"The Begging-Letter Writer" — Furniss's ink-and-wash frontispiece for Dickens's "Reprinted Pieces" (1910)

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The Begging-Letter Writer

Harry Furniss

1910

14.2 x 9.4 cm, framed

Dickens's Reprinted Pieces, Vol. 14 of the Charles Dickens Library Edition, facing the engraved title-page.

In this visual introduction to one of Dickens's minor, journalistic pieces, "The Begging-Letter writer" (second in this sequence), Furniss's illustration is highly specific. In contrast, the elaboration of the principal characters in the edition, not entitled Characters in the Story, is just the second of the two "original plates" for this anthology. The collection of characters and situations in miniature has nothing to do with the twenty-eight reprinted pieces from Household Words and All the Year Round. [Commentary continues below.]

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Anticipated

The natural phenomena of which he has been the victim, are of a most astounding nature. He has had two children who have never grown up; who have never had anything to cover them at night; who have been continually driving him mad, by asking in vain for food; who have never come out of fevers and measles (which, I suppose, has accounted for his fuming his letters with tobacco smoke, as a disinfectant); who have never changed in the least degree through fourteen long revolving years. As to his wife, what that suffering woman has undergone, nobody knows. She has always been in an interesting situation through the same long period, and has never been confined yet. His devotion to her has been unceasing. He has never cared for himself; he could have perished — he would rather, in short — but was it not his Christian duty as a man, a husband, and a father, — to write begging letters when he looked at her? (He has usually remarked that he would call in the evening for an answer to this question.) [Chapter II, "The Begging-Letter Writer," 11]

Commentary

Most of these "reprinted pieces" are relatively obscure examples of Dickens's journalism. The subject of the frontispiece, for example, is not noted at all in The Dickens Index; according to Paul Davis, it was published in Household Words on 18 May 1850. The piece upon which Furniss has seized is a journalistic exposé of frauds and confidence men, "'public robbers' who write letters asking for aid" (Davis, 24). In the final number of Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, having been exposed as a pious fraud, Seth Pecksniff is reduced to writing begging-letters to eke out a living. As a journal editor, Dickens must have received thousands of such petitions — "I, the writer of this paper, have been, for some time, a chosen receiver of Begging Letters. For fourteen years, my house has been made as regular a Receiving House for such communications as any one of the great branch Post-Offices is for general correspondence" (10). Dickens, the dispassionate observer of human affairs, notes for the gullible that the genuinely poor and disadvantaged never write such missives:

The poor never write these letters. Nothing could be more unlike their habits. The writers are public robbers; and we who support them are parties to their depredations. They trade upon every circumstance within their knowledge that affects us, public or private, joyful or sorrowful; they pervert the lessons of our lives; they change what ought to be our strength and virtue into weakness, and encouragement of vice. There is a plain remedy, and it is in our own hands. We must resolve, at any sacrifice of feeling, to be deaf to such appeals, and crush the trade. [17]

Thus, Furniss, without many verbal cues to utilise, imagines the comfortably dressed "beggar" dashing off letter after letter as his comely wife brings him a refreshment tray; in the background, Furniss depicts a son and a daughter likewise engaged in this dubious but money-making endeavour. The writer's room, although slovenly, hardly suggests that the family are poor.

Some of these reprinted pieces such as the topical "Prince Bull" (in Household Words on 17 February 1855), a satire on the bungled Anglo-French administration of the Crimean War, shed light on Dickens's social and political interests and preoccupations, but have slight literary merit.

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. , 1988.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations and Reprinted Pieces. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 14.

Last modified 2 December 2019