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Passage Realised: Tom's Diabolical Tempter

"Tom, my fine fellow, I want to have a word with you."

They had stopped among a disorder of roses — it was part of Mr. Bounderby’s humility to keep Nickits’s roses on a reduced scale — and Tom sat down on a terrace-parapet, plucking buds and picking them to pieces; while his powerful Familiar stood over him, with a foot upon the parapet, and his figure easily resting on the arm supported by that knee. They were just visible from her window. Perhaps she saw them.

"Tom, what’s the matter?"

"Oh! Mr. Harthouse," said Tom with a groan, "I am hard up, and bothered out of my life."

"My good fellow, so am I."

"You!’ returned Tom. ‘You are the picture of independence. Mr. Harthouse, I am in a horrible mess. You have no idea what a state I have got myself into — what a state my sister might have got me out of, if she would only have done it."

He took to biting the rosebuds now, and tearing them away from his teeth with a hand that trembled like an infirm old man’s. After one exceedingly observant look at him, his companion relapsed into his lightest air.

"Tom, you are inconsiderate: you expect too much of your sister. You have had money of her, you dog, you know you have." [Book the Second, "Reaping," Chapter VII, "Gunpowder," p. 97]

Commentary: Temptation in Bounderby's Garden

Mr. Harthouse and Tom Bounderby [sic] in the Garden, reverts to the other plot, drawing our attention to Harthouse's attempt to approach Louisa by developing a relationship with her beloved brother. In this illustration we find ourselves in the garden of Nickits's country-estate, which the aptly named Bounderby acquired through a bank foreclosure. At the top of the facing page, Dickens describes "a disorder of roses," which appear more disciplined and orderly in the plate. Of all the figures in Walker's four plates, these two sharply realised young men possess the greatest degree ofinner-life. As in the text, Tom lounges on the terrace-parapet near the rose-bush, tugging at the buds and pulling them to pieces, but whereas in the text he rests on an arm supported by a knee, here his legs twist in the opposite direction of his torso, a contrapposto suggesting his mental agitation. In Walker's illustration, Tom appears withdrawn and self-absorbed, rather than indignant, "hard-up, and bothered out of [his] mind" as in the text, where, his self-pity welling over, Tom is about to reveal what motivated Louisa to marry Bounderby. Appropriately enough for a temptation scene, Walker uses the suburban garden as his backdrop.

Above him looms his Mephistopheles, his "Familiar," Harthouse, recognizable from the first plate by his mutton-chop whiskers. He confers his presence in exchange for information rather than blood. Following the narrator's statement that Harthouse can make “a devilish good speech” (Book Two, Ch. 2) and seems "weary of everything, and [puts] no more faith in anything than Lucifer," Walker has given Harthouse a jacket and hat much darker than Tom's that implies his darker nature. He has positioned Harthouse with his left hand in his pocket, leaning forward confidentially, self-contained and focused, dominating the scene. Like Dickens's Harthouse, Walker's possesses a quasi-military air befitting a former Cornet of Dragoons, and plays with his watch-chain, as he did earlier in his interview with Mrs. Sparsit. Thus, Walker has synthesized everything that Dickens has said about Harthouse: he is about 35, handsome, and fashionably dressed, with "dark hair, bold eyes," "a certain gallantry at ease," and an ennui resulting from an excess of gentility — and lack of meaningful purpose.

Related Materials

• Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (homepage)
• Walker's four illustrations for Dickens's Hard Times — Introduction
• Harthouse Dines at the Bounderbys
• Stephen and Rachael in the Sick-Room
• Stephen Blackpool Recovered from the Old Hell Shaft

The phlegmatic Jem Harthouse in The Household Editions, 1876-77

• French: "'This, Sir,' Said Bounderby, 'Is My Wife, Mrs. Bounderby.'"
• Reinhart: "'My Sister Loo?' Said Tom. 'She Never Cared for Old Bounderby.'"

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.

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Last modified 29 July 2018