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The Pawnbroker's Shop
Harry Furniss
1910
14.3 cm x 8.3 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Sketches by Boz, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, "Scenes," Chapter 23, "Pawnbroker's Shop," facing I, 177.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The Pawnbroker’s shop is situated near Drury-Lane, at the corner of a court, which affords a side entrance for the accommodation of such customers as may be desirous of avoiding the observation of the passers-by, or the chance of recognition in the public street. It is a low, dirty-looking, dusty shop, the door of which stands always doubtfully, a little way open: half inviting, half repelling the hesitating visitor, who, if he be as yet uninitiated, examines one of the old garnet brooches in the window for a minute or two with affected eagerness, as if he contemplated making a purchase; and then looking cautiously round to ascertain that no one watches him, hastily slinks in: the door closing of itself after him, to just its former width. The shop front and the window-frames bear evident marks of having been once painted; but, what the colour was originally, or at what date it was probably laid on, are at this remote period questions which may be asked, but cannot be answered. Tradition states that the transparency in the front door, which displays at night three red balls on a blue ground, once bore also, inscribed in graceful waves, the words "Money advanced on plate, jewels, wearing apparel, and every description of property," but a few illegible hieroglyphics are all that now remain to attest the fact. The plate and jewels would seem to have disappeared, together with the announcement, for the articles of stock, which are displayed in some profusion in the window, do not include any very valuable luxuries of either kind. A few old china cups; some modern vases, adorned with paltry paintings of three Spanish cavaliers playing three Spanish guitars; or a party of boors carousing: each boor with one leg painfully elevated in the air, by way of expressing his perfect freedom and gaiety; several sets of chessmen, two or three flutes, a few fiddles, a round-eyed portrait staring in astonishment from a very dark ground; some gaudily-bound prayer-books and testaments, two rows of silver watches quite as clumsy and almost as large as Ferguson’s first; numerous old-fashioned table and tea spoons, displayed, fan-like, in half-dozens; strings of coral with great broad gilt snaps; cards of rings and brooches, fastened and labelled separately, like the insects in the British Museum; cheap silver penholders and snuff-boxes, with a masonic star, complete the jewellery department; while five or six beds in smeary clouded ticks, strings of blankets and sheets, silk and cotton handkerchiefs, and wearing apparel of every description, form the more useful, though even less ornamental, part, of the articles exposed for sale. An extensive collection of planes, chisels, saws, and other carpenters’ tools, which have been pledged, and never redeemed, form the foreground of the picture; while the large frames full of ticketed bundles, which are dimly seen through the dirty casement up-stairs—the squalid neighbourhood—the adjoining houses, straggling, shrunken, and rotten, with one or two filthy, unwholesome-looking heads thrust out of every window, and old red pans and stunted plants exposed on the tottering parapets, to the manifest hazard of the heads of the passers-by — the noisy men loitering under the archway at the corner of the court, or about the gin-shop next door — and their wives patiently standing on the curb-stone, with large baskets of cheap vegetables slung round them for sale, are its immediate auxiliaries.["The Pawnbroker's Shop," 178: the wording of the original caption has been emphasized]
Fin-de-siécle illustrator Harry Furniss's interpretation of the chapter in which the desperate and near-destitute pawn their last few valuables involves the mere exterior, studied by several potential clients from across the street, at the very opening of the sketch. It is probably no accident that Furniss's approach to the 30 June 1835 sketch "The Pawnbroker's Shop" (that is, a disreputable shop offering a fraction of the value of the item tendered) complements rather than repeats treatments by George Cruikshank in 1839 — in The Pawnbroker's Shop (1839) — and by Fred Barnard in The Pawnbroker's Shop (1876). Whereas the earlier illustrators had depicted the conducting of business inside the shop, Furniss prepares the reader for the opening paragraphs only by presenting the run-down exterior, a seventeenth-century building requiring the support of a newer building across the street. Furniss identifies the shop specifically as a pawnbroker's by the universal symbol of the three balls (the upper corner), a allusion, contends Ben Johnson, to St. Nicholas's saving the three daughters of a poor knight from a life of prostitution by providing each girl with a suitable dowery — a bag of gold. According to Ben Johnson in his article for Historic UK, the children's song
"Half a pound of tuppenny rice, Half a pound of treacle, That’s the way the money goes, Pop goes the weasel!"
. . . from around 1850 is reputedly about pawning ("popping") a coat or "weasel" (from the rhyming slang "weasel and stoat") in order to get money to buy simple foodstuffs.
Above: George Cruikshank's elegant copper-plate engraving of the interior of the pawnbroker's from behind the counter in the Boz sketch, The Pawnbroker's Shop (1839).
Above: Fred Barnard's realistic wood-engraving of the broker's assessing some clothing being pawned by a washerwoman in The Pawnbroker's Shop (1876). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.
Dickens, Charles. "The Pawnbroker's Sho" "Scenes," Chapter 23, Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890, 138-144
_____. "The Pawnbroker's Sho" Chapter 23 in "Scenes."Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876, 88-92.
_____. "Scenes," Chapter 23, "The Pawnbroker's Sho" Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1, 177-185.
Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. 12-15.
Johnson, Ben. "The Pawnbroker." Historic UK: History Magazine. Accessed 9 April 2017. http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Pawnbroker/
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. , 2009.
Created 27 May 2018
Last modified 2 February 2020