Watkins Tottle [The Courtship of Gabriel Parsons]
George Cruikshank
1850
Wood-engraving
10 x 8.8 cm, vignetted
Chapter 1 of "A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle," Chapter 10 in "Tales" by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, originally published in the January 1835 number of The Monthly Magazine; illustration facing title-page of the Cheap Edition (1850).
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Oh— ah! Well, here I found poor Fanny, quite disconsolate and uncomfortable. The old boy had been very cross all day, which made her feel still more lonely; and she was quite out of spirits. So, I put a good face on the matter, and laughed it off, and said we should enjoy the pleasures of a matrimonial life more by contrast; and, at length, poor Fanny brightened up a little. I stopped there, till about eleven o'clock, and, just as I was taking my leave for the fourteenth time, the girl came running down the stairs, without her shoes, in a great fright, to tell us that the old villain— Heaven forgive me for calling him so, for he is dead and gone now! — prompted I suppose by the prince of darkness, was coming down, to draw his own beer for supper— a thing he had not done before, for six months, to my certain knowledge; for the cask stood in that very back kitchen. If he discovered me there, explanation would have been out of the question; for he was so outrageously violent, when at all excited, that he never would have listened to me. There was only one thing to be done. The chimney was a very wide one; it had been originally built for an oven; went up perpendicularly for a few feet, and then shot backward and formed a sort of small cavern. My hopes and fortune — the means of our joint existence almost— were at stake. I scrambled in like a squirrel; coiled myself up in this recess; and, as Fanny and the girl replaced the deal chimney-board, I could see the light of the candle which my unconscious father-in-law carried in his hand. I heard him draw the beer; and I never heard beer run so slowly. He was just leaving the kitchen, and I was preparing to descend, when down came the infernal chimney-board with a tremendous crash. He stopped and put down the candle and the jug of beer on the dresser; he was a nervous old fellow, and any unexpected noise annoyed him. He coolly observed that the fire-place was never used, and sending the frightened servant into the next kitchen for a hammer and nails, actually nailed up the board, and locked the door on the outside. So, there was I, on my wedding-night, in the light kerseymere trousers, fancy waistcoat, and blue coat, that I had been married in in the morning, in a back-kitchen chimney, the bottom of which was nailed up, and the top of which had been formerly raised some fifteen feet, to prevent the smoke from annoying the neighbours. And there,"added Mr. Gabriel Parsons, as he passed the bottle, "there I remained till half-past seven the next morning, when the housemaid's sweetheart, who was a carpenter, unshelled me. The old dog had nailed me up so securely, that, to this very hour, I firmly believe that no one but a carpenter could ever have got me out."— Chapter 1 of "A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle," Chapter 10 in "Tales" pp. 335-36 in the 1839 edition.
Comic account of an impoverished middle-aged bachelor's attempt, initiated and organized by his prosperous friend, Gabriel Parsons, to capture the affections of a prim, well-to-do spinster, Miss Lillerton. During the course of the story Tottle is arrested for theft [actually, debt] and taken to a sponging-house, from which he is rescued by Parsons. [The Dickens Index, 191]
Compare this 1850 wood-engraving by Cruikshank to his original conception of The Courtship of Gabriel Parsons with his original illustration for two-part tragi-comedy of Watkins Tottle. Much more humorous than the plight of the hapless protagonist is the inset narrative of his friend and sponsor, Gabriel Parsons, although the title of the 1837 illustration, Watkins Tottle, would imply that the gentleman sitting with the young woman on the kitchen dresser is a younger version of Tottle; rather, that first of three illustrations for the romantic farce actually shows Mr. Gabriel and Mrs. Fanny Parsons as newlyweds in Parsons' inset, first-person flashback, it humorously demonstrates how even a curmudgeon can have a romantic past — and tell the story of it for the thousandth time. The situation awkward romance with the blocking figure of Fanny's father must have tickled Cruikshank's fancy that, when Chapman and Hall offered him the opportunity to provide a single illustration, the frontispiece, for the Cheap Edition of Sketches by Boz in 1850, the veteran illustrator seized the opportunity to revisit the courtship of Fanny and Gabriel Parsons. The maid seems to be taking a savage delight in the fashionably-dressed young man's discomfort, for presumably he has been up the bake-oven chimney all night, awaiting release. An anxious Fanny watches her husband's release from the margin, and Cruikshank gives the carpenter in his tradesman's hat a position of prominence. In order to accommodate the fireplace, Cruikshank has had to shrink considerably the settle upon which Gabriel Parsons courted Fanny in the 1839 illustration.
As Frederic G. Kitton notes, Cruikshank had to re-engrave a number of illustrations for the Chapman and Hall serialisation, and the subsequent 1839 anthology, but also had to expand the original program to accommodate the twenty instalments:
During the following year (1837) Macrone published a Second Series of the "Sketches" in one volume, uniform in size and character with its predecessors, and containing ten etchings by Cruikshank; for the second edition of this extra volume two additional illustrations were done, viz., "The Last Cab-Driver" and "May-day in the Evening." It was at this time that Dickens repurchased from Macrone the entire copyright of the "Sketches," and arranged with Chapman & Hall for a complete edition, to be issued in shilling monthly parts, octavo size, the first number appearing in November of that year. The completed work contained all the Cruikshank plates (except that entitled "The Free and Easy", which, for some unexplained reason, was cancelled) and the following new subjects: "The Parish Engine," "The Broker's Man," "Our Next-door Neighbours" [sic], "Early Coaches," "Public Dinners," "The Gin-Shop," "Making a Night of It," "The Boarding-House," "The Tuggses at Ramsgate," "The Steam Excursion," "Mrs. Joseph Porter," and "Mr. Watkins Tottle." — "George Cruikshank, p. 4.
Left: Phiz's frontispiece for the Chapman & Hall Library Edition (1858), showing the one-eyed boots holding Alexander Trott under restraint, The Great Winglebury Duel in Chapter 8 of "Tales." Left of centre: Cruikshank's 1839 frontispiece, which faces the half-title, The Election for Beadle. Right of centre: Cruikshank's depiction of Cruikshank and Dickens as balloonists, Vignette Title (1839). Right: Furniss's elaborate frontispiece, which references both the first and third sketches in "Our Parish," The Election of Beadle (1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
As Prof. Paul Schlicke has explained, the additional illustration for "A Passage in the Life of Mr. Watkins Tottle" was Mr. Watkins Tottle and Miss Lillerton. The other illustrations for the story appeared in Macrone's first series, vol. 2 (1836), in which Mr. Gabriel Parson's Courtship served as a frontispiece, perhaps revealing the predilection of both author and illustrator for this farcical situation.
Above: Fred Barnard's wood-engraving of a scene from "Hackney Coaches," It was a wedding party and it emerged from one of the inferior streets. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Created 6 June 2017 Last updated 17 May 2023
