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Conviviality at Bob Sawyer's
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
May 1837 (fourteenth monthly number)
Steel Engraving
10.7 cm high by 9.6 cm wide (4 by 3 ⅝ inches), vignetted
Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Chapter XXXVIII, facing p. 409.
See below for passage illustrated and commentary. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Bob Sawyer's return was the immediate precursor of the arrival of a meat-pie from the baker's, of which that gentleman insisted on his staying to partake. The cloth was laid by an occasional charwoman, who officiated in the capacity of Mr. Bob Sawyer's housekeeper; and a third knife and fork having been borrowed from the mother of the boy in the gray livery (for Mr. Sawyer's domestic arrangements were as yet conducted on a limited scale), they sat down to dinner; the beer being served up, as Mr. Sawyer remarked, "in its native pewter."
After dinner, Mr. Bob Sawyer ordered in the largest mortar in the shop, and proceeded to brew a reeking jorum of rum-punch therein, stirring up and amalgamating the materials with a pestle in a very creditable and apothecary-like manner. Mr. Sawyer, being a bachelor, had only one tumbler in the house, which was assigned to Mr. Winkle as a compliment to the visitor, Mr. Ben Allen being accommodated with a funnel with a cork in the narrow end, and Bob Sawyer contented himself with one of those wide-lipped crystal vessels inscribed with a variety of cabalistic characters, in which chemists are wont to measure out their liquid drugs in compounding prescriptions. These preliminaries adjusted, the punch was tasted, and pronounced excellent; and it having been arranged that Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen should be considered at liberty to fill twice to Mr. Winkle's once, they started fair, with great satisfaction and good-fellowship. [Chapter XXXVIII, “How Mr. Winkle, when he stepped out of the frying-pan, walked gently and comfortably into the Fire,” 409]
Plate B2, as Johannsen (1956) notes, bears the caption as well as "Phiz, del. And in A1 "page 409" is in the lower right, whereas B2 has "Phiz, del," the legend, and London, Chapman & Hall, 186 Strand for the 1838 bound volume.
As one might expect in a picaresque novel, characters from previous Pickwick chapters now turn up again. In this instalment, Winkle has escaped the wrath of the jealous husband, the irate Mr. Dowler, who believed he was trying to run away with his wife. Having hastened from Bath by coach, Winkle arrives in Bristol. Here, after stopping at The Bush Inn, he gets lost in the maze of dirty streets, and visits a shop to get directions — where he is surprised to encounter Dr. Bob Sawyer, the indefatigable flim-flam pharmacist-cum-medical student, now established as the resident physician at a surgery, in partnership with his confederate, Ben Allen, who serves as the apothecary. Winkle agrees to accept their offered entertainment in the shop's back-parlour.
Although formerly a medical student at Guy's Hospital in London, Dr. Sawyer clearly knows little about the professional calling he has assumed; otherwise, he would not be drinking punch from a chemist's measuring vessel! He and Ben Allen are going bankrupt by extending too much credit; in consequence, the numerous drawers in the apothecary shop contain nothing or are merely false fronts. But the pair are well-stocked with alcohol, which the timid Winkle agrees reluctantly to imbibe with them, despite (he says) the earliness of the hour. Only Winkle's presence here is new — the pair over the past three weeks of their business arrangement have "been wavering between intoxication partial, and intoxication complete."
The gentleman to the right in the Phiz illustration who holds a tumbler is, as we note from previous illustrations, the inept Nathaniel Winkle. Ben Allen falls back in his chair as he drinks punch from a funnel. Bob, presiding as the host, rests his right hand on the table, perhaps to steady himself against advancing tipsiness. The delivery boy peeps through the glass door in the rear, watching his employers rather than "devoting the evening to his ordinary occupation of writing his name on the counter, and rubbing it out again" (ch. 38). As Edward Guiliano and Philip Collins remark in The Annotated Dickens, "The reintroduction of Bob Sawyer serves two functions: it aids in the development of the Winkle/Arabella [Allen romantic] subplot that is now put centre stage, and it permits Dickens to take some more comic jabs at the medical profession, as he has with the clergy and the law. All three are traditional objects of satire in the picaresque novel" (363, n. 2).
