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The Thriving City of Eden as it Appeared in Fact
Phiz
Steel-engraving
13.3 cm high by 11.2 cm wide, vignetted
Eighteenth regular monthly illustration for Charles Dickens's Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, facing page 288 (1844 edition) in the twenty-third chapter; descriptive headline: "Chuzzlewit & Co." (1897)
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
And lastly, he brought forth a great placard (which Martin in the exultation of his heart had prepared with his own hands at the National Hotel) bearing the inscription, CHUZZLEWIT & CO., ARCHITECTS AND SURVEYORS, which he displayed upon the most conspicuous part of the premises, with as much gravity as if the thriving city of Eden had a real existence, and they expected to be overwhelmed with business.
"These here tools," said Mark, bringing forward Martin's case of instruments and sticking the compasses upright in a stump before the door, "shall be set out in the open air to show that we come provided. And now, if any gentleman wants a house built, he'd better give his orders, afore we're other ways bespoke."
Considering the intense heat of the weather, this was not a bad morning's work; but without pausing for a moment, though he was streaming at every pore, Mark vanished into the house again, and presently reappeared with a hatchet; intent on performing some impossibilities with that implement.
"Here's ugly old tree in the way, sir," he observed, "which'll be all the better down. We can build the oven in the afternoon. There never was such a handy spot for clay as Eden is. That's convenient, anyhow."
But Martin gave him no answer. He had sat the whole time with his head upon his hands, gazing at the current as it rolled swiftly by; thinking, perhaps, how fast it moved towards the open sea, the high road to the home he never would behold again.
Not even the vigorous strokes which Mark dealt at the tree awoke him from his mournful meditation. Finding all his endeavours to rouse him of no use, Mark stopped in his work and came towards him.
"Don't give in, sir," said Mr. Tapley.
"Oh, Mark," returned his friend, "what have I done in all my life that has deserved this heavy fate?" [Chapter XXIII, "Martin and his Partner take Possession of their Estate. The Joyful Occasion involves some further Account of Eden," page 288]
In Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (1970), John Harvey has detected influences other than the illustrations of George Cruikshank in Browne's work for Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit — in particular, the emblematic style of eighteenth-century print-maker William Hogarth and the social criticism and whimsy of French cartoonist and lithographer Honoré Daumier (1808-79), whose La Garde-Malade (22 May 1842) in caricaturist Charles Philipon's Paris magazine of satire and social commentary Le Charivari may well have inspired Browne's iconic images of Sairey Gamp.
Partly inspired by Daumier, the new sharpness and energy of Browne's drawing is a fit accompaniment to the new 'suggestiveness, compact and sure of stroke' in Dickens's prose, and the Dickens's new sense of the way in which each visual detail can tell a story. In the following instructions for the plate 'The Thriving City of Eden as it appeared in Fact' . . . , Dickens is virtually moving the pencil himself; he imagines the plate in detail, and except for remembering that the river flows towards home, his details are not the psychic [i. e., psychological] details one expects of a novelist, but the telling visual particulars of an artist like Hogarth. The picture he describes is a typical Hogarthian scene of tumbledown confusion, with its ironic written placards, with characterizing utensils that are not being used; the tools of men's trades, in and out of use, are always significant in Hogarth . . . . [Harvey, p. 134]
The placards in the Eden scene, as Harvey has noted, constitute Dickens's embedded commentary on the plight of the bedraggled representatives of European civilisation who are confronting the primeval wilderness of the Mississippi Valley. Martin "& Co." grandiously implies a firm of architects and surveyors, but in fact designates only Mark. And, pointing towards the unscrupulous land-speculators who are taking advantage of unknowing immigrants, Dickens has specified in his instructions to Phiz the sign "BANK and National Credit Office," an imposing title which the ramshackle appearance of the doorless, windowless log-cabin ironically undercuts. In fact, in his detailed instructions to Browne a month earlier Dickens seems to have thought out in advance how to juxtapose the puny civilising efforts of the colonists and the resilient, oppositional life-force of the American wilderness.
