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Passage Illustrated

"Please, sir, I want some more."

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with wonder; the boys with fear. [Chapter 2, "Treats of Oliver Twist's Growth, Education, and Board," pp. 11-12]

Commentary

Subsequent illustrators including Harry Furniss in 1910 and Charles Pears in 1912 have included a version of the scene in their programs. In the Household Edition sequence by James Mahoney, the reader encounters Oliver's asking for more as the third illustration, the first being the frontispiece which establishes the plot involving the lost heir, The Evidence Destroyed. Similarly, in the 1910 Charles Dickens Library volume, Harry Furniss introduces the issue of Oliver's parentage in Oliver and His Mother's Portrait before starting the boy's story with Starvation in the Workhouse. Two years later, Charles Pears' approach was to introduce the subplot involving the housebreaker and his doxy first with the Fred Barnard frontispiece from his series of Scenes and Characters from Dickens.

Pears' title is revealing, for this is a study in contrasts rather than a political cartoon assailing the excesses of cost-saving measures in parochial workhouses of the early Victorian era. Gone, therefore, are the shocked attendants and the breathless audience of pauper boys who have drawn lots to make Oliver their spokesman; the confrontation is between binary opposites entirely, the corpulent, balding, middle-aged, perfectly normal official and the small, rake-thin, large-headed boy in ill-fitting clothing. No previous treatment brings the confrontation of these two opposites — establishmentarian figure and rank outsider — down to these bare essentials; here, Oliver is not acting a spokesperson selected by fate (the drawing of lots) to ask for more on behalf of his fellow paupers — an engaged audience in previous treatments. Rather, in Pears Oliver tentatively approaches the big man with the ladle. The unflustered Master, in respectable middle-class tailcoat (despite the apron) is mildly curious and somewhat surprised, but hardly indignant or shocked at the effrontery of the small petitioner. Diffidently, Oliver asserts himself against an institution (as personified by the Master and the brick cooking facility behind him) wholly lacking in empathy for the indigent children in its charge. Both Oliver and the Master in this revision are closely based on the previous treatments by the original illustrator, George Cruikshank, and Pears' immediate predecessor, Harry Furniss. The juxtaposition and poses of the two Pears figures are virtually identical to those in the Cruikshank original, but the aperture behind the matron in the earlier illustration has become a stout wooden door immediately behind the Master here, as if he blocks Oliver's passage. The middle space between boy and man in Pears is occupied by the small ladle, by which the illustrator seems to be implying that Oliver will be successful in his suit. In contrast to visual satirist Furniss's exaggerated caricature of the adults' disbelief at the tiny Oliver's temerity, Pears offers realistic portraiture, figures of more realistic proportions, and possessing far less emotional expressions, so that one must read Dickens's text to assess Oliver's motives and the Master's reaction. Furniss's theatrical crowd scene has shrunk to a momentary conversation between just the child and adult, a conversation devoid of an audience of which Furniss makes readers a part.

In James Mahoney's redrafting of the celebrated scene for the The Household Edition in 1871, a rake-thin Oliver innocently gestures towards the fat master with his bowl. Nothing separates the the viewer from the naieve boy in penitential uniform, and the focal point of the picture is clearly the boy and the master, the largest figures in the picture. Whereas in the original 1837 steel engraving the overfed "master" scowls at the temerity of the scrawny waif, while the eight other survivors of the starving system look on in suspense, Mahoney has turned the master's face away from the reader, and has repositioned the matron, who now expresses merely modest astonishment (centre rear) at Oliver's unorthodox behaviour. Although the lineaments of the scenario are much the same in Furniss's reinterpretation, the overall effect is far more kinetic and emotionally charged — an not without some comic distortion and melodramatic exaggeration. In particular, Furniss has given the tiny protagonist a look of stern defiance wholly absent in previous interpretations in this David-versus-Goliath confrontation of scrawny underdog taking on the corpulent establishmentarian figure in what amounts to Socialistic propaganda. Whereas previous illustrators have focussed on the plump, incredulous functionary and the emaciated petitioner, Furniss presents the entire social context of the dramatic moment, placing the eight other boys, individually realised, in the foreground so that the reader approaches the lithograph as if it were a theatrical scene, including two shocked elderly female assistants (upper centre).

Even lacking the support of the Master's female assistants, in Pears' treatment the functionary is in an unequal contest with the wraith of a boy. Although a rebel as a result of social pressure, Oliver here is relatively nondescript; what strikes us about the petitioner is his awkward thinness. In contrast, as the writer of the introduction to the Centenary volume, A. C. Benson, notes, “All the richness of the book, all its characterisation, lies in the evil, grotesque, tainted, pompous figures which it contains” (xi). The first of these is Bumble, the parish beadle; the second is the Master of the Workhouse: large, unpleasant, mean-spirited, self-serving functionaries of a heartless system designed not to cure poverty but to eliminate by systematic starvation the boys who would otherwise grow up to be charges upon the state in prisons, refuges, and union workhouses. The scene in Pears is all very well, with a bemused rather than an outraged authority whose hyperbolic reaction in Furniss and Cruikshank both amuses the readers and prods them, as comfortable members of the book-buying and periodical-consuming middle class, to ponder whether such enormities as Bumble and the Master of the Workhouse should be tolerated in a progressive, democratic society. In short, what Pears' treatment substitutes for Dickensian mirth and indignation is mere portraiture.

Illustrations from the original 1837-38 serial publication and later editions

Left: George Cruikshank's illustration Oliver Asking for More (Part 1, February 1837). Centre: Harry Furniss's pen and ink study of the hungry boys, Starvation in the Workhouse. Right: Kyd's original watercolour study of Oliver asking for a second helping, Oliver Twist (c. 1900).

Above: James Mahoney's 1871 engraving of Oliver challenging the dietary system of the Mudfog workhouse, "Uncaptioned Headpiece for Chapter One". [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.

Clarke, J. Clayton. The Characters of Charles Dickens pourtrayed in a series of original watercolours by "Kyd.". London: Raphael Tuck, 1890.

Cohen, Jane Rabb. "George Cruikshank." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980. Pp. 15-38.

Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Character Sketches from Dickens. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1888.

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

Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; ​Chapman and Hall, 1846.

Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey. The Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Volume One (1820-29).

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1865.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. Illustrated by James Mahoney. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871.

Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens Library Edition. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 3.

Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Intro. by A. C. Benson. Works of Charles Dickens. The Centenary​Edition. Illustrated by Charles Pears. London: Waverley, 1912.

Forster, John. "Oliver Twist 1838." The Life of Charles Dickens. Edited by B. W. Matz. The Memorial Edition. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911. Vol. 1, book 2, chapter 3.

Kitton, Frederic G. "George Cruikshank." Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004. Pp. 1-28.

Kyd. Characters of Charles Dickens. Nottingham: John Player & Sons, 1910.

Pailthorpe, Frederic W. (Illustrator). Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. London: Robson & Kerslake, 1886. Set No. 118 (coloured) of 200 sets of proof impressions.

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Last modified 19 March 2015