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Frontispiece: Sam Weller in the Witness-Box fails to recognise his Father
Harry Furniss
1910
14.6 cm x 9.4 cm, framed
Frontispiece for Dickens's Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, facing II, title-page.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Serjeant Buzfuz now rose with more importance than he had yet exhibited, if that were possible, and vociferated; "Call Samuel Weller."
It was quite unnecessary to call Samuel Weller; for Samuel Weller stepped briskly into the box the instant his name was pronounced; and placing his hat on the floor, and his arms on the rail, took a bird's-eye view of the Bar, and a comprehensive survey of the Bench, with a remarkably cheerful and lively aspect.
"What’s your name, sir?" inquired the judge.
"Sam Weller, my Lord," replied that gentleman.
"Do you spell it with a "V" or a "W," inquired the judge.
"That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord," replied Sam; "I never had occasion to spell it more than once or twice in my life, but I spells it with a 'V.'"
Here a voice in the gallery exclaimed aloud, "Quite right too, Samivel, quite right. Put it down a 'we,' my Lord, put it down a 'we'."
"Who is that, who dares address the court?" said the little judge, looking u "Usher."
"Yes, my Lord."
"Bring that person here instantly."
"Yes, my Lord."
But as the usher didn’t find the person, he didn’t bring him; and, after a great commotion, all the people who had got up to look for the culprit, sat down again. The little judge turned to the witness as soon as his indignation would allow him to speak, and said —
"Do you know who that was, sir?"
"I rayther suspect it was my father, my lord," replied Sam.
"Do you see him here now?" said the judge.
"No, I don't, my Lord," replied Sam, staring right up into the lantern at the roof of the court.
"If you could have pointed him out, I would have committed him instantly," said the judge. Sam bowed his acknowledgments and turned, with unimpaired cheerfulness of countenance, towards Serjeant Buzfuz. [Chapter XXXIV, "Is Wholly Devoted to a Full and Faithful Report of the Memorable Trial of Bardell against Pickwick," 492]
Fin-de-siécle illustrator Harry Furniss's visual overture for the 1836-37 novel, Characters in the Story depicts most of the forty-one named characters, most prominently the affable Samuel Pickwick and his companion, Sam Weller. But here the great comic re-interpreter of Dickenas for the twentieth century establishes the key note for his program of twenty-nine illustrations by focussing on the street-wise wit and humorous banter of Pickwick's valet and factotum rather than the sometimes embarrassing adventures of the often inept eponymous character.
With his background as a law clerk, after removing the Pickwickians from the London milieu, Dickens fashioned his first full-length novel's plot around a legal issue that had more recently from Furniss's perspective been the subject of a popular musical-dramatic work. In William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan's whimsical operetta Trial by Jury (1868), the leering Magistrate settles the breach-of-promise-of-marriage suit of Angelina v. Edwin by proposing to marry the jilted bride himself. Readers familiar with The Pickwick Papers in 1910 might have been only cursorily conversant with the courtroom scene, despite its being the pivotal event in the plot. Accordingly, Furniss's frontispiece serves to recall the memorable scene in which the plaintiff's barrister, the ridiculously named Sergeant Buzfuz, calls Mr. Pickwick's valet, Sam Weller, to the stand to support Mrs. Bardell's contention that the supposedly romantic interlude that the Pickwickians interrupted constituted a marriage proposal. Since Samuel Pickwick has made a fortune in business, Mrs. Bardell is sure that her former lodger will be a veritable golden goose, a conviction that her unscrupulous solicitors, Dodson and Fogg, apparently share. In both his person and manner, the light-hearted Sam foils the self-important lawyers in charge of these petty proceedings, which both sides conduct with all the gravity of a murder trial. Under Victorian matrimonial law, which permitted civil as well as church weddings from 1836, the prospective bride was entitled to financial compensation if the "contract" (i.e., the engagement) were breached (broken off) by the prospective groom. While the jilted bride could pursue restitution for outlay of funds for the approaching ceremony (such as the gown, bridesmaids' dresses, flowers, church rental, trousseau, reception, and so on) through the Common Law Courts, a groom in a similar position would have to seek redress outside the courts.
Although the picaresque novel is full of uproarious moments of physical comedy suitable for the kinds of farcical moments Furniss loved, he undoubtedly wanted to direct readers' attentions to a verbal repartee associated with the chief event, the celebrated breach-of-promise-of-marriage trial that which results Pickwick's temporary incarceration in the Fleet Prison. Later readers, who were usually familiar with John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, would have known that Picwick's and Jingle's incarceration reflects the imprisonment for debt of the writer's father, John, in the Marshalsea in the same decade in which the novel is set.
