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Mr. Brownlow at the bookseller's stall
Harold Copping
1893, rpt. 1924
Photographic reproduction of a line drawing
13.8 cm by 12 cm (5 ⅜ by 4 ⅝ inches), vignetted
From Children's Stories from Dickens, p. 27.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The old gentleman was a very respectable-looking personage, with a powdered head and gold spectacles. He was dressed in a bottle-green coat with a black velvet collar, wore white trousers, and carried a smart bamboo cane under his arm. He had taken up a book from the stall; and there he stood reading asway as hard as if he were in his elbow-chair in his own study. It is very possible that he fancied himself there indeed, for it was plain, from his utter abstraction, that he saw not the bookstall, nor the street, nor the boys, nor, in short, anything but the book itself, which was reading straight through, turning over the leaf when he got to the bottom of the page, beginning at the top line of the next one and going regularly on with the greatest interest and eagerness. [Children's Stories from Dickens, pp. 29-30]
By the time we reach Oliver's decision to abandon Mudfog in the letterpress, we have been introduced to the image of Mr. Brownlow (p. 27), perusing the wares at a bookseller's stall outside the shop, the ideal mark for Oliver's pickpocket associates with whom he has fallen in on the outskirts of London. Curiously, the text names neither boy: they are merely a "strange boy . . . some years older than Oliver" (29) and "another boy." And neither thief appears in the Copping illustration: we see what Oliver from across the street sees.
And what we observe in Copping's portrait is supported both by Dickens's text and by the numerous representations of the benevolent, old bourgeois. Brownlow is dressed as a respectable, upper-middle class gentleman, in contemporary, Regency fashion (cutaway coat and trousers, not breeches and hose) rather than the antiquated style of the late eighteenth century, with a gentleman's accoutrements: the beaver top hat, gold pocket-watch, and cane. He scrutinizes the duodecimo volume, examining the binding and actually reading some of the letterpress. Thus abstracted, he is the ideal victim for the pickpockets with whom Oliver has fallen in. Significantly, neither the authors nor the illustrator ever depicts Fagin and his crew of street-thieves. The only criminal in the narrative-pictorial program is Bill, armed and standing over the unconscious Oliver, presumably after the abortive robbery at Chertsey.
Left: Sol Eytinge, Junior's Mr. Brownlow and Mr. Grimwig in the Diamond Edition (1867). Centre: George Cruikshank's Bentley's illustration Oliver amazed at the Dodger's mode of going to work (July 1837). Right: F. W. Pailthorpe's depiction of Oliver with the balding Brownlow in his study with Mr. Grimwig: "Look here! do you see this?" (1886). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Left: Harry Furniss's Oliver's Eyes are opened (1910). Right: James Mahoney's Household Edition illustration of Oliver's fateful meeting with the Artful Dodger, "Hullo, My Covey! What's the Row?" (1871). [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 23 September 2023