"Jingle in the Fleet" — Harry Furniss's thirty-fifth regular illustration for Dickens's "Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" (1910)

Jingle in the Fleet, a re-interpretation of two earlier Phiz illustrations, facing 608, 9 cm high by 14.5 cm wide (3 ½ inches by 5 ¾ inches) vignetted, in Chapter XLII of Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club from The Charles Dickens Library Edition, Vol. 2 (1910).

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Passage Realised: Inside the Fleet Prison Pickwick encounters Alfred Jingle

The general aspect of the room recalled him to himself at once; but he had no sooner cast his eye on the figure of a man who was brooding over the dusty fire, than, letting his hat fall on the floor, he stood perfectly fixed and immovable with astonishment.

Yes; in tattered garments, and without a coat; his common calico shirt, yellow and in rags; his hair hanging over his face; his features changed with suffering, and pinched with famine — there sat Mr. Alfred Jingle; his head resting on his hands, his eyes fixed upon the fire, and his whole appearance denoting misery and dejection!

Near him, leaning listlessly against the wall, stood a strong-built countryman, flicking with a worn-out hunting-whip the top-boot that adorned his right foot; his left being thrust into an old slipper. Horses, dogs, and drink had brought him there, pell-mell. There was a rusty spur on the solitary boot, which he occasionally jerked into the empty air, at the same time giving the boot a smart blow, and muttering some of the sounds by which a sportsman encourages his horse. He was riding, in imagination, some desperate steeplechase at that moment. Poor wretch! He never rode a match on the swiftest animal in his costly stud, with half the speed at which he had torn along the course that ended in the Fleet. [Ch XLII, "Illustrative, Like the Preceding One, of the Old Proverb, that Adversity Brings a Man Acquainted with Strange Bedfellows — Likewise Containing Mr. Pickwick's Extraordinary and Startling Announcement to Mr. Samuel Weller," 607]

Commentary: A low-key, realistic response to Phiz's 1837 and 1874 illustrations

Furniss's original caption: In tattered garments, and without a coat; his common calico shirt, yellow and in rags; his hair hanging over his face; his features changed with suffering, and pinched with famine — there sat Mr. Alfred Jingle; his head resting on his hands, his eyes fixed upon the fire, and his whole appearance denoting misery and dejection. — Pickwick, 607.

Since Furniss already had a viable model for this encounter in Phiz's July 1837 steel-engraving in which Pickwick does a theatrical double-take as he discovers the duplicitous Alfred Jingle in the large communal cell, Furniss's low-key response, utterly lacking in comedy or drama, seems somewhat surprising. Moreover, Furniss has complicated the viewer's perspective by omitting Pickwick entirely, leading one to conclude that this is precisely what Pickwick sees: seven incidental figures (including a mere child, comforting her dejected grandfather), plus Jingle in front of the fireplace (which seems to have no fire) and Job Trotter bringing food and drink to his master. Pickwick, says Dickens, "had burst into the room to which he had been directed" (607) before he recalls where he is and among whom he finds himself: not criminals, but debtors of various ages and degrees.

Whereas Phiz in his original serial illustration has focussed on Pickwick's utter "astonishment" at encountering the formerly exuberant and flashy Jingle here, Furniss has chosen to focus on Jingle's depressed mental state. Gone are the jaunty attitude, the quips and jibes, as the out-of-work actor and confidence man stares into the void of the "dusty fire" that Furniss does not even suggest in the barren hearth. The "strong-built countryman, flicking a worn-out hunting whip" (607) against the single top boot he wears is precisely as Dickens describes him, attending to the tip of the whip rather than to Jingle or other inmates. Only Job Trotter and his master seem posed, and Furniss's has drained he energy out of the figures whom Phiz described over seventy years before. Although Furniss's figures generally correspond to those in the earlier steel engraving, he has omitted the demented woman who stands behind Trotter, fist raised, as if in frustration that he is blocking her entrance.The lean and haggard prisoner's wife watering the dessicated plants at the window is even more disreputable in this 1910 re-interpretation. The void which Phiz had filled with a stool and a tankard in the centre of the 1874 Household Edition version of this scene is quite empty, save for a piece of broken crockery on the floor. The great late Victorian humourist-illustrator, aware of the precedents of Cruikshank, Leech, and Phiz, nevertheless has produced a singularly unamusing image of the joyless, hopeless life in a debtors' prison.

Furniss has no illusions about the good, old days in this dreary realisation of Dickens's epitomizing life in a debtors' prison as he experienced it directly as a child: his profligate father, John, had spent a few months at the Marshalsea in 1824 because he owed a local baker £40. The 1869 Debtors Act put an end to the necessity for such privately-run debtors' prisons in the UK. The Fleet had closed in 1842; the Faringdon in 1846; Whitecross Street in 1870; the King's Bench in 1880; and, most famously, the Marshalsea in 1842 — all these closures, of course, having occurred well after Dickens set the scene in the late 1820s. Furniss was probably familiar with the surviving outer wall of the Marshalsea, and the few buildings that were still being used as shops and storerooms at the end of the century, although much of the infamous Marshalsea prison had been demolished in the 1870s.

Other artists who illustrated this work, 1836-1910

Relevant Chapman & Hall (1836) and Household Edition (1874) illustrations

Left: The initial Fleet illustration in the 1874 Household Edition: Letting his hat fall on the floor, he stood perfectly fixed and immovable with astonishment. Right: Phiz's original July 1837 steel-engraving, The Discovery of Jingle in the Fleet.

Bibliography

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. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Robert Seymour and Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman & Hall, 1836-37.

_____. 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 Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873. Vol. 4.

_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 2.

Created 10 December 2019

Last modified 6 February 2020