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The First Head — Sunday as it is: Bread Street
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
wood-engraving
8.8 cm by 7.0 cm (3 ½ by 2 ¾ inches), vignetted, facing p. 19.
June 1836
Timothy Sparks' [Charles Dickens's] Sunday Under Three Heads, "Bread Street."
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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But the morning service has concluded, and the streets are again crowded with people. Long rows of cleanly-dressed charity children, preceded by a portly beadle and a withered schoolmaster, are returning to their welcome dinner; and it is evident, from the number of men with beer-trays who are running from house to house, that no inconsiderable portion of the population are about to take theirs at this early hour. The bakers’ shops in the humbler suburbs especially, are filled with men, women, and children, each anxiously waiting for the Sunday dinner. Look at the group of children who surround that working man who has just emerged from the baker’s shop at the corner of the street, with the reeking dish, in which a diminutive joint of mutton simmers above a vast heap of half-browned potatoes. How the young rogues clap their hands, and dance round their father, for very joy at the prospect of the feast. . . . ["As It Is," pp. 10-11]
As critics such as Michael Steig and Valerie Leslie Browne have noted, "Bread Street" here is the centre of a working-class London neighbourhood, as is William Hogarth's polar opposite of "Gin Lane," "Beer Street." Clearly the community leader here is not the vicar from the nearby church, looming in the right-hand register, but the genial baker at the centre of the composition. As Steig notes, Phiz here has employed "emblematic detail — the church, the clock, and the inscription ("Bread Street") — to underline certain implications of the text" (12). This is not the brutal working-class neighbourhood in which Dickens will subsequently set the Fagin, Artful Dodger, Nancy and Sykes scenes in Oliver Twist in 1838, but it is markedly "urban," as we note in those slightly ramshackle buildings in the street going right to centre, and in the Doric columns and pediment of McDough's bakery. "Sunday as it is," moreover, is characterized by interaction of the four gleeful children with their father (centre), who smiles at the youngest as he prepares to carry their steaming supper home. A typically Phizzian touch is the potted plants above the pediment which proclaim the nourishing nature of the shop, in contrast to the sterile Gothic tower of the parish church, beneath which a young mother holds her infant.
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, Timothy. [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.
Created 19 August 2024