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The Consultation [between Arthur Gride and Ralph Nickleby]
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
June 1839
Steel-engraving
5 by 4 ⅛ inches (12.7 cm high x 10.6 cm wide), vignetted
Thirtieth plate for Dickens's Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Chapter XLVII.
Source: J. A. Hammerton, The Dickens Picture-Book, p. 166.
"Noggs!" cried Ralph, "where is that fellow, Noggs?"
But not a word said Newman.
"The dog has gone to his dinner, though I told him not," muttered Ralph, looking into the office, and pulling out his watch. "Humph! You had better come in here, Gride. My man’s out, and the sun is hot upon my room. This is cool and in the shade, if you don’t mind roughing it."
"Not at all, Mr. Nickleby, oh not at all! All places are alike to me, sir. Ah! very nice indeed. Oh! very nice!"
"The person who made this reply was a little old man, of about seventy or seventy-five years of age, of a very lean figure, much bent and slightly twisted. He wore a grey coat with a very narrow collar, an old-fashioned waistcoat of ribbed black silk, and such scanty trousers as displayed his shrunken spindle-shanks in their full ugliness. The only articles of display or ornament in his dress were a steel watch-chain to which were attached some large gold seals; and a black ribbon into which, in compliance with an old fashion scarcely ever observed in these days, his grey hair was gathered behind. His nose and chin were sharp and prominent, his jaws had fallen inwards from loss of teeth, his face was shrivelled and yellow, save where the cheeks were streaked with the colour of a dry winter apple; and where his beard had been, there lingered yet a few grey tufts which seemed, like the ragged eyebrows, to denote the badness of the soil from which they sprung. The whole air and attitude of the form was one of stealthy cat-like obsequiousness; the whole expression of the face was concentrated in a wrinkled leer, compounded of cunning, lecherousness, slyness, and avarice.
Such was old Arthur Gride, in whose face there was not a wrinkle, in whose dress there was not one spare fold or plait, but expressed the most covetous and griping penury, and sufficiently indicated his belonging to that class of which Ralph Nickleby was a member. Such was old Arthur Gride, as he sat in a low chair looking up into the face of Ralph Nickleby, who, lounging upon the tall office stool, with his arms upon his knees, looked down into his; a match for him on whatever errand he had come. [Chapter XLVII, "Mr. Ralph Nickleby has some confidential Intercourse with another old Friend. They concert between them a Project, which promises well for both"]
Dickens and Phiz begin to utilize Newman Noggs as more than a mere comic accessory to the dour, scheming Ralph Nickleby by placing Noggs in the position of an eavesdropper on the conspiratorial conversation between the covetous, grasping, aged money-lender, Arthur Gride, and the malevolent Ralph Nickleby in this forty-seventh chapter, "Mr. Ralph Nickleby has some confidential Intercourse with another old Friend. They concert between them a Project, which promises well for both" (Part 15, June 1839). The "concert" in the chapter title refers to the plot the two are hatching to control Madeline Bray's twelve-thousand-pound inheritance, unbeknownst to the girl left her in her grandfather's will, which Gride has secured. Gride intends to marry the beautiful adolescent, not so much out of lust but out of greed, for if she marries her husband will come into her substantial property (of which she is ignorant). Nickleby agrees to apply pressure to Madeline's father, a debtor, by offering to clear Walter Bray's debts if he consents to the unequal marriage. Phiz suggests the seventy-five-year-old Gride's malignant disposition by his misshapen, over sized head. The particulars of his dress, however, Phiz neglects since Dickens has provided a detailed description of these (see above).
Left: Sol Eytinge, Jr., in the Diamond Edition (1867) presents Gride as a physical contrast to Ralph in Ralph Nickleby and Arthur Gride. Centre: Harry Furniss's dual study of the novel's miserly villains: Arthur Gride and Ralph Nickleby (1910). Right: C. S. Reinhart's 1875 woodblock engraving of the aged miser and the middle-aged money-lender in Noggs's office: "And how have you been?" said Gride. in the American 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 9 May 2009 Last modified 12 September 2021