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Leaving the Morgue
Marcus Stone
Engraver: E. Dalziel
1895
Wood engraving
12.5 cm high by 8.8 cm wide (5 inches high by 3 ⅛ inches wide)
From "Travelling Abroad," Chapter VII in Dickens's Uncommercial Traveller in the Illustrated Library Edition, frontispiece.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
It was very hot weather, and he [a large, dark man with the expression of a prize-fighter] was none the better for that, and I was much the worse. Indeed, a very neat and pleasant little woman, with the key of her lodging on her forefinger, who had been showing him to her little girl while she and the child ate sweetmeats, observed Monsieur looking poorly as we came out together, and asked Monsieur, with her wondering little eyebrows prettily raised, if there were anything the matter? [Chapter VII, "Travelling Abroad," p. 62 in the 1895 edition]
The scene is set just outside the Paris Morgue, a site of considerable interest to Dickens and his protegé, Wilkie Collins, whenever they were visting the French capital. Although this sketch is something of a confessional, it was a bold step to identify the narrative voice of the essays as that of Dickens himself; thus, the illustrator shows a fifties-something Dickens rather than merely an upper-middle-class, middle-aged aged English tourist. So effective is this wood-engraving of Dickens, prematurely-aged literary lion, that Chapman and Hall made it their frontispiece in the 1895 re-print of the 1868 edition.
First published in the number of All the Year Round on 7 April 1860, "Travelling Abroad" was the subject of illustration for both Charles Stanley Reinhart in the Harper and Brothers' Household Edition of 1876 and for Edward Dalziel in the Chapman and Hall Household Edition of 1877. However, these later illustrators chose scenes that reveal the narrator's observant eye and taste for the bizarre and theatrical in the German part of the narrator's travels on the Continent. In contrast, the present illustration elaborates upon Dickens's queasiness and discomfort with what he observes in the Paris Morgue. In that he has specifically identified an aging Dickens as the Uncommercial Traveller, the 1895 characterisation of the narrator might best be compared to that of C. S. Reinhart in his Uncaptioned Scene from "The Wapping Workhouse" since Reinhart is more interested in establishing the narrator as an observer, recorder, and reader of human nature, switching from the first-person of the accompanying text to the third-person or dramatic perspective of realisation.
Left: C. S. Reinhart's theatrical scene of physical comedy, And shook all his ten fingers in his face (p. 35). Right: E. G. Dalziel presents another scene in a similar, farcical fashion: The tall glazed head-dress of the warrior Straudenheim instantly knocked off (1877). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by E. G. Dalziel. The Household Edition. 22 vols. Vol. XVI. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877.
Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Illustrated by C. S. Reinhart and Luke Fildes. The Household Edition. 22 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Dickens, Charles. "Chapter VII: Travelling Abroad." The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. London: Chapman and Hall, 1895. 37-44.
Created 15 March 2026