"Leaving the Morgue" by George Pinwell — illustration for Chapter VII, "Travelling Abroad," in "The Uncommercial Traveller" (1868, rpt. 1895)

Leaving the Morgue

George Pinwell

1868

12.4 x 8.7 cm (4 ⅞ by 3 ⅜ inches), framed.

Dickens's The Uncommercial Traveller, Illustrated Library Edition, facing page 76 in the 1868 edition; frontispiece in the 1895 edition.

The four "W. M." Illustrations — which Frederic G. Kitton attributed to Marcus Stone — for the Illustrated Library Edition are mediocre at best, despite their having been engraved by the Dalziels; but the four wood-engravings by George Pinwell reveal his customary sensitivity towards his subjects, to graph personal relations, and to model his figures effectively. [Commentary continued below.]

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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Illustrated

It was very hot weather, and he [a large, dark man with the expression of a prize-fighter] was none the better for that, and I was much the worse. Indeed, a very neat and pleasant little woman, with the key of her lodging on her forefinger, who had been showing him to her little girl while she and the child ate sweetmeats, observed Monsieur looking poorly as we came out together, and asked Monsieur, with her wondering little eyebrows prettily raised, if there were anything the matter? [Chapter VII, "Travelling Abroad," pp. 75-76 in the 1868 edition]

Commentary

In Leaving the Morgue, Kitton remarks, George Pinwell "has introduced a full-length presentment of the novelist" (221), anticipating by some forty years Harry Furniss's presentation of Dickens, valise in hand, as The Uncommercial Traveller in the Charles Dickens Library Edition, Volume Ten. The scene just outside the Paris Morgue, a site of considerable interest to Dickens and his protegé, Wilkie Collins, whenever they were in the French capital, is something of a confessional, but it was a bold step to identify the narrative voice of the essays as that of Dickens himself. So effective is this wood-engraving of Charles Dickens, prematurely-aged literary lion, that Chapman and Hall made it their frontispiece in the 1895 re-print.

First published in the number of All the Year Round on 7 April 1860, "Travelling Abroad" was the subject of illustration for Charles Stanley Reinhart in the Harper and Brothers' Household Edition of 1876 and for Edward Dalziel in the Chapman and Hall Household Edition of 1877. However, these later illustrators chose scenes that reveal the narrator's observant eye and taste for the bizarre and theatrical in the German part of the narrator's travels on the Continent. In contrast, Pinwell has elaborated upon Dickens's queasiness and discomfort with what he observes in the Paris Morgue. In that he has specifically identified an aging Dickens as the Uncommercial Traveller, Pinwell's characterisation of the narrator might best be compared to that of Reinhart in his Uncaptioned Scene from "The Wapping Workhouse", since Reinhart is more interested in establishing the narrator as an observer, recorder, and reader of human nature, switching from the first-person of the accompanying text to the third-person or dramatic perspective of realisation.

Prior to the 1868 Illustrated Library Edition, G. J. Pinwell had provided Chapman and Hall with a single illustration for the 1865 anthology of The Uncommercial Traveller; Kitton, however, does not indicate whether any of the four 1868 illustrations repeats the single wood-engraving of the 1865 Cheap Edition. Rather than the stage humour of the Staudenheim scene offered by the 1870s Household Edition illustrators, Pinwell offers a serious and realistic study from life in the street. The polite but clearly affected Dickens-like gentleman tips his silk tophat to the French mother and daughter, who have just expressed concern for his health after what he has experienced in the viewing room. This, then, is an extension rather than a strict realisation of the text, in which the narrator describes himself merely as "Faintly replying in the negative" (76) before crossing the road to purchase a brandy. Pinwell shows that neither the mother nor the daughter understands the foreigner's indisposition, and the mother nervously studies the Englishman's face and lifts her skirt in preparation for stepping into the street and away from this strange bourgeois whose reaction to scenes in the morgue she cannot fathom. The Englishman and the French woman are continents of experience and sensibility apart, despite their common, middle-class backgrounds, and Pinwell has imbued the encounter with an engaging sense of mystery.

Household Edition Illustrations for "Travelling Abroad"

Bibliography

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

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books and The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. X.

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Marcus Stone [W. M., and George Pinwell]. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868, rpt., 1895.

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Illustrated by Charles Stanley Reinhart and Luke Fildes. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Edward Dalziel. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. Vol. XVI.

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Edward Dalziel. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877.

Schlicke, Paul, ed. "The Uncommercial Traveller." The Oxford Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999. Pp. 100-101.

Slater, Michaell, and John Drew, eds. Dickens' Journalism: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers 1859-70. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism, vol. 4. London: J. M. Dent, 2000.

Created 19 August 2013

Last modified 11 May 2023