“He folded his hands, and murmuring something more they could not hear, fell into a sleep — only a sleep at first, for they saw him smile.<br/> They whispered together for a little time, and the turnkey, stooping over the pillow, drew hastily back. He has got his discharge, by G_.”</a></span> Page 477. — Thomas Onwhyn's twenty-sixth extra illustration for Charles Dickens's “The Pickwick Club” (15 November 1837)

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“He folded his hands, and murmuring something more they could not hear, fell into a sleep . . . . He has got his discharge, by G_.”

Thomas Onwhyn [“TO del”]

steel engraving

12.6 cm high by 10.9 cm wide (4 ¾ by 4 ¼ inches), vignetted

Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Chapter XLIV, “Treats of Divers Little Matters Which Occurred in The Fleet, and of Mr. Winkle’s Mysterious Behaviour; and Shows How the Poor Chancery Prisoner Obtained His Release at Last,” facing 477.

[Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Illustrated: Another Deathbed Scene — The Chancery Prisoner

There was a short silence, during which the two spectators approached the bed. The sick man drew a hand of his old fellow-prisoner towards him, and pressing it affectionately between both his own, retained it in his grasp.

‘I hope,’ he gasped after a while, so faintly that they bent their ears close over the bed to catch the half-formed sounds his pale lips gave vent to — ‘I hope my merciful Judge will bear in mind my heavy punishment on earth. Twenty years, my friend, twenty years in this hideous grave! My heart broke when my child died, and I could not even kiss him in his little coffin. My loneliness since then, in all this noise and riot, has been very dreadful. May God forgive me! He has seen my solitary, lingering death.’

He folded his hands, and murmuring something more they could not hear, fell into a sleep — only a sleep at first, for they saw him smile.

They whispered together for a little time, and the turnkey, stooping over the pillow, drew hastily back. ‘He has got his discharge, by G —!’ said the man.

He had. But he had grown so like death in life, that they knew not when he died. [Chapter XLIV, “Treats of Divers Little Matters Which Occurred in The Fleet, and of Mr. Winkle’s Mysterious Behaviour; and Shows How the Poor Chancery Prisoner Obtained His Release at Last,” 477]

Commentary: Shades of the Prison House Anticipated

In Bleak House some twenty years later Dickens would pillory the functionaries, forms, and usages of the Court of Chancery. Here, however, in the August 1837 (Sixteenth) instalment, Dickens contents himself with a quasi-humorous portrait of Mr. Pickwick as a victim of a miscarriage of justice. Attended by the faithful Sam, he has been consigned to the Fleet Prison for refusing to pay the substantial damages of 750 pounds that Mrs. Bardell's unscrupulous attorneys, Dodson and Fogg, have won against him in the breach of promise case. However, young Dickens, a former law clerk, offers his readers a premonitory rumble of his condemnation of the Court of Chancery in his lamentable portrait of the dying prisoner who sublets his room to Pickwick in the Fleet.

Dickens has offered us and Onwhyn a verbal portrait of the victim: “A tall, gaunt, cadaverous man . . . with sunken cheeks, and a restless, eager eye"” (Chapter XLII, “Illustrative, Like the Preceding One, of the Old Proverb, that Adversity Brings a Man Acquainted with Strange Bedfellows. Likewise Containing Mr. Pickwick's Extraordinary and Startling Announcement to Mr. Samuel Weller”); however, the “extra” illustrator focuses on just one feature of the derelict: the blackened, sunken eyes of the wasted prisoner on his deathbed. Nevertheless, the Chancery Prisoner remains the object of Pickwick's and the reader's pity rather than becoming the protagonist of an interpolated tale. At the dying prisoner's bedside in the infirmary, Pickwick offers what meagre solace he can before the latest victim of Chancery loses consciousness and passes away.

The illustration, then, establishes the situation and the subject immediately. He has been kept alive, in despair and depression, some twenty years in a virtual grave without the consolation of friends and family. The context is not Pickwick's owm room in the Fleet, and those gathered around the "wan, pale, and ghastly" consumptive prisoner are not even the man's distant family members, but merely a recent acquaintance, a mere "spectator" (Pickwick), the faithful, old cobbler (left), and Roker, the turnkey — a presentiment of the sorry fate that awaits Pickwick if he chooses not to buy his way out of the prison. Since the Fleet remained in use until 1844, both Onwhyn and Phiz may have visited it to make their illustrations look more authentic. Dickens's chapter title ironically suggests but one form of release for the Chancery prisoner: death.

Note

In connection with this illustration, Sean Grass writes:

I can’t read the passage and look at the [Onwhyn] illustration without thinking of Dickens’s account of Gridley, particularly during his last days, in Bleak House. Something about the tableau of bystanders watching anxiously and (more or less) sympathetically at the bedside of the Pickwick Chancery prisoner just immediately makes me think of Gridley, hiding out in George’s shooting gallery, while various characters (Esther, Woodcourt, Jarndyce, Bucket, Miss Flite…) all gather at his bedside. I hadn’t really thought of that before, in prior readings of Pickwick or , but now it seems almost as if this Chancery prisoner was something of a practice run for the late depiction. ["Personal Communication to P. Allingham," 31 March 2024]

Related Material

Debtors in Charles Dickens's Life and Work
Nineteenth-Century Britain, a Nation of Debtors
Empiricism or Faith: Bessy Higgins and the Chancery Prisoner
The Warden's Room by Phiz (Ch. 41) July 1837
Discovery of Jingle in the Fleet by Phiz (Ch. 42) July 1837
Mrs. Bardell encounters Mr. Pickwick in the Prison by Phiz (Ch. 46) August 1837

Bibliography

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. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874; New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1873. Vol. 6.

Grass, Sean C. "Pickwick, the Past, and the Prison." Dickens Studies Annual, Vol. 29 (2000), pp. 17-39.

Titley, Graham D. C. "Thomas Onwhyn: a Life in Illustration (1811-1886)." Pearl. University of Plymouth (2018-07-12).

Created 28 February 2024