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Passage Illustrated: Dismal Jemmy at the Clown's Deathbed

'"Don’t let her come near me," said the man, with a shudder, as she stooped over him. "Drive her away; I can’t bear her near me." He stared wildly at her, with a look of deadly apprehension, and then whispered in my ear, "I beat her, Jem; I beat her yesterday, and many times before. I have starved her and the boy too; and now I am weak and helpless, Jem, she’ll murder me for it; I know she will. If you’d seen her cry, as I have, you’d know it too. Keep her off." He relaxed his grasp, and sank back exhausted on the pillow.

"I knew but too well what all this meant. If I could have entertained any doubt of it, for an instant, one glance at the woman’s pale face and wasted form would have sufficiently explained the real state of the case. “You had better stand aside," said I to the poor creature. "You can do him no good. Perhaps he will be calmer, if he does not see you." She retired out of the man’s sight. He opened his eyes after a few seconds, and looked anxiously round.

'"Is she gone?" he eagerly inquired.

'"Yes — yes," said I; "she shall not hurt you." [Chapter III, "A New Acquaintance — "The Stroller’s Tale" — A Disagreeable Interruption, and an Unpleasant Encounter," 29]

Commentary: A Cautionary Tale about a Severely Depressed Artist

Robert Seymour's steel-engraving constitutes standard, cautionary fare in which a flawed if not evil protagonist dies a painful death surrounded by his sorrowful family. However, the illustrator embeds a number of clues as to the dying man's vocation that particularise his death. The other 19th c. illustrator to do justice to the interpolated oral tale, Thomas Nast, likewise emphasizes the theatrical character of the dying alcoholic whose role (ironically) involves making audiences filled with children laugh at his uproarious gags. Seymour through bits of clown costume and theatrical properties, as well as drawings on the wall, attempts to show that the alcoholic never separated his personal and professional identities, and took his work home with him.

When Robert Seymour, veteran illustrator, was working on this compelling illustration of a deathbed scenario, was he already planning to escape from an unsatisfactory professional relationship? On 20 April 1836, Seymour walked into his back garden and blew his brains out, presumably out of frustration at having to deal with a young upstart who did not appreciate Seymour's background as the illustrator of Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, and Wordsworth. In The Dying Clown, Seymour shows an entertainer professionally successful but bitterly unhappy and unfulfilled, perhaps reflecting Seymour's having been twice passed over by the Royal Academy, or his having lost considerable wages through the bankruptcy of his publishers, Knight and Lacey, in 1827. However, the resilient Seymour had reinvented himself as a gifted etcher on steel by 1830, and had established himself as specialising in lighthearted sporting and satirical political scenes, although he remained a gifted landscape artist. Although when he received the Chapman and Hall "Nimrod Club" commission, Seymour probably had a set of preliminary drawings, he could not have been prepared for Dickens's grim, psychological interpolated tale.

And yet the twenty-two-year-old writer supplied his illustrator with a wealth of domestic detail in describing the dying clown's garrett: the tattered curtain at the head of the bed, the low cinder fire, the distinctive three-cornered table covered with medicine bottles, and the chair at the bedside, the shelves with plates, and the stage-foils underneath. Instead of putting the discarded rags in a corner, Seymour foregrounds them against the broken stool to make the squalor obvious. His chief innovation, however, aside from dismissing the pair of clown-shoes, is his addition of three line drawings above the fireplace which reference the dying man's theatrical background, and the wild-eyed, emaciated wife holding the sickly child to whom the delirious clown gestures. Seymour exposes the dying clown's skeletal chest to suggest his imminent demise. In short, although Dickens has set the scene, Seymour has compellingly fleshed it out. Moreover, the juxtaposition of text and illustration suggests that either the publisher or (more likely) the illustrator and author, wanted the plate to appear two pages after the passage illustrated since the illustration is labelled "Page 31." In other words, one suspects that the juxtaposition is Dickens's doing as he wanted readers to experience the scene as text before encountering it as illustration.

