Poor Jo looks through the iron railing at his friend's grave
Clara M. Burd
1929
Composite Woodblock Engraving
16.6 cm by 11.5 cm (6 ½ by 4 ½ inches) framed
Elizabeth Lodor Merchant's Dickens' Stories About Children, Chapter 5, "Poor Jo!" (facing p. 72).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The next day they [the parish authorities] buried the dead man in the churchyard hard by; a churchyard hemmed in by houses on either side, and separated by an iron gate from the wretched court through which one goes to it.
But that night there came a slouching figure through the court to the iron gate. It held the gate with both hands and looked between the bars — stood looking in for a little while, then with an old broom it softly swept the step and made the arcway clean. It was poor Jo; and as, after one more long look through the bars of the gate, he went away softly he said to himself, "He was very good to me, he was." [Chapter 5, "Poor Jo!" pp. 73-74]
Most of the black-and-white character studies are mre sketches, with little or no background, but often as in Oliver Asks Mr. Bumble for More with a focus on two characters, and little emotional nuance. In this regard, Joe's looking through the iron fenced graveyard at his friend's resting place is a departure. In fact, in a way that most of Burd's other illustrations do not, Poor Jo looks through the iron railing at his friend's grave is a faithful realisation not merely of a moment in Merchant's re-telling, but a moment in Dickens's original text. Moreover, as with the usual Victorian illustration, this image actually faces the page of letterpress that it realises. In fact, Burd has so constructed and positioned the woodblock engraving that one must read through it, from the text on page 72 to its completion at the top of page 74, so that the reader negotiates both image and letterpress simultaneously.
Left: Phiz's September 1853 engraving serves as the title-page vignette for the volume edition: Jo, The Crossing-sweeper. Centre: Fred Barnard's 1873 Household Edition full-page composite woodblock wood-engraving of Joe in a crowd on London Bridge: Frontispiece: Jo. Right: Harry Furniss's study of Joe places him against a blank wall, as if to suggest his alienation: Jo (1910) in the Charles Dickens Library Edition.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853.
_______. Bleak House. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. New York: Sheldon and Company, 1863. Vols. 1-4.
_______. Bleak House. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr, and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. VI.
_______. Bleak House, with 61 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition, volume IV. London: Chapman and Hall, 1873.
_______. Bleak House. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. XI.
Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Headpiece for "List of Coloured Plates," Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893. Page 6.
Gribble, Jennifer. "Chapter 3: Dombey and Son: 'What the Waves were Always Saying'." Dickens and the Bible: 'What Providence Meant'. New York: Routledge, 1893.
Merchant, Elizabeth Lodor. Dickens's Stories About Children. Illustrated by Clara M. Burd. London and New York: John C. Winston. Encyclopedia Americana, 1929.
Created 28 May 2025
