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John Chivery Pens His Own Epitaph
Harry Furniss
1910
14.5 x 9.5 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Little Dorrit, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, Book the Second, "Riches," Chapter 27, "The Pupil of the Marshalsea," facing XII, 769.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Dear Little Dorrit.
Looking back upon his own poor story, she was its vanishing-point. Every thing in its perspective led to her innocent figure. He had travelled thousands of miles towards it; previous unquiet hopes and doubts had worked themselves out before it; it was the centre of the interest of his life; it was the termination of everything that was good and pleasant in it; beyond, there was nothing but mere waste and darkened sky.
As ill at ease as on the first night of his lying down to sleep within those dreary walls, he wore the night out with such thoughts. What time Young John lay wrapt in peaceful slumber, after composing and arranging the following monumental inscription on his pillow —
STRANGER! RESPECT THE TOMB OF JOHN CHIVERY, JUNIOR, WHO DIED AT AN ADVANCED AGE NOT NECESSARY TO MENTION. HE ENCOUNTERED HIS RIVAL IN A DISTRESSED STATE, AND FELT INCLINED TO HAVE A ROUND WITH HIM; BUT, FOR THE SAKE OF THE LOVED ONE, CONQUERED THOSE FEELINGS OF BITTERNESS, AND BECAME MAGNANIMOUS.
— Book The Second, "Riches," Chapter 27, "The Pupil of the Marshalsea," 764: the wording of the picture's original caption has been emphasized.
Caption underneath title: Young John did not lie wrapt in peaceful slumber until after he had composed and arranged a monumental inscription on his pillow. — Dorrit, 764.
Dickens employs John Chivery, Little Dorrit's self-pitying, rejected lover, as a thematic foil to the earnest protagonist, Arthur Clennam. However, like Mr. F's Aunt, young Chivery provides necessary character, which is in short supply in this darker Dickens novel belonging to his late period. Gone are the quirky and delightful figures of the early novels, and Little Dorrit has no comic figures to equal Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers or Sairey Gamp in Martin Chuzzldewit. The Chiveries are a fixture in the Marshalsea: John's father is a turnkey, Mrs. Chivalry keeps the tobacconist's shop, and John has been brought up in and around the notorious prison. Furniss here depicts John as soleful lover suffering a hopeless devotion to the other "Child of the Marshalsea," Amy Dorrit. He struggles with his feelings, but remains firm in his decision to make any sacrifice necessary to ensure Little Diorrit's happiness. Consequently, he helps Pancks investigate her father's claim to a substantial inheritance. John's other role in the plot is to alert Arthur to Amy's true feelings for him when Clennam, his romantic alter-ego, is imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea — and rescued by the young woman he had mistakenly regarded as a child.
Although principally satirical,Furbusss's portrait particularlizes the poetic Chivery in way that the other nineteenth-century illustrators have not. To Eytinge and Mahoney, for example, Chivery is merely a fatuous clotheshorse. In Phiz's At Mr. John Chivery's Tea-table, he contrasts in his youthful inexperienced naiveté the somewhat haggard Clennam sitting across from him; otherwise, however, Phiz does not realize young Chivery's comic possibilities, and instead develops another callow youth, the fatuous Edmund Sparkler, financier Merdle's boobyish step-son and Fanny's entrez into high society and comfortable affluence.
Left: Sol Eytinge, Junior's study of the nattily dressed, poetic youth, not paired with any other character, Young John Chivery. Centre: Phiz's study of Young John's shock at being denounced by his old "patron," Reception of an Old Friend (Book 2, Chapter 18: February 1857). Right: Phiz's illustration of John's taking tea with the latest Marshalsea wreck, Arthur Clennam, in At Mr. John Chivery's Tea-table (May 1857).
James Mahoney's 1873composite woodblock-engraving of John and Amy's farewell, which juxtaposes Amy's genuine distress with John's thwarted adolescent obsession, "O don't cry!" said Little Dorrit piteously. "Don't, don't! Good-bye, John. God bless you!" "Good-bye, Miss Amy. Good-bye!" And so he left her. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Created 26 May 2016
Last modified 25 January 2020