“The mother was misery's picture.”
Arthur A. Dixon
1906
lithograph
4 ⅞ inches high by 3 ⅛ inches wide (12.3 cm by 8.1 cm)
Fifth regular illustration for the Collins Pocket edition, facing p. 225.
The miserable stations by the railway side, the great wild wood-yards, whence the engine is supplied with fuel; the negro children rolling on the ground before the cabin doors, with dogs and pigs; the biped beasts of burden slinking past: gloom and dejection are upon them all. ["Chapter IX," 206]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Passage Realised: The Victims of Slavery — A Broken Family Sold Up
In the negro car belonging to the train in which we made this journey, were a mother and her children who had just been purchased; the husband and father being left behind with their old owner. The children cried the whole way, and the mother was misery’s picture. The champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, who had bought them, rode in the same train; and, every time we stopped, got down to see that they were safe. The black in Sinbad’s Travels with one eye in the middle of his forehead which shone like a burning coal, was nature’s aristocrat compared with this white gentleman. [Chapter IX, "A Night Steamer on the Potomac River — Virginia Road, and a Black Driver — Richmond — Baltimore — The Harrisburg Mail, and a Glimpse of the City — A Canal Boat," 206]
Commentary: Dickens's Personal Observations of American Slavery
We believe that earnest and dispassionate inquiry among men experienced in all the details of the question, would lead eventually to a performance by America of the moral duty of emancipation in a way that might wipe out every reproach for the past treatment of the negroes, and reflect eternal honour on the stars and stripes. [Household Words, 18 September 1852, page 5]
As Michael Slater explains in Charles Dickens (2009),
When it came to dealing with the unavoidable topic of slavery, which the manuscript of American Notes shows [Dickens] had originally fiercely broached in the first chapter set on American soil, the one dealing with Boston, he was disadvantaged by having spent such a short time in the South. In lieu, therefore, of incorporating into the narrative of his journey any first-hand 'sketch' of a scene in the slave states, or any account of the actual institution of slavery, Dickens deals with the subject in a chapter appended, as it were, to the narrative. This chapter is more of an anthology than anything else, consisting as it mainly does of advertisements for runaway slaves copied out by Dickens from an anti-slavery pamphlet by an abolitionist called Theodore Weld. These advertisements document the extreme brutality of the treatment experienced by such slaves, followed by a dozen extracts from Southern newspapers, supplied to Dickens by his publishers. . . . [Michael Slater, 200-201]
In fact, as Slater notes, Dickens found his single direct experience of slavery so "hateful" (185) that he abruptly changed his itinerary and, instead of going south to Charleston, travelled two thousand miles west to see the Looking Glass Prairie outside St. Louis, Missouri. He did, however, visit a tobacco factory staffed by slaves, as well as an actual slave-owner's plantation en route to Baltimore, Maryland.
The illustrations in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) and the Illustrated Library Edition of American Notes (1868) remind readers of the twenty-first century that slavery, although outlawed in the British Empire in 1832, continued to flourish in the American South until President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the American Civil War twenty years later, stipulating "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." We should view the reception of the Phiz illustration of an actual (former) slave in Matin Chuzzlewit in the Chapman and Hall serial (July 1843), perhaps, in the context of the U. S. Supreme Court's ruling that the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 was perfectly constitutional. In reaction, three Northern and anti-slavery States (New York, Vermont, and Ohio) had challenged the validity of the Court's ruling by passing personal liberty laws which recognized former slaves as citizens, even as the Georgia legislature affirmed that it would never recognize Blacks as citizens.
Dixon's Innovations: Elaborating on Marcus Stone's The Black and the White
Left: Marcus Stone's The Black and the White (1874). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Junior, the Diamond Edition (1867), Vol. XI: The Black Driver. Right: Hablot Knight Browne, Mr. Tapley succeeds in finding a jolly subject for contemplation (July 1843).
With little to go on other than Dickens's reference to the Genii in The Arabian Nights and the melodramatic wood-engraving by Marcus Stone, Dixon was at liberty to innovate in his realisation of the paragraph describing the Black woman on the train and her tormentor, her new White owner. In contrast to Stone, Dixon gives a full-length study of the leering, villainous owner. The governing principle behind the illustration must, of course, be consistent with Dickens's intention to make American slavery repulsive to British readers, even though the practice in the Southern States produced the vast quantities of raw material which Lancashire's cotton-mills required in order to supply what the British market needed and to employ hundreds of thousands of operatives.
Whereas Stone had offered British readers a stalwart, handsome Black woman with a single infant fearlessly staring down a caricature villain with a distorted visage, Dixon offers a more realistic portrayal of the grim-faced, cigar-smoking owner who appraises the situation in the spartanly furnished railway carriage. The mother (gripping an infant) and her pair of young children, terrified, stare at their well-dressed would-be assailant, their gazes riveted on the whip that he carries under his arm. The illustrator leaves it to the astute reader to complete the terrible action about to unfold.
Related Materials
- Charles Dickens and American Slavery, 1842
- Charles Dickens, the traveler — places he visited
- Charles Dickens, 1843 daguerrotype by Unbek in America; the earliest known photographic portrait of the author
- Dickens's 1842 Reading Tour: Launching the Copyright Question in Tempestuous Seas
Bibliography
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy and American Notes for General Circulation. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Vol. XI.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy. The Illustrated Library Edition. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. London: Chapman & Hall, 1874.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes and Pictures from Italy, Volume XX, in the New York: P. F. Collier & Son edition, n. d.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1906.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes and Pictures from Italy, Volume 20, in the New York: P. F. Collier & Son edition, n. d.
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy and American Notes for General Circulation. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877. Vol. VII.
Schlicke, Paul. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999.
Slater, Michael. Chapter 8: "America brought to book, 1842." Charles Dickens.New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009. Pp. 175-206.
Created 4 September 2026