A Visitor of Distinction
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
steel-engraving
9.9 cm wide by 11.2 cm cm high
July 1847 (instalment 10)
Etching
Dickens's Dombey and Son, ch. 31
Image scan by Philip V. Allingham.
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Passage Illustrated: Toots's Pugilistic Instructor — A "Celebrated Public Character"
"Oh! I beg your pardon though," said Mr Toots, looking up in the Captain’s face as he sat down in a chair by the fire, which the Captain placed for him; "you don’t happen to know the Chicken at all; do you, Mr Gills?"
"The Chicken?" said the Captain.
"The Game Chicken," said Mr. Toots.
The Captain shaking his head, Mr. Toots explained that the man alluded to was the celebrated public character who had covered himself and his country with glory in his contest with the Nobby Shropshire One; but this piece of information did not appear to enlighten the Captain very much.
"Because he’s outside: that’s all," said Mr Toots. "But it’s of no consequence; he won’t get very wet, perhaps."
"I can pass the word for him in a moment," said the Captain.
"Well, if you would have the goodness to let him sit in the shop with your young man," chuckled Mr Toots, ‘I should be glad; because, you know, he’s easily offended, and the damp’s rather bad for his stamina. I’ll call him in, Mr. Gills."
With that, Mr. Toots repairing to the shop-door, sent a peculiar whistle into the night, which produced a stoical gentleman in a shaggy white great-coat and a flat-brimmed hat, with very short hair, a broken nose, and a considerable tract of bare and sterile country behind each ear.
"Sit down, Chicken," said Mr Toots.
The compliant Chicken spat out some small pieces of straw on which he was regaling himself, and took in a fresh supply from a reserve he carried in his hand.
"There ain’t no drain of nothing short handy, is there?" said the Chicken, generally. "This here sluicing night is hard lines to a man as lives on his condition."
Captain Cuttle proffered a glass of rum, which the Chicken, throwing back his head, emptied into himself, as into a cask, after proposing the brief sentiment, "Towards us!" [Chapter XXXII, "The Wooden Midshipman goes to Pieces," vol. II, 27-28]
Commentary: "the Apollo of Mr. Toots's Pantheon"
Dickens foils the story's sentimental strain with the Cockney, street-wise, no-nonsense attitude of the phlegmatic pugilist who calls himself "The Game Chicken." For thirty-two chapters he has barely tolerated his employer's defeatist attitude towards a possible romantic involvement with Florence throughout the story, but now enough is enough. Toots has employed the prize-fighter to train him in the manly art, and The Chicken has grudgingly obliged by "knocking Toots about the head three times a week for the small consideration of ten-and-six a visit" (Chapter 22, 241). Dickens describes The Chicken exactly as illustrators Phiz and Barnard have depicted him: "A stoical gentleman in a shaggy white great-coat and a flat-brimmed hat, with very short hair, a broken nose, and a considerable tract of bare and sterile country behind each ear."
Phiz has employed the "streaky bacon" layering of the comic and the sentimental by foregrounding the essentially coarse and comic figures of the boxing instructor and Rob the Grinder and conspicuously depicting Captain Cuttle's distress at learning of Walter's having been lost at sea through an account in the morning paper of the wreck of Dombey's merchant vessel The Son and Heir. Thus, within a single frame Phiz realizes a second passage from the chapter:
"Shall I read the passage to you?’ inquired Mr. Toots.
The Captain making a sign in the affirmative, Mr. Toots read as follows, from the Shipping Intelligence:
"'Southampton. The barque Defiance, Henry James, Commander, arrived in this port to-day, with a cargo of sugar, coffee, and rum, reports that being becalmed on the sixth day of her passage home from Jamaica, in' — in such and such a latitude, you know," said Mr. Toots, after making a feeble dash at the figures, and tumbling over them.
"Ay!" cried the Captain, striking his clenched hand on the table. "Heave ahead, my lad!"
"— latitude," repeated Mr. Toots, with a startled glance at the Captain, "and longitude so-and-so, —" the look-out observed, half an hour before sunset, some fragments of a wreck, drifting at about the distance of a mile. The weather being clear, and the barque making no way, a boat was hoisted out, with orders to inspect the same, when they were found to consist of sundry large spars, and a part of the main rigging of an English brig, of about five hundred tons burden, together with a portion of the stem on which the words and letters 'Son and H -' were yet plainly legible. No vestige of any dead body was to be seen upon the floating fragments. Log of the Defiance states, that a breeze springing up in the night, the wreck was seen no more. There can be no doubt that all surmises as to the fate of the missing vessel, the Son and Heir, port of London, bound for Barbados, are now set at rest for ever; that she broke up in the last hurricane; and that every soul on board perished.’"
Captain Cuttle, like all mankind, little knew how much hope had survived within him under discouragement, until he felt its death-shock. During the reading of the paragraph, and for a minute or two afterwards, he sat with his gaze fixed on the modest Mr. Toots, like a man entranced; then, suddenly rising, and putting on his glazed hat, which, in his visitor’s honour, he had laid upon the table, the Captain turned his back, and bent his head down on the little chimneypiece. [31-2]
Illustrations of the The Game Chicken in the Diamond and Household Editions (1867-77)
Left: Fred Barnard's Household Edition illustration of the boxing instructor's giving Toots a piece of his mind: "Wy, it's mean . . . . . that's where it is. It's mean!" (1877). Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s dual portrait of the boxer and his pupil: Mr. Toots and The Chicken (1910).
Related Material, including Other Illustrated Editions of Dombey and Son
- Dombey and Son (homepage)
- Felix Octavius Carr Darley's Captain Cuttle . . . too his own [watch] down from the mantel-shelf for Volume 4 of Dombey and Son, Wholesale Retail & for Exportation, 1862
- Fred Barnard's 61 Illustrations for Dombey and Son, 1877
- Groome's illustrations of the Collins Pocket Edition of Dombey and Son (1900, rpt. 1934)
- Kyd's five Player's Cigarette Cards for Dombey and Son, 1910
- Harry Furniss's twenty-nine illustrations for Dombey and Son, Wholesale Retail & for Exportation (1910)
Bibliography
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.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr., and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. III.
__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 61 wood-engravings. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.
_________. Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. IX.
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, pp. 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, pp. 67-68.
Last modified 16 January 2021