The part of Dickens's 15-18 April 1843 letter on this "second subject" (the first being the envisioned "City" of Eden outlined in the town plan posted on the wall of the land office) has survived probably because it was neither returned to Dickens nor retained by Browne, both of whom burned much of their early correspondence. It is one of the few letters of instruction that survived the artist's and author's bonfires, possibly because it was retained by Chapman and Hall as instructions to the compositor. Valerie Lester mentions John Forster, Dickens's literary agent who sometimes acted on Dickens's behalf when the author was out of London, as another possible source of these letters of instruction for Martin Chuzzlewit since he may have "saved them, having given Phiz the instructions verbally or in another letter" (personal communication 16 May 2007). The contents of the letter do not furnish a clue to its survival, but the marginal notes, written in another hand but clearly dictated by Dickens, and Browne's penciled in rejoinder at the bottom of the page imply that the letter was initially sent to Browne, who then replied as to what he could and could not "shew" before Dickens dictated a few final thoughts about the composition of "The thriving City of Eden as it appeared in fact" (the second illustration for the ninth monthly part).
2nd Subject 2
The First Subject having shewn the settlement of Eden on paper, the second shews it in reality. Martin and Mark are displayed as the tenants of a wretched log hut (for a pattern whereof, see a Vignette brought by Chapman and Hall) in perfectly flat swampy, wretched forest of stunted timber in every stage of decay with a filthy river running before the door, and some other miserable loghouse indicated among the trees, whereof the most ruinous and tumbledown of all, is labelled BANK And National Credit Office. Outside their door, as the custom is, is a rough sort of form or dresser, on which are set forth their pot and kettle and so forth: all of the commonest kind. On the outside of the house at one side of the door, is a written placard CHUZZLEWIT AND Co. ARCHITECTS AND SURVEYORS; and upon a stump of tree, like a butcher's block, before the cabin, are Martin's instruments — a pair of rusty compasses &c On a three legged stool beside this block, sits Martin in his shirt sleeves, with long dishevelled hair, resting his head upon his hands: the picture of hopeless misery — watching the river, as sadly remembering that it flows towards home. But Mr. Tapley, up to his knees in filth and brushwood, and in the act of endeavouring to perform some impossibilities with a hatchet, looks towards him with a face of unimpaired good humour, and declares himself perfectly jolly. Mark the only redeeming feature. Everything else dull, miserable, squalid, unhealthy, and utterly devoid of hope: diseased, starved, and abject. The weather is intensely hot, and they are but partially clothed. [Cited in Harvey, 134-36]
According to the note in the relevant volume of the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens's Letters, Browne modestly asserted his own interpretation:
At the foot of the page another hand has written: "With 2 Sketches" and Browne has written in pencil "I can't get all this perspective in — unless you will allow of a long subject — something less than a mile." Browne's sketch resembles the illustration except that the stump is larger and not growing in the ground, the Chuzzlewit placard is differently placed, and the other reads only "BANK". Beneath it is written (with two vertical lines indicating the width of the block) "too wide — cannot it be compressed by putting Martin's label on the other side of the door and bringing Mark with his tree forwarder [.] qy is that a hat on his head", and "the stump of the tree should be in the ground in fact a tree cut off two up [rough sketch]". The hand is neither CD's nor Browne's, but the substance of the comment suggests that they are CD's, perhaps dictated at the printing office to a member of the staff when CD was in London again 24-26 Aug. The required changes were made, but the hat looks exactly the same on the plate. [The Pilgrim Letters 3: 542-43]
Steig in his 1972 Dickens Studies Annual article notes that, although the degree of correspondence between the detailed instructions and the eighteenth plate is great, Phiz has added from his own imagination two small toads, one regarding Martin and the other caught in the act of jumping into the water, "conceivably as an allusion to Martin's thoughts of suicide" (135). Jane Rabb Cohen in Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators (1980) has positioned the seventeenth and eighteenth plates side by side on page 89 to invite her reader to compare these as expectation and fulfillment: the web-like plan (so unlike real American town plans, which customarily involved a rational grid) with the pump at its centre being the triumphant imposition of civilisation upon the wilderness, and then the trees and unruly grasses, suggestive of the power of nature, surrounding the settlers. Cohen concludes that the extreme number of details that Dickens specified (including the lines indicating the desired width) so curtailed Phiz's authority as an artist that he was able to respond with merely "a dutiful but uninspired picture" (88).
