"Laundresses" by "W. M." — illustration for "Chambers" in "The Uncommercial Traveller" (1868)

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Laundresses

1868

12.5 x 8.8 cm (4 ⅞ by 3 ⅜ inches), framed.

In the fifth of the Pinwell and "W. M." illustrations — which the 1893 reprint of the Illustrated Library Edition by Chapman and Hall has mistakenly attributed to Marcus Stone — George Pinwell's nearly anonymous collaborator depicts the two rough-visaged, almost brawny laundresses, Mrs. Sweeney and Mrs. Miggot, outside Mr. Parkle's rooms at Gray's Inn for the 1868 edition of The Uncommercial Traveller. [Commentary continued below.]

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Scanned image, text, and commentary by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Illustrated: Two Rough-hewn Laundresses at Gray's Inn, London

The genuine laundress, too, is an institution not to be had in its entirety out of and away from the genuine Chambers. Again, it is not denied that you may be robbed elsewhere. Elsewhere you may have — for money — dishonesty, drunkenness, dirt, laziness, and profound incapacity. But the veritable shining-red-faced shameless laundress; the true Mrs. Sweeney — in figure, colour, texture, and smell, like the old damp family umbrella; the tip-top complicated abomination of stockings, spirits, bonnet, limpness, looseness, and larceny; is only to be drawn at the fountain-head. Mrs. Sweeney is beyond the reach of individual art. It requires the united efforts of several men to ensure that great result, and it is only developed in perfection under an Honourable Society and in an Inn of Court. [Chapter XIV, "Chambers," 87]

Commentary

Neither of the rather muscular and masculine-looking laundresses outside Mr. Parkle's chambers in Gray's Inn (at the foot of a rotting staircase) much resembles the description of Mrs. Sweeney that the Uncommercial provides initially:

This set of chambers (as I have gradually discovered, when I have had restless occasion to make inquiries or leave messages, after office hours) is under the charge of a lady named Sweeney, in figure extremely like an old family-umbrella: whose dwelling confronts a dead wall in a court off Gray’s Inn-lane, and who is usually fetched into the passage of that bower, when wanted, from some neighbouring home of industry . . . [81]

The more feminine of the two, Mrs. Miggot (right: "She was a genteel woman"), is distinguished by her hat, which the Uncommercial does not even describe. But the chief problem is that the illustrator has focussed on the laundresses when the central figure in "Chambers" is the depressing, decaying institution of Gray's Inn itself.

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Marcus Stone ["W. M." and George Pinwell]. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868, rpt., 1893.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times and The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Charles Stanley Reinhart. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Edward Dalziel. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877.

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by G. J. Pinwell and "W. M." The Centenary Edition. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911.

Schlicke, Paul, ed. "The Uncommercial Traveller." The Oxford Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999. Pp. 100-101.

Slater, Michaell, and John Drew, eds. Dickens' Journalism: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers 1859-70. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism, vol. 4. London: J. M. Dent, 2000.

Created 11 May 2023