Since volume one in The Charles Dickens Library Edition is Sketches by Boz, this lithograph represents Furniss's initial opportunity to illustrate a full-length Dickens novel, and thereby establish himself in the early twentieth-century public's mind as the major illustrator of the chief Victorian novelist, displacing such contenders for the title as Fred Barnard in the Household Edition of the 1870s, and such contemporary British illustrators as Charles Green and Clayton J. Clarke ("Kyd"), and Dickens's own principal artistic collaborators from the 1830s through the 1850s Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz") and the towering figure of 19th c. caricature, George Cruikshank.
Pickwick's valet had become something of a cult figure, and "Wellerisms" of all kinds represented the irreverent Cockney humour of the London streets. Here, the street-wise former boots of Southwark's White Hart Inn shows little respect for a proceedings that he is well aware have been set in motion to fleece his innocent master, who had done nothing more than try to comfort his landlady when she had (apparently) fainted as Pickwick attempted to introduce the notion of hiring Sam as his valet. By the time that the trial chapter occurs, Dickens has also introduced Sam's facetiously philosophical father, Tony, a jolly, rotund coach driver. His son exhibits sufficient experienced with the court system to realise that, after his father's interrupting from the gallery, he should pretend not to be able to identify the large man seated in the middle above as his father. Here, Furniss offers a more dramatic and humorous version of the original Phiz illustration of the trial of Bardell v. Pickwick, in the March 1837 instalment.
Whereas in earlier representations of the trial Pickwick is the key figure, Furniss uses the figure of the waggish Sam to create a focal point, as if he is on stage in a theatre, his signature hat at his feet. Although he is looking directly at his father in the gallery, he pretends not to see him. In the audience the massive bulk of Sergeant Buzfuz, right of centre, stands out. Below him Pickwick looks up at Sam, but Pickwick's lawyer, Perker, turns to his client rather than attend to the witness. The "little Judge" (although not so little in the illustration) to the left looks askance at Sam, but does not appear "angry," despite Dickens's description, and Dodson and Fogg are not flanking Sergeant Buzfuz. Although Dickens has included the principal Pickwickians (Tupman, Winkle, Snodgras) as witnesses prior to Sam's taking the stand, they are not evident in the illustration, and Mrs. Bardell is likely the lady seated beside Perker. Whereas Pickwick's associates buckled under under Buzfuz's "excessive badgering" (491), Sam seems perfectly comfortable contradicting his interlocutor. Furniss thus turns the travesty of justice (which results in a verdict against Pickwick which sends him to the Fleet Prison) into a verbal sparring match between the unflappable Cockney and the irascible barrister.
Left: Phiz's original conception of the scene in the Guildhall, The Trial (March 1837); centre: Nast's uncaptioned frontispiece, demonstrating the continuing popularity of Pickwick's facetious valet, Sam Weller Greets the Reader (1873); right: Nast's version of the courtroom scene, "No, I don't, my Lord," replied Sam, staring right up into the lantern at the roof of the court (1873). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Phiz revises his approach to the trial scene to present the trial of Pickwick from the perspective of the magistrate's bench, showing a surprised Pickwick with his barrister, Mr. Perker, making a cautionary gesture, to the left and Mrs. Bardell and her female supporters to the right: An admonitory gesture from Perker restrained him, and he listened to the learned gentleman's continuation with a look of indignation" (1874).
Above: Felix Octavius Carr Darley's beautifully engraved title-page vignettes for the Sheldon & Co. (New York) Household Edition volumes; left: Making a Start (vol. 1) 1861; centre: Joyful Tidings — Book I, Ch. XXXV (vol. 2, 1863); right: Closing in — Book II, Ch. XXX (vol. 4, 1863). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Clarke, Clayton J. ('Kyd'). The Characters of Charles Dickens portrayed in a series of original watercolours by "Kyd." London, Paris, and New York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, n. d.
Clarke, Clayton J. ('Kyd'). "Sam Weller." John Player Cigarette Cards. Nottingham, 1910. No. 17.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
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_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Frontispieces by Felix Octavius Carr Darley and Sir John Gilbert. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1863. 4 vols.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. 14 vols.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. 22 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873. Vol. 2.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. Vol. 5.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 2.
Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London 1899 edition.
Schlicke, Paul, ed. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999.
Created 1 July 2019
Last modified 4 February 2020