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Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce
Harry Furniss
1910
14.3 cm x 9.5 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Sketches by Boz, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, "Characters," Chapter 7, "The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce," facing I, 236.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Can you open me an oyster, my dear?" said Mr. John Dounce.
"Dare say I can, sir," replied the lady in blue, with playfulness. And Mr. John Dounce eat [sic] one oyster, and then looked at the young lady, and then eat another, and then squeezed the young lady's hand as she was opening the third, and so forth, until he had devoured a dozen of those at eightpence in less than no time.
"Can you open me half-a-dozen more, my dear?" inquired Mr. John Dounce.
"I'll see what I can do for you, Sir," replied the young lady in blue, even more bewitchingly than before; and Mr. John Dounce eat half-a-dozen more of those at eightpence, and his gallantry increased. ["The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce," 235-236]
"[The] Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce. . ." Originally published as "Scenes and Characters No. 5. Love and Oysters in Bell's Life in London (October 4, 1835), this sketch describes a steady "old boy" widower and his infatuation for a 25-year-old woman in a blue dress who sells oysters. He becomes ridiculous to his longtime male companions, has his proposal turned down by the young lady, and eventually marries his cook. [Davis, 244]
Extended caption: Mr. John Dounce ate half a dozen more of those at eightpence, and his gallantry increased. — Sketches by Boz, p. 236. [p. 237]
Shops of all kinds appear in Dickens's fiction and journalism, most famously the old curiosity shop in the novel of the same name, although seems to have been chiefly interested in inns, hotels, public-houses, and bake-shops. Nevertheless, he had a fondness for oysters throughout his life; on his second American tour, for example, his repast on the night of a public reading would consist solely of champagne and oysters. The British had been fond of "Colchester Natives" since the Roman occupation, when barrels of oysters from the remote corner of the Empire were highly prized in Rome. When the legions pulled out in 410 A. D., the oyster farms were abandoned, and oysters disappeared from British recipes until the reign of King Richard II. Since meat was prohibited by the mediaeval church for up to one-third of the year, oysters quickly became a popular alternative to fish, although the mixing of oysters with such meat dishes as steak-and-kidney pie, steak, and mutton occurred only after the Reformation. Since beef-and-oyster pie was a classic Victorian dish, demand for the shellfish was high in nineteenth-century Britain: "as many as 80 million oysters a year being transported from Whitstable's nutrient-rich waters to London's Billingsgate Market alone" (Ysewijn). Undoubtedly, by the time that Dickens (under the pseudonym "Tibbs," rather than "Boz," his pen-name for the Evening Chronicle) wrote this sketch for Bell's Life in London set in a superior "oyster saloon," the native oyster beds were becoming exhausted, and the price of oysters was rising to such an extent that only the prosperous classes could afford to eat them "on the shell" by mid-century.
Those were the days of supper, for at that time a beneficent Legislature had not ordained that, at a certain hour, no matter how soberly we may be enjoying ourselves in a house of public entertainment, we were to be turned into the streets. There were many houses which combined a supper with a dinner business; there were some which only took down their shutters when ordinary hard-working people were going to bed. Among the former were the oyster-shops — Quinn's in the Haymarket; Scott's, facing that broad-awake thoroughfare; a little house (name forgotten) in Ryder Street — not Wilton, who closed at twelve; Godwin's, with the celebrated Charlotte as its attendant Hebe, in the Strand near St. Mary's Church. Godwin's was occasionally patronized by journalists and senators who lived in the Temple precincts: the beaming face of Morgan John O'Connell was frequently to be seen there; and Douglas Jerrold would sometimes look in. Charlotte was supposed to be one of the few who had ever silenced the great wit: he had been asking for some time for a glass of brandy-and-water; and when at length Charlotte placed before him the steaming jorum, she said, "There it is, you troublesome little man; mind you don't fall into it and drown yourself." Jerrold, who was very sensitive to any remarks upon his small and bent figure, collapsed.
Other famous oyster-houses of that day, as they are of this, were Lynn's in Fleet Street, Pimm's in the Poultry, and Sweeting's in Cheapside; but they were all closed at night. Restaurants where the presence of ladies at supper was encouraged rather than objected to were the Café de l'Europe, in the large room at the back (the front room, entered immediately from the street, was reserved for gentlemen, and will be mentioned elsewhere), and Dubourg's, already mentioned, the proprietor of which —a fat elderly Frenchman, his portly presence much girt with gold watch-chain — was a constant attendant at the Opera, and was well known to the roués of the day. — Edmund Yates, "1847-1852."
In Furniss's illustration (clearly a realistic response to Cruikshank's original, Mr. John Dounce, 1836, revised 1839), the jovial elderly bachelor in fashionable middle-class garb is rather more animated than his stiff, portly counterpart in the Cruikshank plate. Whereas the shopgirl merely serves her rotund customer an oyster in Cruikshank's "Oyster Saloon" (designated by large sign in the window), in the Furniss lithograph she bats her eyes at him, displays her dimples to advantage, and flirts outrageously — and she is much more youthful and pretty under Furniss's pen. Although the plain-faced shopgirl in the 1836 illustration is not plausibly the sort of nubile female over whom an elderly widower would be likely to make a fool of himself, Furniss's charming Edwardian beauty is virtually a magazine fashion-plate. On the other hand, although he has improved on the figures in the Cruikshank plate, Furniss has taken no pains to display the kinds of commercial signs that one would likely have seen in such an Ostrea edulis emporium in the 1830s: "Purts Ginger Beer" and Webb's Soda Water." A great many other London shops of the period appear in one of Dickens's earliest journalistic pieces, "Shops and Their Tenants," originally published in the Morning Chronicle on 10 October 1834 as "Street Sketches No. 12," and collected as the third article under the heading "Scenes" (Series 1, 8 February 1836). On 15 December 1834 he followed up with another description of commercial establishments in "Brokers' and Marine Store Shops" in the Morning Chronicle.
Above: George Cruikshanks's original 1836 copper-plate engraving of the flirtatious widower, his girth somewhat exaggerated, at the newly-opened oyster-shop, Mr. John Dounce (1836), and Cruikshank's 1839 revised version of the same plate for the 1839 Chapman and Hall edition. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
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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. "The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce." Sketches by Boz. Second series. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: John Macrone, 1836. Pp. 193-208.
_____. "The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce," Chapter 7 in "Characters," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890. Pp. 181-185.
_____. "The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce," Chapter 7 in "Characters," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Pp. 115-117.
_____. "The Misplaced Attachment of Mr. John Dounce," Chapter 7 in "Characters," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. 232-238.
Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. Pp. 12-15.
Schlicke, Paul. "Sketches by Boz.Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999. Pp. 530-535.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.
Yates, Edmund. "1847 -1852." His Recollections and Experiences. London, 1885. Rpt. in "Victorian London — Food and Drink — Restaurants — Oyster-shops and restaurants." Dictionary of Victorian London. New Haven: Yale U. P., 2014. Web. Accessed 11 April 2017; 18 May 2023.
Created 26 April 2017
Last modified 18 May 2023