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Mrs. Joseph Porter [Mr. Sempronius Gattleton as Othello]
George Cruikshank
1839
Copper engraving
11.1 by 9.6 cm, vignetted
"Mrs. Joseph Porter" — the ninth chapter in "Tales," by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, facing p. 319.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Ting, ting, ting! went the prompter's bell at eight o'clock precisely, and dash went the orchestra into the overture to "The Men of Prometheus."The pianoforte player hammered away with laudable perseverance; and the violoncello, which struck in at intervals, "sounded very well, considering."The unfortunate individual, however, who had undertaken to play the flute accompaniment "at sight,"found, from fatal experience, the perfect truth of the old adage, "out of sight, out of mind;"for being very near-sighted, and being placed at a considerable distance from his music-book, all he had an opportunity of doing was to play a bar now and then in the wrong place, and put the other performers out. It is, however, but justice to Mr. Brown to say that he did this to admiration.The overture, in fact, was not unlike a race between the different instruments; the piano came in first by several bars, and the violoncello next, quite distancing the poor flute; for the deaf gentleman too-too'daway, quite unconscious that he was at all wrong, until apprised, by the applause of the audience, that the overture was concluded. A considerable bustle and shuffling of feet was then heard upon the stage, accompanied by whispers of "Here's a pretty go! — what's to be done?"&c. The audience applauded again, by way of raising the spirits of the performers; and then Mr. Sempronius desired the prompter, in a very audible voice, to "clear the stage, and ring up."
Ting, ting, ting! went the bell again. Everybody sat down; the curtain shook; rose sufficiently high to display several pair of yellow boots paddling about; and there remained.
Ting, ting, ting! went the bell again. The curtain was violently convulsed, but rose no higher; the audience tittered; Mrs. Porter looked at Uncle Tom; Uncle Tom looked at everybody, rubbing his hands, and laughing with perfect rapture. After as much ringing with the little bell as a muffin-boy would make in going down a tolerably long street, and a vast deal of whispering, hammering, and calling for nails and cord, the curtain at length rose, and discovered Mr. Sempronius Gattleton solus, and decked for Othello. . . . .
At last, the tragedy began in real earnest. It went off well enough, until the third scene of the first act, in which Othello addresses the Senate: the only remarkable circumstance being, that as Iago could not get on any of the stage boots, in consequence of his feet being violently swelled with the heat and excitement, he was under the necessity of playing the part in a pair of Wellingtons, which contrasted rather oddly with his richly embroidered pantaloons. When Othello started with his address to the Senate (whose dignity was represented by, the Duke, a carpenter, two men engaged on the recommendation of the gardener, and a boy), Mrs. Porter found the opportunity she so anxiously sought.
Mr. Sempronius proceeded —
"'Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors, My very noble and approv'd good masters, That I have ta'en away this old man's daughter, It is most true;— rude am I in my speech —'"
"Is that right?" whispered Mrs. Porter to Uncle Tom.
"No."
"Tell him so, then."
"I will. Sem!"called out Uncle Tom, "that’s wrong, my boy."
"What's wrong, uncle?" demanded Othello, quite forgetting the dignity of his situation.
"You've left out something. — "Tales," Chapter 9, "Mrs. Joseph Porter," pp. 323-25.
Originally published as 'Mrs Joseph Porter, "Over the Way"' in The Monthly Magazine, Jan. 1834, CD's second appearance in print. Comic account of the wrecking of an amateur production of Othello in the Gattleton family by the jealous Mrs. Porter. — The Dickens Index p. 172.
Preparations have been extensive, food in quantity has been laid in, and everybody knows his or her role — although perhaps not to the complete satisfaction of Mrs. Gattleton's waggish older brother, "Uncle Tom" Balderstone, who has committed to memory (with pauses and emphases) the lines of "all the principal plays of Shakespeare from beginning to end" (321). Unfortunately for the success of the amateur production, Uncle Tom cannot bear incorrect lines: "he could never sit by, and hear a misquotation from the 'Swan of Avon' without setting the unfortunate delinquent right" (321-322). Sitting in the centre of the third row from the stage beside the intensely jealous and spiteful Mrs. Porter, a close neighbour of the Gattletons, Uncle Tom, unwitting putty in the predatory Mrs. Porter's hands, undermines the confidence of the actors, beginning with that of his brother-in-law, who is both stage-manager and lead. From the illustration, it is apparent that Othello, on the edge of the narrow stage, is addressing the Venetian Senate, as represented by a man in a bushy beard. Cruikshank's realisation of Uncle Tom's opening salvo prepares the reader for an Othello that is, in fact, a Comedy of Errors. Egged on by the pernicious Mrs. Porter, Uncle Tom performs "a kind of running accompaniment, by muttering out everybody's part as it was delivered, in an undertone" (325). Suddenly, no actor is comfortable in his tights, costumes are found to be ill-fitting and difficult to move in, hats with plumes get lost in "the flies," technical effects such as the fire at the end of act two go awry, and the orchestra is thoroughly put out. Mrs. Porter feels a sense of elation that the affair has turned out to be "a complete failure," even though the audience has found the inept production a delightful farce: "The audience went home at four o'clock in the morning, exhausted with laughter" (326).