According to Jane Rabb Cohen in the second chapter of Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators, Seymour's failure to etch the plate properly brought Seymour's suicidal depression from having to work with an unknown hack journalist (and take direction from him on the project that the artist had proposed to Chapman and Hall in the first place!) to a sudden head:

Dickens proposed that all the Pickwick principals meet, not to celebrate the success of their project (which he unaccountably termed "most complete") but to inspect a revised sketch of 'The dying Clown.' "I have seen your design for an etching to accompany 'The Stroller's Tale' and thought it extremely good," Dickens elaborated, "but still, it is not quite my idea." He wanted the woman to look younger, he said, the dismal man less miserable and more compassionate, and the emaciated clown less repulsive. "The furniture of the room," he granted in conclusion, "you have depicted admirably." Seymour must have been gratified, as Edgar Johnson acidly notes, "to have it conceded that he could draw a bed and a three-cornered table, and that it was merely the people he had got all wrong."39 Certainly Dickens left Seymour no choice but to furnish him with another drawing. . . . .

On Monday, the perturbed artist completed his new design for 'The dying Clown,' but unfortunately, he accidentally ruined the plate he was etching it on. Time was running out. Only two of the required four illustrations were completed. It must have seemed to the artist that now even his "mechanical" abilities were failing. In desperation, he devoted most of Tuesday to doing the etching over.41 In the final plate . . . , the woman appears as aged as before and even more haggard, and the dismal man is solicitous enough; but not only is the clown's emaciation more pronounced, his facial grimace makes him more horrifying than before, as if in reflection of Seymour's own frightened affinity with his representation. Dickens's "idea" of the plate was not realized until Phiz later altered and re-etched it, making all the characters more attractive, hence, more sympathetic (fig. 25). [Cohen 46]

Years afterward, Seymour's widow seems to have blamed Dickens for pirating her husband's projected book, and driving him to suicide, although the mostly non-sporting Pickwickians and their generally non-sporting misadventures more logically would have originated with Dickens; the sole exception appears to be the pseudo-sportsman Winkle. Living at Islington not far from George Cruikshank, Seymour had had the opportunity to observe "weekend sportsmen" of the working class, who were (as Cohen succinctly remarks) "overequipped, undertrained sportsmen pursuing cats, birds, and stray pigs on foot or on horseback" (40). That may have been Seymour's original impetus, but it certainly did not accord with Dickens's conception of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The Dying Clown, therefore, may well have been the last straw for moody, sensitive Robert Seymour.

Plates by other illustrators for "The Stroller's Tale," 1873 and 1910

Left: Thomas Nast's behind-the-scenes approach to the story of the alcoholic clown, "Never shall I forget the repulsive sight that met my eyes as I turned around" in the American Household Edition. Centre: Harry Furniss's Charles Dickens Library Edition characterisation of the teller of the tale that reduces the dying pantomime clown to a pair of claw-like hands, The Stroller's Tale (1910). Right: Clayton J. Clarke's Player's Cigarette card shows the moody tale-teller entirely wrapped up in a closed posture: Dismal Jemmy (1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Related Materials: Dickens's Short Fiction, 1833-68

• Interpolated Tales in Dickens's Pickwick Papers
• A Comprehensive List of Dickens's Short Fiction, 1833-1868
• An Overview of Dickens's Short Fiction, 1833-1868
• A Critical Analysis of Dickens's Short Fiction, 1833-68
• Dickens' Aesthetic of the Short Story
• The Victorian Short Story: A Brief History

Related Materials: Victorian Pantomime

• Victorian Pantomimes and Extravaganzas
• The Development of Pantomime, 1692-1761
• Pantomime, 1844
• Nineteenth-Century British Pantomime

Other artists who illustrated this work, 1836-1910

• Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) 1836-37
• Thomas Onwhyn (1837)
• Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1861)
• Sol Eytinge, Jr. (1867)
• Thomas Nast (1873)
• Harry Furniss (1910)
• Clayton J. Clarke's Extra Illustrations for Player's Cigarettes (1910)

Bibliography

Cohen, Jane Rabb. Chapter 2: "Robert Seymour." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980. Pp. 39-50.

Dickens, Charles. "Pickwick Papers (1836-37). Illustrated by Robert Seymour and Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman & Hall. Part Two (May 1836).

Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873.

Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.

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Created 15 August 2019

Last modified 18 March 2024