However, whereas Dickens had specified that there be in the background a "wretched forest of stunted timber in every stage of decay," Browne has provided robust and stately trees of some height and possessing straight trunks, implying that the town-site possesses a potential for construction and habitation that Mark can see and Martin, filled with self-pity, cannot. Phiz, then, explodes the pathetic fallacy: whereas Mark revels in the challenge posed by the natural scene, Martin is immobilized by the apparent lack of opportunity for a young man who is trying to pass himself off as an architect. . . . . The placards and general confusion which Dickens envisages are especially reminiscent of Hogarth, and the rusty compasses are a detail reminiscent of such graphic artists as Dürer. Browne has asserted himself against Dickens the visualizer, the would-be illustrator, by rejecting aspects of these instructions impossible to realize visually (such as the intense heat) and by including the toads, changing the author's conception of the surrounding wilderness, and particularly through the hat with which he has persisted in providing Mark Tapley even as Dickens has queried it.
Left: Harry Furniss's panoramic view of Eden — in which a colossal Mark seems momentarily to dominate the landscape, "Eden!" in Chapter 23 (1910). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s study of the effect of malaria on Martin, Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley (1867). Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s, study of an American original, Hannibal Chollop (1867). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Fred Barnard's realisation of the scene in which Martin disabuses his American acquaintances of their odd notions about the British monarchy, "I was merely remarking, gentlemen — though it's a point of very little import — that the Queen of England does not happen to live in the Tower of London." (1872).
Above: Fred Barnard's realisation of the scene in which Martin is invited to deliver a lecture to the Watertoast Society, "Well, sir!" said the Captain, putting his hat a little more on one side, for it was rather tight in the crown: "You're quite a public man I calc'late."(1872).
Above: Fred Barnard's realisation of the scene in which the faithful Mark tends a feverish Martin in their cabin in Eden, "Jolly!" (1872).
Allingham, Philip V. "Historical Background." The Dickens Magazine: Martin Chuzzlewit. 5.2 (August, 2008): 8.
_____. "Phiz's Illustrations, Part Two." [Ch. 16-23] The Dickens Magazine: Martin Chuzzlewit. 5.2 (August, 2008): 9-13.
Buck, Anne. Victorian Costume and Costume Accessories. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1961.
Cohen, Jane R. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1980.
Cunnington, C. Willett and Phillis. Handbook of English Costume in the Nineteenth Century. Boston, Great Britain: Plays, 1970.
Dickens, Charles. The Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey, & Kathleen Tillotson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. Volume 3 (1842-3).
_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.
_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872.
_____. Martin Chuzzlewit. Edited by Andrew Lang and illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. The Works of Charles Dickens in Thirty-four Volumes, vol. III. The Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897. 2 vols.
Harvey, John R. Ch. 6, "Dickens and Browne: Martin Chuzzlewit to Bleak House." Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970. Pp. 130-159.
Lester, Valerie Browne. "Note on CD's Letter to Phiz, 15-18 June 1844." Personal communication, 16 May 2007.
Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U.P., 1978.
_____. "Martin Chuzzlewit's Progress by Dickens and Phiz." Dickens Studies Annual 2 (1972): 119-149.
Vann, J. Don. "Martin Chuzzlewit, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, January 1843 — July 1844." New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Pp. 66-67.
Modified 10 March 2019
Last updated 12 November 2024