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Stiggins Punished by the Wellers
Harry Furniss
1910
13.8 cm x 9.2 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, facing II, 752.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
It was a beautiful and exhilarating sight to see the red-nosed man writhing in Mr. Weller's grasp, and his whole frame quivering with anguish as kick followed kick in rapid succession; it was a still more exciting spectacle to behold Mr. Weller, after a powerful struggle, immersing Mr. Stiggins’s head in a horse-trough full of water, and holding it there, until he was half suffocated.
"There!" said Mr. Weller, throwing all his energy into one most complicated kick, as he at length permitted Mr. Stiggins to withdraw his head from the trough, "send any vun o’ them lazy shepherds here, and I'll pound him to a jelly first, and drownd him artervards! Sammy, help me in, and fill me a small glass of brandy. I’m out o’ breath, my boy." [Chapter LII, "Involving a Serious Change in the Weller Family, and the Untimely Downfall of Mr. Stiggins," 753-54]
Sam, having repaired to his father's pub as soon as he received a letter at London's George and Vulture announcing her demise, in the background of the illustration cheers on his incensed father (as in previous interpretations of this scene). The burly coachman's assault seems to be triggered by the alcoholic preacher's helping himself to pineapple rum, sugar, and water on the strength of some sort of financial commitment to the Emanuel Chapel that he feels sure that Tony's wife, Susan, just buried, has reified in her will. Suddenly throwing the hot liquor in Stiggins's face, Tony proceeds to eject him forcefully from the bar, through the passage, and out into the street, this being the same scene that Nast had vigorously realised in the 1873 American Household Edition, and that Phiz had realised thirty-five years earlier. Whereas Stiggins is airborn in Nast's illustration and Tony has but one foot on the ground, here Furniss shows Tony simultaneously carrying Stiggins by his collar and kicking him forward to the trough. Meanwhile, as in Phiz's 1874 version of the scene, Sam cheers on his father's vigorous action from the porch of The Marquis of Granby. Thus, the various illustrations of the comic nemesis culminate in Stiggins's physical ejection, although Nast sets his scene inside the public house.
For Victorian readers, whether in 1837 or 1874, the incarceration of the blameless protagonist in the Fleet for an unjust debt (the damages which the jury have awarded Mrs. Bardell in the breach-of-promise suit) must have seemed a total violation of the governing principle of contemporary fiction, poetic justice. Dickens and Phiz, however, mitigate this injustice by effecting Pickwick's early release, and by showing the violent ejection of the hypocritical Non-conformist minister from the public house at Dorking. Although Furniss has modelled his version of the scene on Phiz's original conception, showing the exterior of The Marquis of Granby with its signpost in great detail, Furniss adds to the kinetic energy of the scene by the swirling of Tony Weller's over-length mourning crepe hatband. As in a Baroque composition, Furniss has caught the senior Weller in the midst of the action, one boot on the ground, the other in the air, aimed at Stiggins's backside, and the left hand raised, as if he is about to pummel Stiggins. Furniss has made the clergyman a limp rag-doll with a Hallowe'en mask of a face, both strategies designed to make him seem less human, and quite undeserving of the reader's sympathy.
The scene depicted twice by Phiz (1837 and 1873) and by the American satirical cartoonist Thomas Nast occurs shortly after the sudden death of Sam Weller's "mother-in-law" (stepmother), a blindly devoted member of Reverend Stiggins's congregation of gullible females; vulture-like, Stiggins hovers over Tony in hopes of securing a bequest, despite the fact that he was inadvertently the cause of her death, for his prolonged, sermonical rant while she was sitting on the grass in the rain listening to him for hours occasioned her catching a severe cold.
Left: Tony Weller ejects Mr. Stiggins by Phiz (Nov., 1837). Right: Resumes his kicking with greater agility than before by Thomas Nast(1873). [Click on these images to enlarge them.]
Phiz revises his approach to the comic moment only slightly, but changes the orientation of the plate to permit showing more background detail in It was a still more exciting spectacle to behold Mr. Weller . . . . . immersing Mr. Stiggins's head in a horse-trough full of water, and holding it there until he was half suffocated (em>See page 369.) in the Household Edition, engraved by one of the Dalziels.
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 Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873. Vol. 4.
_____. 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.
Created 10 December 2019
Last modified 6 February 2020