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Sally Brass gives the Marchioness her dinner
Harold Copping
1893
Photographic reproduction of line drawing, p. 116.
13.4 x 12.2 cm (5 ⅜ by 4 ⅞ inches), vignetted.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image, caption, and commentary below by Philip V. Allingham
"Now," said Dick, one day, walking up and down with his hands in his pockets; "I'd give something — if I had it — to know how they use that child, and where they keep her."
The office door was open, and that moment he caught a glimpse of Miss Brass flitting down the kitchen stairs. "And, by Jove!" thought Dick, "She's going to feed the small servant. Now or never!"
First peeping over the handrail and allowing Miss Brass to disappear into the darkness below, he groped his way down, and arrived at the kitchen door immediately after Miss Brass had entered the same, bearing in her hand a cold leg of mutton. It was a very dark, miserable place, very low and very damp; the water was trickling out of a leaky butt, and a most wretched cat was lapping up the drops with the sickly eagerness of starvation. Everything was locked up; the coal-cellar, the candle-box, the salt-box, the meat-safe, were all padlocked. There was nothing that a beetle could have lunched on.
The small servant stood with humility in presence of Miss Sally, and hung her head.
"Are you there?" said Miss Sally.
"Yes ma'am," was the answer, in a weak voice.
"Go further away from the leg of mutton, or you'll be picking it, I know," said Miss Sally.
The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass opened the safe, and brought from it a dreary waste of cold potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge.
"Do you see this?" she said, slicing off about two square inches of cold mutton, and holding it out on the point of a fork.
The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see every shred of it and answered, "Yes." ["The Marchioness," Chapter XI in Children's Stories from Dickens, pp. 111-112]
This is the climactic scene in Copping's narrative-pictorial sequence It clarifies the girl's status as a domestic slave, and therefore explains why the small servant runs away from the Brasses. Here, Dick spies upon Sally Brass as she force-feeds the Marchioness in the kitchen. Copping humanizes Sally more than any other illustrator, avoiding physical distortion and describing her prosaically. Mary Angela Dickens keeps us in the dark about the background of The Marchioness, and particularly her real relationship to Sally Brass. She is merely "the small servant," and Sally is merely her tyrannical employer. In the letterpress, the child escapes from the Brasses to take shelter with Dick, and nurses him back to health. At the conclusion of Mary Angela Dickens's chapter "The Marchioness" he sends her to a good school, and marries her when she is nineteen.
Left: Clayton J. Clarke's thirtieth Player's Cigarette Card in the Characters from Dickens series: Sally Brass (1910). Centre: Phiz's introduction of hideous legal partners and siblings: Sampson and Sally Brass (19 Sept. 1840). Right: Sol Eytinge's version of the Brasses in the Diamond Edition: Sampson and Sally Brass (1867).
Left: Harry Furniss's Charles Dickens Library Edition lithograph: Dick Swiveller hears the Marchioness say "No!" (1910). Centre: Charles Green offers a more comedic version of Dick and Sally in the Brasses' office: In some of these flourishes it went close to Miss Sally's head (1876). Right: Worth's kitchen scene of helping the Marchioness to a real supper: "Clear off that, and then you'll see what's next." (Ch. LVII, 1872).
Left: Furniss excessively caricatures Sally Brass in her only foregrounded appearance in his series: Sally Brass under Examination (1910). Centre: Phiz pillories both Brasses in his version of the 9 January 1841 Nemesis scene: Mr. Brass Unexpectedly Appears (Chapter LXVI).
Clarke, Joseph Clayton. ('Kyd'). "Dick Swiveller (Old Curiosity Shop. - Chap. XIII.)." Characters from Dickens. Series III. London: Raphael Tuck, 1904.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). London: Chapman and Hall, 1841. Rpt., 1849 by Bradbury and Evans (3 vols. in 2).
_____. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Thomas Worth. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Bros., 1872. I.
_____. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.
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.
Created 10 October 2023