Passage Illustrated: An Aging Couple Surrounded by the Extended Family

And the old couple — have they no comfort or enjoyment of existence? See them among their grandchildren and great-grandchildren; how garrulous they are, how they compare one with another, and insist on likenesses which no one else can see; how gently the old lady lectures the girls on points of breeding and decorum, and points the moral by anecdotes of herself in her young days — how the old gentleman chuckles over boyish feats and roguish tricks, and tells long stories of a ‘barring-out’ achieved at the school he went to: which was very wrong, he tells the boys, and never to be imitated of course, but which he cannot help letting them know was very pleasant too — especially when he kissed the master’s niece. This last, however, is a point on which the old lady is very tender, for she considers it a shocking and indelicate thing to talk about, and always says so whenever it is mentioned, never failing to observe that he ought to be very penitent for having been so sinful. So the old gentleman gets no further, and what the schoolmaster’s niece said afterwards (which he is always going to tell) is lost to posterity.

The old gentleman is eighty years old, to-day. . . . [Chapter XII, "The Old Couple," pp. 85-86]

Commentary

Phiz has managed to realise the old couple as they are now and, through the portraits behind them, what they once were: a young married couple, but the crowd of grandchildren (or, more likely, great-grandchildren) immediately returns us to the present. Since the two young women attending the elderly couple look amazingly like the female in the portrait to the right, Phiz is signalling that these are either the couple's daughters or grand-daughters, and the mothers of the five children swarming around the adults. Whereas the anonymous narrator speaks about the "boys" with whom the grandfather interacts, Phiz has included just one male child: the old man seems to be speaking with the three girls rather than this sole boy, struggling with his awkward costume. For most of us beyond the pale of seventy-five, this image still rings true as a familial ideal, although we hope to ward off the decrepitude that so obviously characterizes the physical state of "grandfather and grandmother" (82) here with exercise, vacations and so on. The ideal of love and companionship well into our eighties Phiz has emphasized by the artwork above the mantlepiece: the pair of neoclassical statues and the portraits of the couple as they were in the full mental and physical vigour of late youth.

Bibliography

Buchanan-Brown, John. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978.

Caswell, Edward. Sketches of Young Ladies: In Which These Interesting Members of the Animal Kingdom Are Classified, According to Their Several Instincts. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. London: Chapman and Hall, 31 December 1836.

Dickens, Charles. Sketches of Young Couples. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. London: Chapman and Hall, 1840.

Dickens, Charles. Sketches of Young Gentlemen. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne]. London: Chapman and Hall, 1838.

Lester, Valerie Browne Lester. Phiz! The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.

Bentley, Nicholas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. "Sketches of Young Couples." The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. P. 237.

Steig, Michael. Chapter Two: "The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24-85.

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Created 24 April 2023

Last updated 13 May 2023