at the "metropolis" of Muggleton in Kent, the London "Stranger" last seen at the Rochester charity ball, the out-of-work actor and confidence man Alfred Jingle, enthralls the company of Dingley Dellers with his rapid fire repartee about their sport, "talking all the while as if the whole of the arrangements [for food and drink] were under his especial patronage and direction" (45). The purpose of the eighth illustration in the Household Edition sequence is to reify the face and figure of the "Stranger" (whose hand Mr. Wardle grips so warmly in the frontispiece) and firmly associate the image with Jingle's name and distinctive staccato style of speaking. The "Stranger" is delighted to make the acquaintance of the wealthy squire, Mr. Wardle, through their mutual friend, Samuel Pickwick (thereby setting up the plot gambit of Jingle's eloping with Rachael Wardle). Presumably the cricketers practising in the background are "All-Muggleton," who have the first innings, according to the text.

Clearly Phiz felt that his 1873 narrative-pictorial sequence should include multiple images of the fascinating Jingle since he had a second opportunity — without Dickens's oversight to veto the notion — to develop a longer visual programme. Thomas Nast, like Phiz in the original illustrations (responsibility for which he had just inherited from Seymour and Buss), focuses in the early Dingley Dell sequence of chapters on Tupman's incipient romance with Rachael Wardle, the "spinster aunt," but Phiz in the Household Edition takes yet another opportunity to graph the career of the affable flim-flam man. As in the frontispiece (a revisiting of the June 1836 illustration Wardle and his Friends Under the Influence of the Salmon), realising the return of the besotted cricket party in Chapter VII, Alfred Jingle is the focus of the cricket tent incident, with Wardle and Pickwick playing supporting roles. Indeed, given the opportunity to focus on characters other than Pickwick and Sam, Phiz seems to have decided to follow the fortunes of Jingle more carefully in the Household Edition, for in the fifty-seven illustrations Jingle appears a total of five times — in contrast, Jingle does not appear even once in Nast's Household Edition sequence. In that, having amassed debts and lived by his wits, Jingle and his servant, Job Trotter, eventually emigrate with Pickwick's assistance and begin a new life abroad, this distinctively voiced character anticipates Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield, although Jingle and Trotter sail for the West Indies at the end of the novel rather than Australia. Unlike the somewhat corpulent Micawber, however, Jingle can consume almost any amount of food and drink and still remain perfectly slender, suggesting that his metabolism is as rapid as his manner of speaking.

Related Material

Other artists who illustrated this work, 1836-1910

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. Formatting by George P. Landow. [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.]

Bibliography

Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File and Checkmark Books, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Robert Seymour, Robert Buss, and Phiz. London: Chapman and Hall, November 1837. With 32 additional illustrations by Thomas Onwhyn (London: E. Grattan, April-November 1837).

_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. Vol. 1.

_______. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873. Vol. 4.

_______. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. Vol. 6.

_______. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 2.

Guiliano, Edward, and Philip Collins, eds. The Annotated Dickens.2 vols. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986. Vol. I.

Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book. London: Educational Book Co., 1910.

Johnannsen, Albert. "The Posthumous Papers of The Pickwick Club." Phiz Illustrations from the Novels of Charles Dickens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1956. Pp. 1-74.

Kitton, Frederic G. Dickens and His Illustrators. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004.

Steig, Michael. Chapter 2. "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24-50.

Created 8 March 2012

Last modified 4 April 2024