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The Little Wife
Marcus Stone
Engraver: E. Dalziel
1866
Wood-engraving
8.5 cm wide by 13 cm high (5 ⅛ by 3 ⅜ inches)
From "From Cincinnati to Louisville in another Western Steamboat; and from Louisville to St. Louis in Another. St. Louis," Chapter 12 in Dickens's American Notes for General Circulation in the Illustrated Library Edition, facing page 203.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
On the fourth night after leaving Louisville, we reached St. Louis, and here I witnessed the conclusion of an incident, trifling enough in itself, but very pleasant to see, which had interested me during the whole journey.
There was a little woman on board, with a little baby; and both little woman and little child were cheerful, good-looking, bright-eyed, and fair to see. The little woman had been passing a long time with her sick mother in New York, and had left her home in St. Louis, in that condition in which ladies who truly love their lords desire to be. The baby was born in her mother's house; and she had not seen her husband (to whom she was now returning), for twelve months: having left him a month or two after their marriage.
Well, to be sure, there never was a little woman so full of hope, and tenderness, and love, and anxiety, as this little woman was: and all day long she wondered whether 'He' would be at the wharf; and whether "He" had got her letter; and whether, if she sent the baby ashore by somebody else, "He" would know it, meeting it in the street: which, seeing that he had never set eyes upon it in his life, was not very likely in the abstract, but was probable enough, to the young mother. She was such an artless little creature; and was in such a sunny, beaming, hopeful state; and let out all this matter clinging close about her heart, so freely; that all the other lady passengers entered into the spirit of it as much as she; and the captain (who heard all about it from his wife) was wondrous sly, I promise you: inquiring, every time we met at table, as in forgetfulness, whether she expected anybody to meet her at St. Louis, and whether she would want to go ashore the night we reached it (but he supposed she wouldn't), and cutting many other dry jokes of that nature. There was one little weazen, dried-apple-faced old woman, who took occasion to doubt the constancy of husbands in such circumstances of bereavement; and there was another lady (with a lap-dog) old enough to moralize on the lightness of human affections, and yet not so old that she could help nursing the baby, now and then, or laughing with the rest, when the little woman called it by its father’s name, and asked it all manner of fantastic questions concerning him in the joy of her heart.
It was something of a blow to the little woman, that when we were within twenty miles of our destination, it became clearly necessary to put this baby to bed. But she got over it with the same good humour; tied a handkerchief round her head; and came out into the little gallery with the rest. Then, such an oracle as she became in reference to the localities! and such facetiousness as was displayed by the married ladies! and such sympathy as was shown by the single ones! and such peals of laughter as the little woman herself (who would just as soon have cried) greeted every jest with!
At last, there were the lights of St. Louis, and here was the wharf, and those were the steps: and the little woman covering her face with her hands, and laughing (or seeming to laugh) more than ever, ran into her own cabin, and shut herself up. I have no doubt that in the charming inconsistency of such excitement, she stopped her ears, lest she should hear "Him" asking for her: but I did not see her do it.
