“Stephen and Rachael in the Sick-Room” by Frederick Walker (1868)

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Stephen and Rachael in the Sick-Room

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). Illustration opposite p. 47 in the Illustrated Library Edition (1868).

Although Dickens develops the scene through Stephen's consciousness, here he seems a mere cipher; enclosed in darkness in Walker's plate, "as if a spell were on him, . . . motionless and powerless," Stephen's face and expression are revealed only in the accompanying letter-press./p>

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Passage Realised: As if in a dream...

The wind was blowing again, the rain was beating on the house-tops, and the larger spaces through which he had strayed contracted to the four walls of his room. Saving that the fire had died out, it was as his eyes had closed upon it. Rachael seemed to have fallen into a doze, in the chair by the bed. She sat wrapped in her shawl, perfectly still. The table stood in the same place, close by the bedside, and on it, in its real proportions and appearance, was the shape so often repeated.

He thought he saw the curtain move. He looked again, and he was sure it moved. He saw a hand come forth and grope about a little. Then the curtain moved more perceptibly, and the woman in the bed put it back, and sat up.

With her woful eyes, so haggard and wild, so heavy and large, she looked all round the room, and passed the corner where he slept in his chair. Her eyes returned to that corner, and she put her hand over them as a shade, while she looked into it. Again they went all round the room, scarcely heeding Rachael if at all, and returned to that corner. He thought, as she once more shaded them — not so much looking at him, as looking for him with a brutish instinct that he was there — that no single trace was left in those debauched features, or in the mind that went along with them, of the woman he had married eighteen years before. But that he had seen her come to this by inches, he never could have believed her to be the same.

All this time, as if a spell were on him, he was motionless and powerless, except to watch her.

Stupidly dozing, or communing with her incapable self about nothing, she sat for a little while with her hands at her ears, and her head resting on them. Presently, she resumed her staring round the room. And now, for the first time, her eyes stopped at the table with the bottles on it. [Book One, "The Sowing," Chapter 13, "Rachael," pp. 47-48]

Commentary: The Deadly Bottle

Walker focuses upon the romantic triangle of the subplot (which is complemented by the Harthouse/Bounderby/Louisa triangle of the main plot, signalled in the frontispiece). As Stephen watches, stupefied, from the foreground (from the viewer's perspective, so to speak) and Rachael momentarily dozes beside the bed, the dipsomaniac's right hand stealthily reaches for the larger of the two bottles on the small bedside table (repeating the table of the first plate) while her left grasps a mug. The working-class sick-room appears in stark contrast to the affluent factory-owner's dining-room, a corner of which appears in the first plate. Here, bare floorboards protrude from beneath the ragged-edged carpet. Standing on a small (possibly three-legged) table without a cloth at the bedside a single candle illuminates the humble cell, unadorned except for an indeterminate picture in the rear (in contrast to the patriarchal portrait in the first plate). Whereas Dickens tells us that "A candle faintly burned in the window" at the very opening of Ch. 13, Book One, here it blazes with sacramental intensity, creating a haloed effect by its reflection on the wall above Rachael's head. There is no basin, but in herhands Rachael holds the linen strip mentioned in the letter-press. We see neither the trimmed fire nor the swept hearth, extensions of Rachael's benign influence and tidy-mindedness, but all is in good order. Rachael sits immediately by the bed, ready to minister to Mrs. Blackpool, as in the text screened by a curtain; this latter object, shown as part of a foreshortened canopy above the bed, Walker uses to tantalize and engage the viewer.

Walker cues the precise moment captured by the two bottles on the table, the strip of linen that the sleeping Rachael clutches, the moving hand. At the top of the page, Stephen rouses himself; at the bottom, Rachael has fallen into a dose, "wrapped in her shawl, perfectly still." Stephen notices the curtain slightly move as, on the page following, the hand steals forward. We have yet to see the creature in the bed and, held in suspense since the larger bottle for which she seems to be reaching contains poison, we visualise her from the clues Dickens has already provided: she is not in her right mind, is wounded in the neck, and bruised. We see her in our mind' s eye, but each of us completes her face and form differently,according to our individual conceptions of and experiences with the Fallen Woman.

Walker makes the illustration's focal points the dark bottle, the surreptitious hand, and the tranquil, mature beauty of Rachael's face, so like Louisa's in the former plate,despite their differences in class, education, and wealth. Walker leaves the defining of Mrs. Blackpool's image, softened by neither Christian name nor pet-name in the text, to the author himself, as the text describes the "haggard" aspect, the "woful [sic] eyes," the "debauched features," all evidence of "brutish instinct." The woman's "greedy hand" that has in the past sold out and betrayed the marriage vow for drug-money now stretches forth — but this time its owner is aware of the bottle and grasps "a mug." Thus, Walker has heightened the suspense in this chapter by conflating two moments (two reachings) into one.

Related Materials

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

Other Depictions of the Slatternly Mrs. Blackpool (1861-77)

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1988.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Fred Walker. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman & Hall, 1868.

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1862. Vol 1 (frontispiece).

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

Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. With twenty illustrations by Harry French. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877.

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

Last modified 29 July 2018