“Harthouse Dines at the Bounderbys” by Frederick Walker (1868)

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Harthouse Dines at the Bounderbys

Frederick Walker

Wood engraving by Joseph Swain

7 x 4¼ inches

Charles Dickens, Hard Times for These Times, originally serialized in Household Words, 1 April-12 August 1854 (unillustrated).

As the frontispiece of the Illustrated Library Edition Walker chose a scene which would reveal the story's domestic tensions as the disaffected aristocrat sets his sights romantically on the rational woman trapped in a loveless marriage for the sake of her scapegrace younger brother.

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Walker alerts the reader unfamiliar with the plot of Hard Times to Louisa's romantic interest in the phlegmatic aristocrat and Tory politician who has made common cause with the Lancashire industrialists Josiah Bounderby and Thomas Gradgrind.The illustrator is pointing towards a moment in the second chapter of Book Two, after Bounderby has paraded his new ally before "the voting and interesting nobilities of Coketown and its vicinity." Walker has shortened the table (set for four, but with only three seated, as in the text) considerably to include all four figures: Louisa (left, at the head of the table, as in the letter-press), Tom revealed to us principally through Louisa's adoring gaze, Bounderby seated next to him, focussed solely on the meal, and, at the foot of the table, scrutinizing the others, James ("Jem") Harthouse.

In the precise instant that Walker has chosen to capture, Louisa reaches for Tom's hand, a gesture repeated by Mrs. Blackpool and the bottle in the next plate. Supposedly having worked overtime at the bank, Tom (back towards us) has arrived late for dinner. The artist focuses the viewer's attention on the beautiful, young wife in fashionable dress. He accentuates the vivifying elements of the scene: Louisa's small hand; graceful neck; enchanting smile; and large, oval eyes, full of adoration for her wastrel brother, back towards us, expression unseen. The bearded diner, centre, likely her husband, prepares to chastise his brother-in-law for his tardiness. (This is Bounderby's only appearance in Walker's short programme of illustration, whereas the others will each appear once again). Walker has placed Harthouse to the far right, giving him fashionable mutton-chop whiskers (not described by Dickens) which Walker repeats in Mr. Harthouse and Tom Bounderby [sic] in the Garden (opposite p. 97). While Bounderby speculates on the vittles before him in salvers and tureens (although Dickens indicates the soup and fish courses have already been served), the impassive Harthouse shrewdly appraises the relationship between "The Whelp" and his attractive sister. Everything else in the scene is Walker's invention: the lack of servants, the candelabrum, the inverted tumbler (suggestive of abstemiousness) and upright wineglasses, the portrait of a middle-aged, fashionably dressed man grasping a document (suggestive of Bounderby's proprietary rights to Louisa, perhaps), the wainscotting, the ever-so-slightly patterned carpet (consonant with friend and father-in-law Thomas Gradgrind' s tastes in interior design), and the Ottoman filling the immediate foreground. This last object seems curiously in Tom's way, as if it will trip him up when he turns; perhaps it is the artist's symbol for Tom's ultimate fate in the story.

Related Materials

Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (homepage)
Walker's four illustrations for Dickens's Hard Times — Introduction
Stephen and Rachel in the Sick-Room
Mr. Harthouse and Tom Bounderby [sic] in the Garden
Stephen Blackpool Recovered from the Old Hell Shaft

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times and Pictures from Italy.Illustrated Library Edition. One vol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868.

Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book. London: Educational Book, 1910.

Last modified March 12, 2002