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Mr. Bumble, The Parochial Beadle
Harold Copping
1893, rpt. 1924
Photographic reproduction of a line drawing
11.8 cm by 6.2 cm (4 ½ by 2 ½ inches), vignetted
From Children's Stories from Dickens, p. 19.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Oliver was then led away by Mr. Bumble from the wretched home . . . . And yet he burst into an agony of childish grief, as the cottage-gate closed after him . . . . . Mr. Bumble walked on with long strides; little Oliver, firmly grasping his gold-laced cuff, trotted beside him. [Character Sketches from Dickens, 32]
Along this same footpath Oliver well remembered he had trotted beside Mr. Bumble, the Beadle. His heart beat quickly when he bethought himself of this, and he half resolved to turn back. [Children's Stories from Dickens, 28]
Very early in the novel, the pompous beadle, Mr. Bumble, Dickens's satirical personification of the antiquated British Poor Laws that regulated the lives of the poor and underprivileged, removes the youthful protagonist from the only real home he has known in his first eight years of life, Mrs. Mann's "baby farm," and returns him to the penitentiary-like orphanage. In this first instalment of the novel (February 1837), Mr. Bumble accompanies a crying, disoriented Oliver on his ninth birthday from Mrs. Mann's establishment. The text accompanying Copping's realization (Mr. Bumble and Oliver Twist) of the scene on the high road, "Oliver Twist Returns to the House," occurs in the opening serial instalment of Dickens's novel in Chapter 1, "Treats of the Place where Oliver Twist was Born, and of the Circumstances attending his Birth" (February 1837). In the present illustration in the third chapter, "Oliver Twist," after Mrs. Sowerbury sends Charlotte to bring back the beadle to remove Oliver from the undertaker's for his assault on Noah Claypole, as he takes the footpath connecting to the high road to London, Oliver recalls Bumble's having guided him along that same short-cut across the fields.
Left: George Cruikshank's Oliver escapes being bound apprentice to a Sweep (March 1837). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Junior's Mrs. Corney and Mr. Bumble in the Diamond Edition (1867). Right: James Mahoney's Household Edition illustration "Don't sigh, Mrs. Corney" (1871). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Left: Harry Furniss's Oliver Refuses to be Bound over to a Sweep" (1910). Centre: Harry Furniss's "Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Corney" (1910). Right: F. W. Pailthorpse's study of Bumble's contemplating becoming lord of Mrs. Corney's possessions as he does a jig: Inexplicable Conduct of Mr. Bumble (1886). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1846.
Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
Created 6 March 2009 Last modified 21 September 2023