The 1837 Cruikshank illustration captures the precise moment when the sarcastic neighbour initiates her disruption by prompting Uncle Tom Balderstone, something of an authority on the works of Shakespeare with a thorough working knowledge of his plays (not unlike Dickens), to correct the lead, her wealthy Clapham neighbour Sempronius Gattleton, in mid-speech. She is presumably the woman immediately under the rosette, and next to the balding Uncle Tom, who has just noted the error, has stood up, and is pointing at the stage. The audience as one turn away from the stage to listen to Uncle Tom's objection. As Frederic G. Kitton notes, Cruikshank had to re-engrave this illustration for the Chapman and Hall serialisation, and the subsequent 1839 anthology:
During the following year (1837) Macrone published a Second Series of the "Sketches" in one volume, uniform in size and character with its predecessors, and containing ten etchings by Cruikshank; for the second edition of this extra volume two additional illustrations were done, viz., "The Last Cab-Driver" and "May-day in the Evening." It was at this time that Dickens repurchased from Macrone the entire copyright of the "Sketches," and arranged with Chapman & Hall for a complete edition, to be issued in shilling monthly parts, octavo size, the first number appearing in November of that year. The completed work contained all the Cruikshank plates (except that entitled "The Free and Easy," which, for some unexplained reason, was cancelled) and the following [twelve] new subjects: "The Parish Engine," "The Broker's Man," "Our Next-door Neighbours" [sic], "Early Coaches," "Public Dinners," "The Gin-Shop," "Making a Night of It," "The Boarding-House," "The Tuggses at Ramsgate," "The Steam Excursion," "Mrs. Joseph Porter," and "Mr. Watkins Tottle." — "George Cruikshank, p. 4.
Unlike Cruikshank's earlier illustration Private Theatres the setting is not a theatre in the City, but the converted dining room of a wealthy stock-broker in suburban Clapham Rise, South London, which Dickens would later use as the locale for "The Poor Relation's Story," the 1852 Christmas Story in Household Words. In the 1830s, as the area became more populous, horse-drawn omnibuses began running between Clapham and London to the north. After the coming of the railways, Clapham developed as a suburb for commuters into central London. However, Dickens wrote the story just prior to the arrival of the London to Southampton railway in 1838 designed to service a growing upper-middle-class population that had been attracted to the noble mansions designed and built by Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855) in the Clapham Park Estate, which he began in 1825 when he purchased 229 acres for the exclusive housing development. Coincidentally, having built much of Tavistock Square and vicinity in the 1820s with elegant Regency mansions, his firm later extended Tavistock House for Charles Dickens.
Twenty-three years after writing the satire on amateur theatricals and suburban jealousies, forty-four-year-old Dickens collaborated with fellow amateur thespian and playwright Wilkie Collins on the melodrama The Frozen Deep. For the initial production of this play, as well as for The Lighthouse (with a backdrop designed by his old friend and collaborator on The Christmas Books, 1844-48, the ex-Royal Navy sailor and landscape painter Clarkson Stanfield), and the children's plays William Tell, Tom Thumb, and Fortunio and His Seven Gifted Servants, Dickens converted his children's schoolroom at his Bloomsbury mansion Tavistock House at Christmas 1856 into "The Smallest Theatre in the World." The first such play he presented there during his first Twelfth Night entertainments was the burlesque Guy Fawkes by Alfred Smith.
