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“Old Wardle would not hear of his rising, so they made the bed the chair, and Mr. Pickwick presided.”
Thomas Onwhyn [signed “TO del”]
steel engraving
13.4 cm high by 11 cm wide (5 ¼ by 4 ¼ inches), vignetted
Charles Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Chapter XXX (February 1837), facing p. 314.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Mr. Pickwick paused not an instant until he was snug in bed. Sam Weller lighted a blazing fire in the room, and took up his dinner; a bowl of punch was carried up afterwards, and a grand carouse held in honour of his safety. Old Wardle would not hear of his rising, so they made the bed the chair, and Mr. Pickwick presided. A second and a third bowl were ordered in; and when Mr. Pickwick awoke next morning, there was not a symptom of rheumatism about him; which proves, as Mr. Bob Sawyer very justly observed, that there is nothing like hot punch in such cases; and that if ever hot punch did fail to act as a preventive, it was merely because the patient fell into the vulgar error of not taking enough of it. [Chapter XXX, “How the Pickwickians made and cultivated the Acquaintance of a Couple of Nice Young Men Belonging to one of the Liberal Professions; How they Disported Themselves on the Ice; and how their First Visit came to a Conclusion,” 314]
This is Onwhyn's more animated and natural version of Robert Seymour's Mr. Pickwick Addresses the Club (April 1836), but decoding it proves something of a conundrum, not because Joe the Fat Boy and Sam Weller (to say nothing of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen) are obviously present among the Pickwickians, but rather because Pickwick's host, Mr. Wardle, owner of Dingley Dell, Manor Farm, and an important recurring character, is not easily found, and is certainly not prominent in the convivial scene that follows Pickwick's falling through the ice while sliding.
The text which Onwhyn has realised is not entirely helpful in determining who Pickwick's night-time guests are, although the figure of the chilled Pickwick himself, in bed and dipping into the punch bowl, is obvious. We recognize the slender Mr. Winkle next to Pickwick, and Bob Sawyer (checkered trousers), so that Mr. Wardle, owner of Manor Farm, remains an enigma. Of course Sam Weller (right), perhaps carrying the second (or perhaps third!) bowl of hot punch, is readily identifiable by his vest and function in the scene. The three figures in the centre are Snodgrass (lean face, checkered vest), Tupman, and perhaps Wardle, and to the right, the Fat Boy, Joe. This identification is rendered all the more problematic by the best illustration we have of Wardle, namely his centre-stage appearance in First Appearance of Mr. Samuel Weller (Chapter X, July 1836). Not a single face in Onwhyn's group study even remotely resembles the original Phiz portrait. Consequently, the man in spectacles, glass raised, is not Wardle, but one of the newcomers, the apothecary Benjamin Allen, who is accompanied by his friend and fellow medical student Bob Sawyer. Bob is the jovial figure to the left of centre in the checkered trousers whom Dickens specifically mentions as being in attendance at this social event. Since Onwhyn issued this plate to coincide with the appearance of the seventeenth instalment, he had had the benefit of having seen the illustrations for the first sixteen instalments (April 1836 through August 1837), and therefore had already seen Phiz's versions of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen in Conviviality at Bob Sawyer's (Ch. XXXVIII) from the May 1837 instalment. Thus, the present Onwhyn plate serves as a sequel to both Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's and Mr. Pickwick slides, which clearly depicts the latest additions to the cast of characters, Bob Sawyer (checked trousers) and Bob Allen (glasses) in the lower left.
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Robert Seymour, Robert Buss, and Phiz. London: Chapman and Hall, November 1837. With 32 additional illustrations by Thomas Onwhyn (London: E. Grattan, April-November 1837).
_______. The Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Thomas Nast (1873) and Phiz (1874). The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874; New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1873. Vol. 6.
Titley, Graham D. C. "Thomas Onwhyn: a Life in Illustration (1811-1886)." Pearl. University of Plymouth (2018-07-12).
Created 25 February 2024
