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Passage Illustrated: Phaleg Once Again Challenges Mervyn

In such ruminations hour after hour passed by and the clock below had just struck one, when I heard a strange kind of noise,apparently proceeding from below, and being greatly startled, listened for its recurrence with a palpitating heart. But the men snored loudly, and not being able to make out anything clearly, l crept cautiously down stairs, and peeped into the house-place. There were no shutters to the windows, and, the curtains being partially drawn aside, the moonlight streamed in, shining upon the table, which was still standing in the middle of the room, covered with the remains of the supper. But I could see nothing to occasion alarm, and only heard the chirping of the crickets on the hearth and the ticking of the old clock.

Thinking I had been deceived, I was preparing to return, when I distinctly heard footsteps in my uncle's room. It was a dead, dull sound, as if some one were walking about without shoes, or in list slippers. My first impulse was to try and rouse Talbot, who was now sleeping on the hearth, but though I shook him he would not move.

Meantime, my ears were strained to catch the slightest repetition of the sound. For a few seconds all had been still. Then i heard the footsteps again, followed by a noise like the falling of a hammer, or some implement. On this I called out loudly, but the men were too sound asleep to hear me. Hannah, however, whose bedroom adjoined that of my uncle, opened her door, and asked what was the matter, I told her that robbers were in the house; whereupon, she hastily retreated and bolted her door, while I ran up-stairs, and with some difficulty aroused the men, who were all very much astonished and alarmed.

During the time occupied by them in huddling on their clothes, I got my gun, which was reared in a corner near my bed, and, loading it, put in a goods charge of swan shot. We then went down stairs, but when I explained to the men that the noise proceeded from my uncle's room, they shook their heads mysteriously, and declined entering it.

"We shan see nowt there belongin' to this warld," Will Weaver said.

"Well, I'll go in, if no one else will," I cried, cocking my gun. On this, Sam plucked up his courage, and, taking down his yeomanry sword, drew it from the scabbard, while Will Weaver armed himself with the disabled duck gun, and Peter, unhooking the horse-pistols, grasped the barrel of one in either hand, hold up its brass-mounted butt-end in readiness for action.

In this state we advanced to the door.

After a moment's breathless pause, during which Hanna's head was again popped out, the door was thrown-open by Will Weever, and Sam, with the drawn sabre in his hand, sprang into the room. I was close at his heels, and the others followed us. We expected something dreadful, but the only dreadful thing we beheld was the dead man, upon whose rigid features the wan moonlight fell, through the small panes of the uncurtained window. [Book the First, Chapter XII, "A Nocturnal Alarm," 97-98]

Commentary: Phiz's Comic Servants versus Cruikshank's (1838)

The composition bears some resemblance to analogous scene in Oliver Twist, Oliver at Mrs. Maylie's Door (Part 13, April 1838), in which the servants of the mansion at Chertsey approach the exhausted waif on their doorstep with trepidation, suspecting that he is part of the gang who attempted to burglarize the house the night before.

The situation in the Ainsworth novel, as a comparison of the two engravings makes clear, is rather different. Whereas the servants are unreasonably apprehensive, given the debilitated condition of the child on the doorstep, the comedy is not so pointed in the Phiz illustration because the servants and Mervyn definitely heard footsteps from Uncle Mobberley's bedroom. In other words, the menace that they confront as they open the bedroom door (right) may well be real, and Mervyn's presence among the servants enforces the reader's crediting the threat. Although Will, armed with a dysfunctional shotgun, anticipates a supernatural antagonist, Sam and Mervyn expect to meet a burglar, and the text reveals that they are correct, as the miscreant gypsy, Phaleg, has apparently been in the room and stolen something significant.

The surly Gypsy taunts Mervyn in the garden when he boy caches up with him. As Mervyn points his fowling-piece at Phaleg, the intruder suggests that he has taken something of value from the dead man's room. Apparently he wants to strike some sort of bargain: "Yo'n repent it, when it's too late." The servants later conclude that the Gypsy had jumped the garden fence to steal some chickens, and that, in the absence of such evidence as footsteps on the gravel walk under Uncle Mobberley's window, he had not been in the dead man's room after all. What then, was the "something worth knowing to tell us" that Phaleg had mentioned to Mervyn before hopping the fence and avoiding Mervyn's shot?

Since Cruikshank in illustrating the scene with the servants in Oliver Twist knew that the servants (adequately individualized by Dickens on the night of the break-in) have no reason to be afraid, he portrayed the situation as comic, except for the pathetic image of Oliver on the doorstep. On the other hand, Phiz, knowing from reading the entire chapter that an intruder has indeed been in the dead man's room, cannot depict the apprehensive group as entirely ridiculous, although he makes Peter, ineptly holding the horse-pistols butt-ends first, suitably ludicrous. The illustrator heightens the suspense by not depicting the interior of the room, leaving the reader-viewer to wonder momentarily about what the servants are seeing by candle light.

Bibliography

Ainsworth, William Harrison. The Life and Adventures of Mervyn Clitheroe (1851-2; 1858). Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). London: Routledge, 1882.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Vann, J. Don. "William Harrison Ainsworth. Mervyn Clitheroe, twelve parts in eleven monthly installments, December 1851-March 1852, December 1857-June 1858." New York: MLA, 1985. 27-28

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Created 23 November 2018

Last modified 17 March 2021