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Rob the Grinder Reading with Captain Cuttle
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
Steel-engraving
April 1848
9.3 cm high by 7.4 cm wide
This was the title-page vignette for the last number of the serial publication of Dickens's Dombey and Son.
Click on image to enlarge it.
Details
Image scan and text by Philip V. Allingham.
In this self-imposed retirement, the Captain passed whole days and weeks without interchanging a word with anyone but Rob the Grinder, whom he esteemed as a pattern of disinterested attachment and fidelity. In this retirement, the Captain, gazing at the packet of an evening, would sit smoking, and thinking of Florence and poor Walter, until they both seemed to his homely fancy to be dead, and to have passed away into eternal youth, the beautiful and innocent children of his first remembrance.
The Captain did not, however, in his musings, neglect his own improvement, or the mental culture of Rob the Grinder. That young man was generally required to read out of some book to the Captain, for one hour, every evening; and as the Captain implicitly believed that all books were true, he accumulated, by this means, many remarkable facts. On Sunday nights, the Captain always read for himself, before going to bed, a certain Divine Sermon once delivered on a Mount; and although he was accustomed to quote the text, without book, after his own manner, he appeared to read it with as reverent an understanding of its heavenly spirit, as if he had got it all by heart in Greek, and had been able to write any number of fierce theological disquisitions on its every phrase. [Chapter XXXIX "Further Adventures of Captain Edward Cuttle, Mariner," Vol. 2, 129]
In the frontispiece and title-page vignette, which Bradbury and Evans issued serially in the last "double" number (Chapters 58-62), Phiz summarizes the action of the novel in an allegorical design which reflects the thematic principles of the monthly wrapper, and sets up an anticipatory mindset for the non-serial reader. The original readers of the monthly parts would have recognized the two secondary characters of the title-page vignette, the rascally Rob the Grinder (who always has an eye to the main chance and his own self-interest) and the genial old salt, Captain Cuttle. The vignette underscores the novel's theme of the necessity for caring adults to nurture children, not merely in the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills such as Rob picks up at the Grinders' School, but in the larger issue of values formation. Dickens uses the benign retired sailor as a foil to the uncaring, aloof Dombey and the exploitative, mercenary, manipulative Carker. Although the titular characters initially anchor the narrative, ultimately Mr. Dombey and his deceased son are far less significant in Dickens's observations about society than such figures as Walter Gay, Florence and Edith Dombey, Robin Toodle, and Captain Cuttle. The picture also introduces volume-edition readers to the story's chief setting: the comfortable back parlour in the marine-store shop, The Little Midshipman.
Above: Fred Barnard's less detailed and less charming version of the back
parlour as Rob bids the Captain farewell in Ch. 39 (composite woodblock-engraving):
Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. With illustrations by H. K. Browne. The illustrated library Edition. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, c. 1880.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). 8 coloured plates. London and Edinburgh: Caxton and Ballantyne, Hanson, 1910.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 16: Dombey and Son."The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Co., 1910. Vol. 17, 294-337.
Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London (1899) edition.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Ch. 12, "Work, Work, Work." Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. 128-160.
Steig, Michael. Chapter 4. "Dombey and Son: Iconography of Social and Sexual Satire." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 86-112.
Vann, J. Don. Chapter 4. "Dombey and Son, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, October 1846-April 1848." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. 67-68.
Created 8 August 2015
Last modified 27 January 2021
