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The Gentleman Next Door Declares His Passion for Mrs. Nickleby
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
April 1839
Steel-engraving
5 ⅞ by 4 ⅛ inches (14.8 cm high x 10.5 cm wide), vignetted
Twenty-sixth plate for Dickens's Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Chapter XLI.
Source: J. A. Hammerton, The Dickens Picture-Book, p. 162.
As Kate rose from her seat in some alarm [at the vegetables just discharged from the other side of the garden wall], and caught her mother's hand to run with her into the house, she felt herself rather retarded than assisted in her intention; and following the direction of Mrs. Nickleby's eyes, was quite terrified by the apparition of an old black velvet cap, which, by slow degrees, as if its wearer were ascending a ladder or pair of steps, rose above the wall dividing their garden from that of the next cottage (which, like their own, was a detached building), and was gradually followed by a very large head, and an old face in which were a pair of most extraordinary grey eyes: very wild, very wide open, and rolling in their sockets, with a dull languishing leering look, most ugly to behold.
"Mama!" cried Kate, really terrified for a moment, "why do you stop, why do you lose an instant? Mama, pray come in!" . . . .
"Queen of my soul," replied the stranger, folding his hands together, "this goblet sip!"
Nonsense, sir," said Mrs. Nickleby. "Kate, my love, pray be quiet."
"Won't you sip the goblet?" urged the stranger, with his head imploringly on one side, and his right hand on his breat. "Oh, do sip the goblet!" [Chapter XLI, "Containing some Romantic Passages Between Mrs. Nickleby and thew Gentleman in the Small-Clothes next Door," Part 13, April 1839]
Contrasting the "love-at-first-sight" romance of Nicholas and Madeline Bray, among the most realistically proportioned characters in Phiz's plates for this 1838-39 novel, in the previous illustration (for Chapter 40), this first illustration for the April 1839 instalment involves a distinctly odd couple ill-suited by virtue of their age for the youthful rhetoric of passion. For ironic purposes, Dickens and Phiz exploit the physical "Pyramus and Thisbe" situation of the ludicrous courtship scene. The garden interlude is all the more delightful in that Dickens bursts the idyllic bubble, first by having him shower the object of his affections with vegetables and then by having the elderly gentleman's "keepers" arrive in the nick of time to cut short the hyperbolic protestations of Mrs. Nickleby's lunatic suitor "in small clothes" (i. e., the fashion of the previous century). That the suitor is not to be taken seriously is signalled by his presence as merely an oversized head in Phiz's illustration. The caricaturist brilliantly foils the fatuous and misshapen visage of the madman with the beauty of the garden setting, framing the entire composition with luxuriant greenery.
Left: Harry Furniss enjoys the ladies' discomfiture as much as he does the madman's antics in Kate and Mrs. Nickleby and the Madman (1910). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Diamond Edition study of the novel's comic madman: The Gentleman in Small Clothes (1867). Right: Fred Barnard's 1875 woodblock engraving of agile lunatic on the garden wall: Concluded by standing on one leg,and repeating his favourite bellow with increased vehemence, in the British Household Edition.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1839.
_______. Nicolas Nickleby. Illustrated by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). The Gadshill Edition, ed. Andrew Lang. The Works of Charles Dickens in Thirty-four Volumes. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897. Vols. IV and V.
_______. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr., and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., Late Ticknor and Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1875 [re-print of 1867 Diamond Edition, Vol. IV].
_______. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. With fifty-two illustrations by C. S. Reinhart. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875. I.
_______. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. With fifty-nine illustrations by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1875. IV.
__________. Nicholas Nickleby. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. IV.
Steig, Michael. Chapter 2. "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 24-50.
Vann, J. Don. "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, April 1838-October 1839." New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. 63.
Created 4 May 2009 Last modified 2 September 2021