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As the coach stops, a gentleman in a straw hat looks out of the window
A. B. Frost
Engraver: E. Dalziel
1878
Wood engraving
8.9 cm wide by 13.3 cm high
From Chapter XIV, "Return to Cincinnati. A Stage-coach Ride from That City of Columbus, and Thence to Sandusky. So, By Lake Erie, to the Falls of Niagara," in Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation in the Household Edition, facing p. 375.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The time is one o’clock at noon.
The scene, a place where we are to stay and dine, on this journey. The coach drives up to the door of an inn. The day is warm, and there are several idlers lingering about the tavern, and waiting for the public dinner. Among them, is a stout gentleman in a brown hat, swinging himself to and fro in a rocking-chair on the pavement.
As the coach stops, a gentleman in a straw hat looks out of the window:
Straw Hat. (To the stout gentleman in the rocking-chair.) I reckon that’s Judge Jefferson, an’t it?
Brown Hat. (Still swinging; speaking very slowly; and without any emotion whatever.) Yes, sir. . . .
Both. (Musingly, as each gazes down the street.) Yes, sir.
Another pause. They look at each other again, still seriously than before. [Chapter XIV, “Return to Cincinnati. A Stage-coach Ride from That City of Columbus, and Thence to Sandusky. So, By Lake Erie, to the Falls of Niagara,” pp. 374-375]
Since the writer has formatted the scene as a script with parenthetical stage directions, Frost has filled in the gaps in the text, including the coach, the horses, the venue, and the broader cast of characters, the "walk-ons" who constitute the onstage audience. Dickens regards his job as capturing the characteristically laconic American mode of speaking, a staccato question-and-answer or stichomythia of almost courtroom rapidity. The interrogative style seems appropriate to the subject of the phlegmatic discourse, the conclusion of a court-case.
The point of Dickens's prose is to demonstrate the terse stichomythia of American speech, whereas Frost's intention is to fill out the scene in order to show to British readers how an American stage-coach stop, located at a tavern, tends to operate as a community centre. The person outside the coach in Frost's illustration is not sitting on a rocking hair, as in the passage, but on a keg or perhaps a wooden pail, and instead of "pavement" the illustrator shows the street merely as packed dirt.In this 1880 version of the scene at the stage-coach stop, Frost implies that the man seat in the foreground, holding a percussion cap hunting-rifle, is the interlocutor for the passenger in the coach. Therefore, the second (horizontal) plate constitutes a significant revision because Nast has adjusted the placement and appearance of the second speaker to more closely approximate Dickens's description. The alternate version, which appears in the P. F. Collier edition of 1890, includes a number of other figures, including a man seated on an American rocker. With a ramshackle stable of rough boards in the background Frost creates the impression of a frontier outpost rather than an Eastern American town. In the dialogue Dickens does not denote the speakers by either name or profession, but simply as "Straw Hat" and "Brown Hat," suggesting their nondescript nature; one might overhear such a laconic current-affairs dialogue on any Mid-western main street, he seems to suggest. As the alternate version makes clear, Brown Hat and Straw Hat conduct a very public as the patrons and staff of the tavern have come out on the porch to observe the arrival of the stage-coach. Both versions make clear that the appearance of the coach in the town's main street marks a significant point in the daily life of a small American community. The actual dialogue is almost inane in its simplicity, as if Dickens here is anticipating the style of Eugene Ionescu a century later.
Above: Frost's alternate version, a horizontal orientation that may possibly represent a re-thinking of the illustration, for the Peter Fenelon Collier & Son edition of the travelogue, As the coach stops, a gentleman in a straw hat looks out of the window (1890).
Dickens, Charles. Chapter XIV, "Return to Cincinnati. A Stage-coach Ride from That City of Columbus, and Thence to Sandusky. So, By Lake Erie, to the Falls of Niagara." American Notes, Sketches by Boz, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by A. B. Frost and Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877. Pp. 357-63.
Dickens, Charles. Chapter XIV, "Return to Cincinnati. A Stage-coach Ride from That City of Columbus, and Thence to Sandusky. So, By Lake Erie, to the Falls of Niagara." American Notes and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by A. B. Frost and Gordon Thomson. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880. Pp. 370-86.
Last modified 28 May 2019