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Michael Steig's Commentary on the Wood-engraving from Period 1: 1836-1841.

The first collaboration between Dickens and Browne was on something considerably less than a novel, but it clearly shows their joint debt to the Hogarthian tradition (since both Sunday Under Three Heads and the fourth part of Pickwick, for which Browne was engaged, were published in June 1836, the order of events is not certain.). The first two of the three small wood engravings for the anti-Sabbatarian pamphlet Sunday Under Three Heads demonstrate the complementary nature of Browne's and Dickens' art, for they make explicit a quality which is only latent in the text. Dickens conceived his tendentious pamphlet in the mode of Hogarth's Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751), posing alternative consequences which will result from two opposed ways of ordering British society. The immediate occasion of Hogarth's pair of engravings was a measure to limit the sale of gin (Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 1, p. 207), while Dickens was concerned with the repressive Sabbath Bills, but both men present contrasts of healthy and depraved London life. Dickens mentions beer often enough in the first essay to make reasonable the connection with Hogarth's plates; for the drinking of beer "in content and comfort" is clearly contrasted with "outward signs of profligacy or debauchery." (Sunday Under Three Heads, in The Nonesuch Dickens, 23 vols. (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), 22: 507). Although the second essay does not mention the beer which is earlier associated with innocent recreation, it predicts that the restrictive Sabbath laws will produce much more profligacy, idleness, drunkenness, and vice." (Ibid., p. 516.) [12/13]

Despite their technical weakness, the two cuts illustrating these two essays make evident the twenty-one year old Browne's maturity as an interpreter of the moral significance of his author's text. In particular they make use of iconographic techniques developed by Hogarth and his followers, especially emblematic detail — the church, the clock, and the inscription ("Bread Street") — to underline certain implications of the text. These sorts of devices are employed by Browne in every Dickens novel he illustrated through Little Dorrit (as well as in many by other authors), and they increase in frequency from Pickwick on, reaching a high point in Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield, then diminishing in Bleak House and Little Dorrit, and disappearing entirely from the sixteen illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities. The particular categories of emblematic detail are various, from biblical allusions to titles of plays, sculptures or pictures representing classical mythology, references to Hogarth and Aesop, book titles of various kinds, and fairly standard emblematic objects such as clocks, cobwebs (usually indicating that the hero is somehow trapped, like a fly), maps, pictures of ships sailing smoothly or sinking — the list is almost endless. [Chapter 1: "Illustration, Collaboration, and Iconography," pp. 12-13]

Passage Illustrated: Complementing The First Head, "Sunday as it is"

But the morning service has concluded, and the streets are again crowded with people. Long rows of cleanly-dressed charity children, preceded by a portly beadle and a withered schoolmaster, are returning to their welcome dinner; and it is evident, from the number of men with beer-trays who are running from house to house, that no inconsiderable portion of the population are about to take theirs at this early hour. The bakers’ shops in the humbler suburbs especially, are filled with men, women, and children, each anxiously waiting for the Sunday dinner. Look at the group of children who surround that working man who has just emerged from the baker’s shop at the corner of the street, with the reeking dish, in which a diminutive joint of mutton simmers above a vast heap of half-browned potatoes. How the young rogues clap their hands, and dance round their father, for very joy at the prospect of the feast. . . . ["Sunday as it is," ]

Commentary: McDough's Bakery as a Community Centre for the Urban Working Class

As critics such as Michael Steig and Valerie Leslie Browne have noted, "Bread Street" here is the centre of a working-class London neighbourhood, as is William Hogarth's polar opposite to "Gin Lane." And clearly the community leader is not the priest from the church, looming in the right-hand register, but the genial baker at the centre of the composition. As Steig notes, Phiz here has employed "emblematic detail — the church, the clock, and the inscription ("Bread Street") — to underline certain implications of the text" (12). This is not the brutal working-class neighbourhood in which Dickens will subsequently set the Fagin, Artful Dodger, and Sykes scenes in Oliver Twist in 1838, but it is markedly "urban," as we note in those slightly ramshackle buildings in the street going right to centre, and in the Doric columns and pediment of McDough's bakery. "Sunday as it is," moreover, is characterized by interaction of the four gleeful children with their father (centre), who smiles at the youngest as he prepares to carry their steaming supper home. A typically Phizzian touch is the potted plants above the pediment which proclaim the nourishing nature of the shop, in contrast to the sterile Gothic tower of the parish church.

Bibliography

Buchanan-Browne, John. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1978.

Davis, Paul. "Sunday under Three Heads." Charles Dickens A top Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998. 371.

Dickens, Charles. Sunday Under Three Heads. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablột Knight Browne]. In One Vol. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: August 19, 2024.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Chapter Six, "The Collaborators." Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. Pp. 39-51.

Slater, Michael. Chapter 4: "Break-through Year: 1836." Charles Dickens. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 59-83.

Sparks, Timonthy. [Charles Dickens] Sunday Under Three Heads — As it is; as Sabbath Bills would make it; as it might be made. London: Chapman and Hall, 1836.

Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978.

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Created 16 September 2024