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Passage Illustrated: Complementing "The Dedication"

DEDICATION

To The Right Reverend

THE BISHOP OF LONDON

My Lord,

You were among the first, some years ago, to expatiate on the vicious addiction of the lower classes of society to Sunday excursions; and were thus instrumental in calling forth occasional demonstrations of those extreme opinions on the subject, which are very generally received with derision, if not with contempt.

Your elevated station, my Lord, affords you countless opportunities of increasing the comforts and pleasures of the humbler classes of society—not by the expenditure of the smallest portion of your princely income, but by merely sanctioning with the influence of your example, their harmless pastimes, and innocent recreations.

That your Lordship would ever have contemplated Sunday recreations with so much horror, if you had been at all acquainted with the wants and necessities of the people who indulged in them, I cannot imagine possible. That a Prelate of your elevated rank has the faintest conception of the extent of those wants, and the nature of those necessities, I do not believe.

For these reasons, I venture to address this little Pamphlet to your Lordship’s consideration. I am quite conscious that the outlines I have drawn, afford but a very imperfect description of the feelings they are intended to illustrate; but I claim for them one merit — their truth and freedom from exaggeration. I may have fallen short of the mark, but I have never overshot it: and while I have pointed out what appears to me, to be injustice on the part of others, I hope I have carefully abstained from committing it myself.

I am,

My Lord,

Your Lordship’s most obedient,

Humble Servant,

TIMOTHY SPARKS. [pp. ii-v]

Steig's Commentary on Sunday under Three Heads (1836)

The first collaboration between Dickens and Browne was on something considerably less than a novel, but it clearly shows their joint debt to the Hogarthian tradition (Since both Sunday Under Three Heads and the fourth part of  Pickwick, for which Browne was engaged, were published in June 1836, the order of events is not certain.). The first two of the three small wood engravings for the anti-Sabbatarian pamphlet Sunday Under Three Heads demonstrate the complementary nature of Browne's and Dickens' art, for they make explicit a quality which is only latent in the text. Dickens conceived his tendentious pamphlet in the mode of Hogarth's Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751), posing alternative consequences which will result from two opposed ways of ordering British society. The immediate occasion of Hogarth's pair of engravings was a measure to limit the sale of gin (Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works, 1, p. 207), whereas Dickens was concerned with the repressive Sabbath Bills, but both men present contrasts of healthy and depraved London life. Dickens mentions beer often enough in the first essay to make reasonable the connection with Hogarth's plates; for the drinking of beer "in content and comfort" is clearly contrasted with "outward signs of profligacy or debauchery." ("Sunday Under Three Heads," in The Nonesuch Dickens, 23 vols. (London: Nonesuch Press, 1938), 22: 507.) Although the second essay does not mention the beer which is earlier associated with innocent recreation, it predicts that the restrictive Sabbath laws will produce much more profligacy, idleness, drunkenness, and vice." (Ibid., p. 516.) [12/13]

Despite their technical weakness, the two cuts illustrating these two essays make evident the twenty-one-year-old Browne's maturity as an interpreter of the moral significance of his author's text. In particular they make use of iconographic techniques developed by Hogarth and his followers, especially emblematic detail — the church, the clock, and the inscription ("Bread Street") — to underline certain implications of the text. As an anonymous publication of mere pages, the pamphlet was never collected in any lifetime edition of Dickens's works.

The salient feature of both the engraved cover and the illustrated title page is the vignettes: the first two of the three "heads": at the top, the Archbishop of London, the Reverend Charles Bloomfield (1786-1857), and in the middle Scottish Member of Parliament Sir Andrew Agnew (1793-1849). The third "head" may be that of the pamphleteer himself, Timothy Sparks.

Bibliography

Buchanan-Browne, John. Phiz! Illustrator of Dickens' World. New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1978.

Davis, Paul. "Sunday under Three Heads." Charles Dickens A top Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998. 371.

Dickens, Charles. Sunday Under Three Heads. Illustrated by Phiz [Hablột Knight Browne]. In One Vol. Project Gutenberg. Last Updated: August 19, 2024. Rpt.London: J. W. Jarvis & Son, 28, King William Street, Strand, 1 February 1884. Pp. v + 49.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Chapter Six, "The Collaborators." Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004. Pp. 39-51.

Slater, Michael. Chapter 4: "Break-through Year: 1836." Charles Dickens. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 59-83.

Sparks, Timonthy. [Charles Dickens] Sunday Under Three Heads — As it is; as Sabbath Bills would make it; as it might be made. London: Chapman and Hall, 1836.

Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1978.

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Created 8 September 2024