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The Night
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
steel engraving
13.5 cm by 9.1 cm (5 ¼ by 3 ½ inches), vignetted
March 1846
Dickens's Little Dorrit, Book 2, Chapter 19, "The Storming of the Castle in the Air" (March 1856)
Source: Chapman & Hall (1901), facing p. 560.
[Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
At first her uncle was stark distracted. "O my brother! O William, William! You to go before me; you to go alone; you to go, and I to remain! You, so far superior, so distinguished, so noble; I, a poor useless creature fit for nothing, and whom no one would have missed!"
It did her, for the time, the good of having him to think of and to succour.
"Uncle, dear uncle, spare yourself, spare me!"
The old man was not deaf to the last words. When he did begin to restrain himself, it was that he might spare her. He had no care for himself; but, with all the remaining power of the honest heart, stunned so long and now awaking to be broken, he honoured and blessed her.
"O God," he cried, before they left the room, with his wrinkled hands clasped over her. "Thou seest this daughter of my dear dead brother! All that I have looked upon, with my half-blind and sinful eyes, Thou hast discerned clearly, brightly. Not a hair of her head shall be harmed before Thee. Thou wilt uphold her here to her last hour. And I know Thou wilt reward her hereafter!"
They remained in a dim room near, until it was almost midnight, quiet and sad together. At times his grief would seek relief in a burst like that in which it had found its earliest expression; but, besides that his little strength would soon have been unequal to such strains, he never failed to recall her words, and to reproach himself and calm himself. The only utterance with which he indulged his sorrow, was the frequent exclamation that his brother was gone, alone; that they had been together in the outset of their lives, that they had fallen into misfortune together, that they had kept together through their many years of poverty, that they had remained together to that day; and that his brother was gone alone, alone!
They parted, heavy and sorrowful. She would not consent to leave him anywhere but in his own room, and she saw him lie down in his clothes upon his bed, and covered him with her own hands. Then she sank upon her own bed, and fell into a deep sleep: the sleep of exhaustion and rest, though not of complete release from a pervading consciousness of affliction. Sleep, good Little Dorrit. Sleep through the night!
It was a moonlight night; but the moon rose late, being long past the full. When it was high in the peaceful firmament, it shone through half-closed lattice blinds into the solemn room where the stumblings and wanderings of a life had so lately ended. Two quiet figures were within the room; two figures, equally still and impassive, equally removed by an untraversable distance from the teeming earth and all that it contains, though soon to lie in it.
One figure reposed upon the bed. The other, kneeling on the floor, drooped over it; the arms easily and peacefully resting on the coverlet; the face bowed down, so that the lips touched the hand over which with its last breath it had bent. The two brothers were before their Father; far beyond the twilight judgment of this world; high above its mists and obscurities. [Book The Second, "Riches," conclusion of Chapter XIX, "The Storming of the Castle in the Air," pp. 560-561].
The book was published in the customary twenty monthly parts, December 1855 through June 1857, by Bradbury and Evans with a blue-green wrapper and forty plates designed by Phiz. The Night was one of two illustrations for the sixteenth monthly part, the other being the scene in which William Dorrit has a mental break in the midst of a farewell speech to Mr. Merdle, An Unexpected After-Dinner Speech.
James Mahoney in the Household Edition volume of 1873 reinterpreted this illustration as The two brothers were before their Father. However, whereas Phiz has provided plenty of contextual bric-a-brac to establish the affluence of the English travellers on the Continent (indeed, these material objects such as statues and paintings almost seem to entomb the prostrate figure), Mahoney focuses on the somberly dressed, aged upper-middle-class English gentleman who has just followed his older brother into death, freeing them both from a tawdry past and a present obsession with decorous behaviour and the cultivation of polished, sophisticated surfaces.
Browne returns to Mr. Dorrit later to depict his ultimate fate, and the earlier illustrative mode chosen for the plate seems appropriate, though it is unusual for this novel. The Night (Bk. 2, ch. 19) is the kind of subject which tended to stimulate Browne's emblematic imagination. No doubt the idea of showing just Mr. Dorrit's arm and hand, and having the illustration center on his loving and devoted brother Frederick, formed part of Dickens' instructions, though in this regard it does not follow the text precisely, since the latter speaks repeatedly of two figures, yet the notion is consistent with the last two sentences in the chapter, especially the description of "the arms easily and peacefully resting on the coverlet, the face bowed down so that the lips touched the hand over which with its last breath it had bent" (Bk. II, ch. 19, p. 492). On the wall are paintings of a king and a ruined castle, the first probably representing the condition of power and eminence Dorrit has so recently imagined himself to occupy, the second the collapse of his castle in the air. A third emblematic detail is a statue of a seminude woman, probably Psyche, with her head turned to took at the butterfly on her shoulder. The butterfly as soul is a traditional emblem, and here as in the plate dealing with Dora Copperfield's death the reference is to the impending departure of the dying person's soul.
Left: Sol Eytinge, Junior's interpretation of William Dorrit as The Father of Marshalsea, with a wistful Amy, Little Dorrit and Her Father (1867). Centre: Darley's 1863 frontispiece of the scene in which William Dorrit learns of his providential inheritance, Joyful Tidings (Volume 2). Right: Sol Eytinge, Junior's interpretation of the musical younger Brother, Amy's uncle, Frederick Dorrit (1867). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: James Mahoney's atmospheric interpretation of the scene of the Dorrit brothers' deaths in Rome, The two brothers were before their Father (Household Edition, 1873). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Created 5 July 2002
Last modified 6 December 2023