Then, a great crowd of people rushed on board, though the boat was not yet made fast, but was wandering about, among the other boats, to find a landing-place: and everybody looked for the husband: and nobody saw him: when, in the midst of us all — Heaven knows how she ever got there — there was the little woman clinging with both arms tight round the neck of a fine, good-looking, sturdy young fellow! and in a moment afterwards, there she was again, actually clapping her little hands for joy, as she dragged him through the small door of her small cabin, to look at the baby as he lay asleep! [Chapter XII, "From Cincinnati to Louisville in another Western Steamboat; and from Louisville to St. Louis in Another. St. Louis," pp. 201-203]
Revisiting the reunion of the husband and wife for literary purposes in late 1843 after describing it in upbeat, sentimental terms in American Notes in 1842, Dickens transforms the raw materials of direct experience in his fictional account of American manners and mores: "in Martin Chuzzlewit, the young woman and her children from steerage find her husband worn out by the hellish heat and disease of the Mississippi at Eden, a cautionary tale for would-be English emigrants" ("America's Eden," p. 8). Realizing how he could use the immigrant family later in the novel's American chapters, Dickens has Mark Tapley assist a young woman with her children as they cross the Atlantic to meet her husband in New York. What he recounts in a cheerful, anecdotal, Dickensey manner in American Notes he transforms into something quite serious. Dickens metamorphoses the little American wife and her infant travelling briefly by steamboat to join her husband in St. Louis into a careworn English woman with a sickly infant and two exuberant young sons crossing the Atlantic on The Screw to join her husband after a two-year separation. He replaces the domestic cheerfulness and coyness of The Little Wife anecdote with domestic tragedy in the Darwinian wilderness at Eden as the young wife, who has just reunited with her husband, loses her youngest child to malaria:
They had some medicine in their chest; and this man of sad experience showed Mark how and when to administer it, and how he could best alleviate the sufferings of Martin. His attentions did not stop there; for he was backwards and forwards constantly, and rendered Mark good service in all his brisk attempts to make their situation more endurable. Hope or comfort for the future he could not bestow. The season was a sickly one; the settlement a grave. His child died that night; and Mark, keeping the secret from Martin, helped to bury it, beneath a tree, next day. [Ch. XXXIII, "Further Proceedings in Eden, and a Proceeding out of it. Martin makes a Discovery of some Importance," Vol. 2 in the Gadshill edition, page 122]
Dickens abandons the chipper tone of the scene in American Notes for the somber notes of domestic tragedy. He uses as the basis for his fiction a genuine reminiscence (undoubtedly coloured by his own yearnings to be reunited with his children in England), creating a grave moment as part of the novels's over-arching thematic design to reveal the deleterious effects of greed and hypocrisy. In The Little Wife, the graphic artist and the writer focus on the sentimental reunion of the couple in the steamboat cabin as the young husband sees his child for the first time. Stone has discretely turned their backs to the viewer, who therefore participates in the scene by imagining the tender emotions that the couple expresses. Thus, The Little Wife foils the coincidental meeting of Mark Tapley and the immigrant family in Hablot Knight Browne's January 1844 illustration, Mr. Tapley is Recognised by Some Fellow-Citizens of Eden, in which the immigrant wife holds the dying child on her lap as the normally ebullient Mark, staggered by what he sees, enters the squalid log-cabin. In contrast to Phiz's caricatural composition of the ragged and careworn immigrant couple, Stone's American husband and wife are substantial, well-dressed figures whose health and prosperity betoken a bright future in the Mid-west, which marks the western limit of Charles Dickens's experiences on the 1842 American reading tour.
Left: Phiz's interpretation of the scene in which Mark Tapley discovers his English neighbours suffering from malarial fever, Mr. Tapley is Recognised by Some Fellow-Citizens of Eden (Ch. XXXIII: January 1844). Right: Furniss depicts Mark as a collossus above the ramshackle cabins of thge pestiferous township, Eden! (1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Fred Barnard's realisation of the jovial Mark acting as nanny for the immigrant family in steerage on the packet-ship, On board the "Screw" in Chapter 15 (1872). This becomes the family whose reunification creates a melancholy scene in Eden.
Above: Fred Barnard's realisation of Mark's nursing Martin through malarial fever in Eden, "Jolly!" in Chapter 33 (1872).
Allingham, Philip V. "Historical Background: America's Eden." The Dickens Magazine: Martin Chuzzlewit. 5.2 (August, 2008): 8.
_____. "Phiz's Illustrations, Part Three." [Ch. 29-35] The Dickens Magazine: Martin Chuzzlewit. 5.3 (February, 2009): 8-11.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy in Works. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall: 1866, rpt. 1874.
_____. American Notes and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Bros., 1877. Vol. XVI.
_____. American Notes and Pictures from Italy. With eighteen illustrations by A. B. Frost and Gordon Thomson. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878. Vol. XIX.
_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. The Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897. 2 vols.
Kaplan, Fred. Chapter 5: "The Emperor of Cheerfulness (1842-1844)." Dickens: A Biography. New York: William Morrow, 1988. Pp. 122-160.
Slater, Michael. Chapter 8: "America brought to book, 1842." Charles Dickens. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009. Pp. 175-206.
Created 17 January 2019
Last modified 15 March 2026