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Martin Meets an Acquaintance at the House of a Mutual Relation
Phiz
May 1843
Steel-engraving
13.3 cm high by 10.9 cm wide, vignetted
Eleventh regular monthly illustration for Charles Dickens's Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, facing page 166 (1844 edition) in the tenth chapter.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The shopman was so highly entertained by this piece of humour that Mr. Tigg himself could not repress some little show of exultation. It vented itself, in part, in a desire to see how the occupant of the next box received his pleasantry; to ascertain which he glanced round the partition, and immediately, by the gaslight, recognized Martin.
"He wants money, sorely!" cried Mr. Tigg with excessive sympathy. "David, will you have the goodness to do your very utmost for my friend, who wants money sorely. You will deal with my friend as if he were myself. A gold hunting-watch, David, engine-turned, capped and jewelled in four holes, escape movement, horizontal lever, and warranted to perform correctly, upon my personal reputation, who have observed it narrowly for many years, under the most trying circumstances" — here he winked at Martin, that he might understand this recommendation would have an immense effect upon the shopman; "what do you say, David, to my friend? Be very particular to deserve my custom and recommendation, David." [Chapter XIII, "Showing What Became of Martin and his Desperate Resolve, after he left Mr. Pecksniff's house; what persons he encountered; what Anxieties he suffered; and what news he heard," bottom page 167 in the 1844 edition; descriptive headline in the 1868 edition: "Money Lent": in the 1897 edition: "Mr. Tigg's Company Not Desired."]
Lacking ready money, Martin has to visit his "uncle," the local pawnshop in London; thus, his meeting the perpetually indigent cadger Montague Tigg, confidant of Chuzzlewit scion Chevy Slyme, is not mere coincidence. The moment realized occurs in Chapter Thirteen: "I have removed my town establishment from thirty-eight Mayfair, to number fifteen-hundred-and-forty-two Park Lane," said Mr. Tigg; desiring to see how the occupant of the next box received his pleasantry, he glanced round the partition and recognized Martin." As Michael Steig noted in his Dickens Studies Annual article of 1972, the plate is closely based on George Cruikshank's "The Pawnshop" from Sketches by Boz (1838): the same door, the symbol of the three balls; the division of counter and private boxes, and the two clerks, a young woman with her elbows planted on the counter, concentrating on the transaction, and a workman in his cap leaning against the outer partition. Phiz's treatment of the subject, however, is freer and my dynamic, in part as the result of the injection of the ever-lively Montague Tigg. — Chapter 13.
The bourgeois virtue of the Pecksniffs is only temporarily defeated in the last of the first five monthly parts, for the subsequent travels of young Martin represent what is to him the severe humiliation of having to make his way in the world on his own, without name or connection. Dickens stresses this humiliation with the appearance of the odious Montague Tigg in the pawnshop where Martin seeks anonymity, and in depicting the scene Browne has used both an external allusion and emblematic details. George Cruikshank's etching for The Pawnbroker's Shop; in Sketches by Boz is surely the source for Browne's design in "Martin meets an acquaintance at the house of a mutual relation" (ch. 13). In each there is an open door decorated with the pawnbroker's emblem of three balls, and a desk counter with private cubicles. Even the arrangement of figures is the same, down to a workman in a shapeless cap. Phiz's design reverses Cruikshank's as one would expect if he had drawn directly in imitation of the original and transferred the drawing to the steel by his usual method. [Steig, Chapter 3, page 68]
The illustrator deploys the pawned family portraits to create a sense of dislocation for customers such as Tigg and Martin, who must abandon their personal connections with their pasts, with family and friends, in order to convert portable property into ready cash. The ancestral figures seem to look down from their frames in distaste at the sordid transactions occurring beneath them. As he pops his head around the cubicle, violating the line between pawnbroker and client, Tigg momentarily loses his beaver, so that the light-coloured hat momentarily takes on a life of its own, eerily floating above Tigg's hairy visage. His intrusive movement towards the right throws the viewer's attention to the next cubicle, in which a sombre Martin waits his turn.
Left: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Montague Tigg and Chevy Slyme (1867). Centre: F. O. C. Darley's frontispiece for volume one in the American Household Edition, And straightway was let down stairs, alluding to Pecksniff's accidental encounter with Tigg in Chapter 4. Right: Furniss's introduction of handling of the same scene, Martin meets Tigg at the Pawnbroker's. (1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Fred Barnard's complementary character studies of Martin and Tigg, "Stuck his hands in his skirt-pockets and swaggered round the corner", (Chapter 13, the Household Edition, 1872).
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.
Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U.P., 1978.
Vann, J. Don. "Martin Chuzzlewit, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, January 1843 — July 1844." New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Pp. 66-67.
Last modified 2 March 2019