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The bill had not been long in the window, when a stout, good-humoured looking gentleman, of about five-and-thirty, appeared as a candidate for the tenancy. Terms were soon arranged, for the bill was taken down immediately after his first visit. In a day or two the single gentleman came in, and shortly afterwards his real character came out.

First of all, he displayed a most extraordinary partiality for sitting up till three or four o’clock in the morning, drinking whiskey-and-water, and smoking cigars; then he invited friends home, who used to come at ten o'clock, and begin to get happy about the small hours, when they evinced their perfect contentment by singing songs with half-a-dozen verses of two lines each, and a chorus of ten, which chorus used to be shouted forth by the whole strength of the company, in the most enthusiastic and vociferous manner, to the great annoyance of the neighbours, and the special discomfort of another single gentleman overhead.

Now, this was bad enough, occurring as it did three times a week on the average, but this was not all; for when the company did go away, instead of walking quietly down the street, as anybody else's company would have done, they amused themselves by making alarming and frightful noises, and counterfeiting the shrieks of females in distress; and one night, a red-faced gentleman in a white hat knocked in the most urgent manner at the door of the powdered-headed old gentleman at No. 3, and when the powdered-headed old gentleman, who thought one of his married daughters must have been taken ill prematurely, had groped down-stairs, and after a great deal of unbolting and key-turning, opened the street door, the red-faced man in the white hat said he hoped he'd excuse his giving him so much trouble, but he'd feel obliged if he'd favour him with a glass of cold spring water, and the loan of a shilling for a cab to take him home, on which the old gentleman slammed the door and went up-stairs, and threw the contents of his water jug out of window — very straight, only it went over the wrong man; and the whole street was involved in confusion. — Chapter 7, "Our Next-door Neighbour," p. 31-32.

Commentary

The sketch, originally unillustrated, first appeared in the Morning Chronicle on 18 March 1836. It did not appear in the John Macrone two-volume "First Series" of Sketches by Boz, but was added to "Our Parish" in the "Second Series," with the Cruikshank illustration (not one of the original Macrone plates of February 1836). "Sketches by Boz — New Series No. 1 in the 18 March 1836 Evening Chronicle contains what Dickens himself would later describe as a "streaky bacon" construction, with the anecdote about the practical-joking rowdies and the shocked landlord followed by a brief account of the pathetic death of a consumptive son, farcical comedy followed by pathos and youthful high-jinks by sentiment. The story that develops out of the opening sketch about the natures of the owners of various types of brass door-knockers (a forestaste of Dickens's use of Scrooge's knocker transforming itself into the face of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol) is consistent with Dickens's then-novel petite-bourgeois approach as to what is a suitable subject for magazine fiction:

Boz's stories focused on the middle classes, looking at a London seldom visited in literature. This was not the London of aristocrats and grandhouses, but a city of ordinary people doing everyday things; the humour came not from grand farces, but from the minutiae of simple misunderstandings and comic situations. The stories were largely humorous, such as "The Bloomsbury Christening,": but there were also serious, poignant tales like "The Drunkard's Death." — Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, p. 14.

Since October 1835, when young publisher John Macrone proposed a collaboration between up-and-coming author Charles Dickens and long-established visual satirist George Cruikshank (twenty years' Dickens's senior), the pair had been well matched as Cruikshank selected for illustration material from the Sketches had already published in various London periodicals in order to produce the two-volume anthology of February 1836. Although the relationship got off to a fine start on 17 November 1835, subsequent meetings to discuss the Macrone project were not always so amicable owing to "artistic differences," including the setting of appropriate timelines, for Cruikshank was initially convinced that the work could be ready by Christmas since type-setting would prove no problem as everything was already written and available for him to study. Delays were inevitable insofar as Dickens, new to publishing, was not aware of the complexities of the project. In fact, Macrone published what would prove to be the "First Series" of Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Everyday Life and Everyday People on 18 February 1836.

In later editions, Dickens removed the artist's name from his "Preface" and indeed from the spine of the book, and merely acknowledged the appeal of the illustrations (xxv), and even that oblique reference to Cruikshank's contribution he excised in his final, one-page version. So great was the success of these initial volumes that, by the summer of 1836, Macrone was proposing a "Second Series," for which the writer and illustrator would jointly select the material for illustration "instead of independently as before, when the pieces were already published, and [Cruikshank] even retained the finished portion of the manuscript in order to follow the text more precisely" (Cohen 17). Dickens certainly gave Cruikshank excellent material from which to choose his subjects as the portraits of London characters such as the landlord and the practical jokers in "Our Next-Door Neighbour" are are drawn with graphic detail and comic exuberance — seemingly ready for the etching needle of the veteran illustrator. However, Cruikshank fleshed out Dickens's comic and pathetic conceptions with appropriate background details, juxtapositions, postures, and even embedded visuals, creating a fuller appreciation of the moment realised.

