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The Dissolution of a Partnership
Phiz
August 1843
Steel-engraving
12.3 cm high by 10.3 cm wide, vignetted
Fifteenth monthly illustration for Charles Dickens's Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, seventh instalment, facing p. 232 (1844 edition) in Ch. XVIII: descriptive headline, "A Struggle for Life" (1897).
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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It would have been, if it had made the noise which startled them; [231-232] but another kind of time-piece was fast running down, and from that the sound proceeded. A scream from Chuffey, rendered a hundred times more loud and formidable by his silent habits, made the house ring from roof to cellar; and, looking round, they saw Anthony Chuzzlewit extended on the floor, with the old clerk upon his knees beside him.
He had fallen from his chair in a fit, and lay there, battling for each gasp of breath, with every shrivelled vein and sinew starting in its place, as if it were bent on bearing witness to his age, and sternly pleading with Nature against his recovery. It was frightful to see how the principle of life, shut up within his withered frame, fought like a strong devil, mad to be released, and rent its ancient prison-house. A young man in the fullness of his vigour, struggling with so much strength of desperation, would have been a dismal sight; but an old, old, shrunken body, endowed with preternatural might, and giving the lie in every motion of its every limb and joint to its enfeebled aspect, was a hideous spectacle indeed. [Chapter XVIII, "Does Business with the House of Anthony Chuzzlewit and Son, from which one of the Partners retires unexpectedly," pp. 231-232]
What is not present or shown can sometimes be as significant as what the careful illustrator chooses to include. In this instance, Old Chuffey rather than Jonas attends Anthony, who has suddenly collapsed on the floor of what appears to be the Chuzzlewit counting-house, if one may judge by the four ledgers sitting on Chuffey's desk, upper right. In the second illustration for the eighth monthly instalment, Pecksniff appears again, in part as a consequence of the first illustration as the family require a nurse for Chuffey, who is prostrate with grief at his old master's passing, which is signified in the initial August 1843 plate by the hands of the clock set at about five minutes after midnight. If we do not take the clock literally, however, then the scene depicted may be that in which the dying merchant interrupts the family's breakfast the next morning and is attended specifically by Chuffey rather than a vague "they" which probably indicates both Pecksniff and Jonas. The scene at the end of the chapter is therefore climactic, its title a suitable commentary on the strained relationship between Jonas and Anthony Chuzzlewit:
Mr. Pecksniff promised that he would remain, if circumstances should render it, in his esteemed friend’s opinion, desirable; they were finishing their meal in silence, when suddenly an apparition stood before them, so ghastly to the view that Jonas shrieked aloud, and both recoiled in horror.
Old Anthony, dressed in his usual clothes, was in the room — beside the table. He leaned upon the shoulder of his solitary friend; and on his livid face, and on his horny hands, and in his glassy eyes, and traced by an eternal finger in the very drops of sweat upon his brow, was one word — Death.
He spoke to them — in something of his own voice too, but sharpened and made hollow, like a dead man's face. What he would have said, God knows. He seemed to utter words, but they were such as man had never heard. And this was the most fearful circumstance of all, to see him standing there, gabbling in an unearthly tongue.
"He's better now," said Chuffey. "Better now. Let him sit in his old chair, and he'll be well again. I told him not to mind. I said so, yesterday."
They put him in his easy-chair, and wheeled it near the window; then, swinging open the door, exposed him to the free current of morning air. But not all the air that is, nor all the winds that ever blew 'twixt Heaven and Earth, could have brought new life to him. [page 232]
That we are dealing with this later scene, which faces the illustration in the 1844 volume, Phiz makes clear by the breakfast that Anthony has just interrupted, upper left. The clock, then, again signals the father's death as, having rapidly run down, it has stopped at five minutes after twelve.
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Last modified 8 January 2019