The hedonistic bachelors Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer had first appeared in Chapter XXX, in which old Mr. Wardle introduced them to Pickwick — and the reader. Clearly Phiz has made use of the following descriptions in the current illustration:
Mr. Benjamin Allen was a coarse, stout, thick-set young man, with black hair cut rather short, and a white face cut rather long. He was embellished with spectacles, and wore a white neckerchief. Below his single-breasted black surtout, which was buttoned up to his chin, appeared the usual number of pepper-and-salt coloured legs, terminating in a pair of imperfectly polished boots. Although his coat was short in the sleeves, it disclosed no vestige of a linen wristband; and although there was quite enough of his face to admit of the encroachment of a shirt collar, it was not graced by the smallest approach to that appendage. He presented, altogether, rather a mildewy appearance, and emitted a fragrant odour of full-flavoured Cubas.
Mr. Bob Sawyer, who was habited in a coarse, blue coat, which, without being either a greatcoat or a surtout, partook of the nature and qualities of both, had about him that sort of slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait, which is peculiar to young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and scream in the same by night, call waiters by their Christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description. He wore a pair of plaid trousers, and a large, rough, double-breasted waistcoat; out of doors, he carried a thick stick with a big top. He eschewed gloves, and looked, upon the whole, something like a dissipated Robinson Crusoe.
Such were the two worthies to whom Mr. Pickwick was introduced, as he took his seat at the breakfast-table on Christmas morning. [Chapter XXX]
Referring back to that chapter, the reader can identify Ben Allen (left) by virtue of his "black hair cut rather short," and his spectacles, and Bob Sawyer (centre) merely by his "slovenly smartness, and swaggering gait." What is surprising, given Winkle's manifest ineptitude as a sportsman (as when, for example, Bob and Ben came to his assistance after his fall on the ice at Dingly Dell), is his confident nonchalance as a smoker and imbiber of alcoholic beverages. Winkle learns from Ben that Arabella Allen, Ben's beautiful sister with whom Winkle had become infatuated at Wardle's, is staying nearby. Consequently, when Sam turns up to bring Winkle back to Bath, he refuses to leave Bristol.
Left: Thomas Nast's American Household Edition's engraving for the Chapter XXXV, "Bless my soul," everybody says, "somebody taken suddenly ill! Sawyer, late Nockemorf, sent for!" (1873). Right: Thomas Onwhyn's "extra" steel engraving for Chapter L (April 1837) shows Mr. Winkle, Sr., interviewing Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen: Mr. Bob Sawyer whose wit had lain dormant. . . .. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Left: Harry Furniss's version of the aftermath of the apothecaries' entertaining Winkle: for Bob Sawyer's Party (1910). Right: Phiz's Household Edition woodcut reworks his original 1837 steel engraving as Mr. Bob Sawyer's boy . . . . peeped through the glass door, and thus listened and looked on at the same time (1874). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Robert Seymour, Robert Buss, and Phiz. London: Chapman and Hall, November 1837. With 32 additional illustrations by Thomas Onwhyn (London: E. Grattan, April-November 1837).
Guiliano, Edward, and Philip Collins, eds. The Annotated Dickens. Vol. 1. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986.
Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book. London: Educational Book Co., 1910.
Johnannsen, Albert. "The Posthumous Papers of The Pickwick Club." Phiz Illustrations from the Novels of Charles Dickens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1956. Pp. 1-74.
Kitton, Frederic G. Dickens and His Illustrators. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004.
Steig, Michael. Chapter 2. "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24-50.
Created 3 August 2019
Last modified
29 March 2024