As their collective title suggests, Sketches by Boz are self-consciously pictorial. The pieces, written before Dickens ever dreamed that his work would be illustrated, owed almost as great a debt to popular graphic tradition as to Cruikshank's plates. Dickens may have been breaking fresh literary ground in taking for settings gin and pawn shops, courts and prisons, coach and boat excursions, together with the lower middle-class people who frequented them; but such unheroic subjects had long been featured in the prints of Hogarth, Gillray, and Rowlandson, not to mention those of Cruikshank himself. In order to structure and focus his own "little pictures" of London life (xxiii), Dickens appears to have studied not only the subjects of these pictorial satirists, but also their methods. — Jane Rabb Cohen, "Dickens and His Early Illustrators," p. 18.

In juxtaposing the swaggering, obviously tipsy practical-joker, lithe of leg and fashionably dressed, with the middle-aged landlord in his dressing-gown and nightcap, Cruikshank imposes a col tempo theme on the confrontation that is not immediately apparent in Dickens's description of the antiphonal pair. Merry as the quartet of tipplers may be and carefree as the existence of the tenant may be, these jocular states of mind are temporary aberrations that cannot be sustained. "Cruikshank appropriately underscores the transience of such activities by often portraying his characters in actions that clearly cannot be sustained" (Cohen 18) as, for example, with the practical joke played by the tenant's madcap guest, demanding refreshment of a man recently asleep who has had to unlock his front door laboriously, thinking there is some emergency in the street involving his married daughter that requires his immediate intervention. In the defensive gesture at his chest (not merely against the night air, but against the unexpected intrusion of the bewhiskered caller) that the be-spectacled landlord makes Cruikshank captures in his stunned look his failure to appreciate what is happening as the fashionably dressed swell in white top-hat that accentuates his height and stirrup trousers that show his youthful limbs to advantage gestures open-handedly, the other hand casually and self-confidently in his pocket, as if he were a comedian on the London stage. And his audience is obviously enjoying the merriment, the central figure adopting a horsey posture, supporting his co-conspirators, the outside member of the trio holding his cigar aloft, the figure nearest the spokesman losing his balance as he attempts a dance-step. The architectural decorums of the little Georgian, fan-shaped window above the door and the neoclassical column separating the principals imply the landlord's middle-class respectability, even as the young men make him the butt of their joke.

In the many narrative sequences in the Sketches, Dickens achieved a "Hogarthian" ability to anticipate the final destiny of a character or object while representing only the intermediate stages; Cruikshank creatively followed suit. [18]

A brilliant addition to heighten the comedy is the smirking trio of tipsy young men who admire their friend's utter gall as they savour the landlord's utter shock at being so accosted at his own door. Although undoubtedly meeting the requirements of the vertically arrayed illustration, the narrowness of the house implies the constriction of middle-class, middle-aged existence into which the landlord, his appreciation of youthful exuberance long passed, has psychologically fallen. The difference, remarks Cohen, is not just one of differing "generations," but of chronological "degeneration":

Indeed, Dickens's "progresses" throughout the Sketches, whether of criminals (C, XII, 272) or lovers (C, VII, 242-47) or objects (OP, VII, 41; S, VI, 75-81) are really degenerations, ending only in disintegration or death. The author, and the artist after him, depicted little change in this society that was not for the worse. [18]

As Frederic G. Kitton notes, Cruikshank had to re-engrave this illustration for the Chapman and Hall serialisation, and the subsequent 1839 anthology:

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 [twelve] 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.

The Relevant Illustration from The Household Edition (1876): The Next Renter

Above: Fred Barnard's realistic wood-engraving of the next prospective tenant's inspecting the rental room, When he first came to look at the lodgings, he inquired most particularly whether he was sure to be able to get a seat in the Parish Church. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

References

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Bentley, Nicholas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens: Index. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.

Cohen, Jane Rabb. Part One, "Dickens and His Early Illustrators: 1. George Cruikshank. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1980. Pp. 15-38.

Dickens, Charles. "Our Next-Door Neighbour." Chapter 7 in "Our Parish."Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839, rpt. 1890.

Dickens, Charles. "Our Next-Door Neighbour." Chapter 7, "Our Parish."Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876.

Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. Pp. 12-15.

Kitton, Frederic G. "George Cruikshank." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: Chapman & Hall,1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004. Pp.1-28.

Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.

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