Emblem XII

Charles Bennett

1861

Wood engraving by an unidentified engraver

2¾ x 2¼ inches

Illustration for Quarles’ Emblems, p.50.

Another of Bennett’s most disconcerting images, in part a lesson about surfeit and starvation, both moral and physical, and in part a commentary on the inequalities of mid-Victorian society. It visceral immediacy, notably in the contrast between the obscene plenty of the breasts and the starving child, is typical of his capacity to shock his viewers.

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Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke.

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Commentary

The text is Isaiah LXVI: II: ‘Ye may suck, but not be satisfied with the breast of her consolation’. Quarles explains the lines’ admonition never to take ‘surfeit where thou should’st but taste’, and Bennett’s design makes this message clear in a grotesque configuration. Two figures are fed by a pair of breasts attached to a fleshly globe, the symbol of the world; one is a plump infant dressed as a jester and the other a diseased and starving child, complete with an angel’s withered wings, who has to sieve whatever is left of the milk. Sharply contrasted, the characters connote the negative outcome of excess: the obese child takes more than he needs and, morally speaking, will ultimately become the foundling, afflicted with illness and without spiritual nourishment. The contrapuntal arrangement of the figures stresses the idea that ‘Who strains beyond a mean, draws in and gulps disease’; moderation is the message, symbolized in the movement between bloated excess and moral poverty. At the same time, Bennett gives his universal sign a contemporary significance. Extending beyond Quarles’s text, he shows his children as Plenty and Want, the physical embodiments of class difference in a Britain which in the 1860s was almost as sharply divided on economic lines as in previous decades. The figures recall Dickens’s Ignorance and Want in A Christmas Carol (1843), and the notion of topical relevance is stressed, bizarrely, by placing the symbolic scene at the side of a railway line, complete with a telegraph line, a passage under the line, and a signal-box. Presented in the form of a universal dream-image, the image functions as an iconographic scheme visualising universal truths as Quarles configured them, and as a piece of journalism.

References

Quarles’ Emblems. London: Nisbet, 1861.

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Last modified 24 March 2014