"A Phenomenon at Titbull's" by "W. M." — illustration for "Chambers" in "The Uncommercial Traveller" (1868)

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A Phenomenon at Titbull's

1868

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

In the seventh of the Pinwell and "W. M." illustrations — which the 1893 reprint of the Illustrated Library Edition has mistakenly attributed to Marcus Stone — George Pinwell's nearly anonymous collaborator depicts Mrs. Mitts and her one-armed "Greenwich Pensioner," or veteran of the Royal Navy, outside the alms-houses 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: A Suitable Couple

There was an air about this Greenwich Pensioner when he took his departure, which imbued all Titbull’s with the conviction that he was coming again. He was eagerly looked for, and Mrs. Mitts was closely watched. In the meantime, if anything could have placed the unfortunate six old gentlemen at a greater disadvantage than that at which they chronically stood, it would have been the apparition of this Greenwich Pensioner. They were well shrunken already, but they shrunk to nothing in comparison with the Pensioner. Even the poor old gentlemen themselves seemed conscious of their inferiority, and to know submissively that they could never hope to hold their own against the Pensioner with his warlike and maritime experience in the past, and his tobacco money in the present: his chequered career of blue water, black gunpowder, and red bloodshed for England, home, and beauty.

Before three weeks were out, the Pensioner reappeared. Again he knocked at Mrs. Mitts’s door with the handle of his stick, and again was he admitted. But not again did he depart alone; for Mrs. Mitts, in a bonnet identified as having been re-embellished, went out walking with him, and stayed out till the ten o’clock beer, Greenwich time. [Chapter XXVII, "Titbull's Alms-Houses," pp. 165-166]

Commentary

The energetic, curious child in the background at the wrought-iron fence provides a visual counterpoint to the intimate, touching moment that the elderly couple share, watched by a peg-legged old salt. Thus, the illustration shifts from a physical description of the alms-house to the social dimension of the retirement home: even in advanced age, romance is possible, even in the midst of so much depressing social realism. The scene is not an "Alms-House Fairy Tale" (165) like the story of a young lottery-winner who whisked his mother away from poverty in his own coach; this, then, is "the only proved case of resignation" (165) within the personal experience of the Uncommercial.

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