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Meditations in Monmouth Street
Harry Furniss
1910
13.9 cm x 8.9 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Sketches by Boz, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, "Scenes," Chapter 6, "Meditations in Monmouth Street," facing I, 72.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
A very smart female, in a showy bonnet, stepped into a pair of grey cloth boots, with black fringe and binding, that were studiously pointing out their toes on the other side of the top-boots, and seemed very anxious to engage his attention, but we didn't observe that our friend the market-gardener appeared at all captivated with these blandishments; for beyond giving a knowing wink when they first began, as if to imply that he quite understood their end and object, he took no further notice of them. His indifference, however, was amply recompensed by the excessive gallantry of a very old gentleman with a silver-headed stick, who tottered into a pair of large list shoes, that were standing in one corner of the board, and indulged in a variety of gestures expressive of his admiration of the lady in the cloth boots, to the immeasurable amusement of a young fellow we put into a pair of long-quartered pumps, who we thought would have split the coat that slid down to meet him, with laughing.
We had been looking on at this little pantomime with great satisfaction for some time, when, to our unspeakable astonishment, we perceived that the whole of the characters, including a numerous corps de ballet of boots and shoes in the background, into which we had been hastily thrusting as many feet as we could press into the service, were arranging themselves in order for dancing; and some music striking up at the moment, to it they went without delay. It was perfectly delightful to witness the agility of the market-gardener. Out went the boots, first on one side, then on the other, then cutting, then shuffling, then setting to the Denmark satins, then advancing, then retreating, then going round, and then repeating the whole of the evolutions again, without appearing to suffer in the least from the violence of the exercise. ["Scenes," Chapter 6, "Meditations on Monmouth Street," 75]
Extended caption: A very smart female, in a showy bonnet, stepped into a pair of grey cloth boots, with black fringe and binding, that were studiously pointing out their toes on the other side of the top-boots, and seemed very anxious to engage his attention, but we didn't observe that our friend the market-gardener appeared at all captivated with these blandishments. — Sketches by Boz, 75.
Originally published in the Morning Chronicle (September 24, 1836) as "Sketches by Boz, New Series No. 1." At the second-hand clothing shops in Monmouth Street, "the burial-place of the fashions," Boz imagines the former owners of the clothes and shoes that are for sale. In particular he constructs the life story from boyhood to death of one man whose lifetime of suits are hanging together in one of the shops. — Paul Davis, 240.
One cannot simply walk down Monmouth Street in present-day London and see the very buildings that Dickens described in 1836 and that Cruikshank pictured in 1839 because it was subsumed into the newly designed Shaftesbury Avenue by architect George Vulliamy and urban civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette between 1877 and 1886 to speed arterial traffic through St. Giles and Soho, an urban renewal project designed to clear away the lawless, unsanitary slums, and dislocate the working poor who had lived there for generations:
The first Monmouth Street ran approximately where the middle stretch of Shaftesbury Avenue now is (until it was obliterated by the controversial Metropolitan Board of Works renovations in the late 19th Century). The current Monmouth Street has existed for many years, it was formerly called Little and Great St Andrew’s Streets and only took its current name in 1930.
As a scion to the clothing trade, around 1840 there sprung up a number of cobblers on Monmouth Street. Boots and shoes were bought, sold and repaired here, although much of the 'cobbling' was just brown paper and blacking. Around this time, "Monmouth Street finery" was a common phrase used as a euphemism for tat. — "In and Around Covent Garden." http://coventgarden.uk.com/magazine/monmouth-street-then
The original Cruikshank illustration shows three used-clothing shops, with the one to the right specialising in second-hand shoes and boots. This aspect of the original "establishing image" may have prompted the imaginative Furniss to consider the second of the narrator's reveries, the gay fantasy of the dancing footwear, as the subject for his 1910 illustration, which has no precedent in the Fred Barnard illustrations in the Household Edition volume of 1876. Furniss provides the figures that correspond to several of the pairs of boots: "a jolly, good-tempered, hearty-looking pair of tops" (74) are occupied by "a fine, red-faced, jovial fellow of a market-gardener" (centre), and the "grey cloth boots, with black fringe and binding" (75) by a shapely, wasp-waisted and fashionably dressed young lady; moreover, Furniss has impressed the personalities of the original wearers on these boots, so that the slender boot in the foreground has a feminine face and from its fellow rises, wraith-like, the image of the young lady herself, and the market-gardener's boot has a sleepy face, suggesting his state after the long wagon-ride up from the country. By the time that the reader encounters the text, he or she has already seen and struggled to interpret Furniss's "boot" fantasy on the previous page. In the background Furniss has sketched the gallant old gentleman with his cane (right of centre), tottering in his list shoes, while the remaining figure, a comic young gentleman in "long-quartered pumps," laughs at the other three phantasms (their unreality is signalled by the shading that makes it look as if they are in the rain).
Above: George Cruikshanks's original copper-plate engraving of the street of used clothing vendors, Meditations on Monmouth Street (1836). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. "Meditations in Monmouth Street," Chapter 6 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890, 54-59.
_____. "Meditations in Monmouth Street," Chapter 6 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876, 34-38.
_____. "Meditations in Monmouth Street," Chapter 6 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1, 70-76.
Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. 12-15.
"In and Around Covent Garden." Accessed 23 April 2017. http://coventgarden.uk.com/magazine/monmouth-street-then.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. , 2009.
Created 26 April 2017
Last modified 2 February 2020