Preparations for the private play had gone on incessantly up to Christmas [1856], and, in turning the schoolroom into a theatre, sawing and hammering worthy of Babel continued for weeks. the priceless help of Stanfield had again been secured, and I remember finding him one day at Tavistock House in the act of upsetting some elaborate arrangements by Dickens, with a proscenium before him made up of chairs, and the scenery planned out with walking-sticks. But Dickens's art in a matter of this kind was to know how to take advice; and no suggestion came to him that he was not ready to act upon, if it presented the remotest likelihood. — John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, II, 134.
Compare this massive work of temporary conversion to that of Sempronius Gattleton at the opening of the story:
Most extensive were the preparations at Rose Villa, Clapham Rise, in the occupation of Mr. Gattleton (a stock-broker in especially comfortable circumstances), and great was the anxiety of Mr. Gattleton's interesting family, as the day fixed for the representation of the Private Play which had been "many months in preparation," approached. The whole family was infected with the mania for Private Theatricals; the house, usually so clean and tidy, was, to use Mr. Gattleton's expressive description, "regularly turned out o' windows;" the large dining-room, dismantled of its furniture, and ornaments, presented a strange jumble of flats, flies, wings, lamps, bridges, clouds, thunder and lightning, festoons and flowers, daggers and foil, and various other messes in theatrical slang included under the comprehensive name of "properties." The bedrooms were crowded with scenery, the kitchen was occupied by carpenters. Rehearsals took place every other night in the drawing-room, and every sofa in the house was more or less damaged by the perseverance and spirit with which Mr. Sempronius Gattleton, and Miss Lucina, rehearsed the smothering scene in "Othello" — it having been determined that that tragedy should form the first portion of the evening's entertainments. [319]
The autobiographical aspect of the story even extends to Dickens's fascination with the works of Shakespeare. Fittingly, a statue of Shakespeare overlooks Dickens's grave in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. Thus, there may be a bit of "self-satire" in his characterisation of the know-it-all Uncle Tom. Before he turned nine, Charles Dickens accompanied his cousin James Lamert to the Theatre Royal, Rochester, to see Richard III; he recalled these early impressions of Shakespeare on stage in "Dullborough Town" in The Uncommercial Traveller. When on his eighteenth birthday he could finally get a card to the library of the British Museum, one of the first books he checked out was a two-volume Shakespeare, and for some years afterward his chief ambition, as he confided in John Forster (later, his biographer), was to become an actor. "In 1833 he wrote and, with his family and friends, produced a Shakespearean travesty, The O'Thello" (Schlicke, p. 525). Moreover, as Michael Slater notes, the tag-line or subtitle of his second, enormously popular weekly journal All the Year Round is derived from this late Shakespeare tragedy, "The story of our lives, from year to year" (Slater, p. 470). Dickens was one of the founding members of the Shakespeare Society, which, although short-lived (1837-39), led to triumphant stage performances for Dickens in later life as he organized benefit performances of traditional and contemporary comedies for the Royal General Theatrical Fund.
"Sempronius," by the way, the Christian name of the actor-manager with whom Dickens so sympathizes in this story, is actually a double Shakespearean allusion in that it denotes both the jealous friend of the titular character in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and one of the protagonist's kinsmen in Titus Andronicus. On 27 April 1836, while he waited for his dinner at the Garrick Club, the lion of the Victorian stage, actor-manager William Charles Macready, read a recently-published amusing anthology of essays, sketches, and stories entitled Sketches by Boz, in which he particularly enjoyed two pieces about amateur theatricals, "Private Theatres" and "Mrs. Joseph Porter."
In the play, an amateur performance of Othello quickly descends into farce, with Iago playing his part in wellington boots, Roderigo has a tall hat that keeps knocking against scenery, and an enthusiastic audience member continuously shouts out corrections whenever lines are misread, John’s manuscript dates Dickens’ play as 1833, but increasingly Dickensian scholars have challenged this assumption, pointing to the one reference Dickens makes to it in a letter of April 1834 and suggesting the mistake is on John's part, and that the play was actually written after "Mrs. Joseph Porter," to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday [23 April, also St. George's Day]. The significance of this ordering is that the comic fiction inspires an actual play, rather than the play inspiring a short story about a disastrous performance. If we think O'Thellocomes first, as John suggests, then the resulting narrative would be Dickens writing a play about Othello, and then later using some of that experience in his fictional sketch, suggesting in turn that the play was not a complete success. But, if we assume "Mrs. Joseph Porter" came first, and that having written of a disastrous performance Dickens decides to write his own nonsense version of Othello, then it gives Dickens more self-awareness in the script, writing his play with full awareness of potential pitfalls and pranks, but cheerfully doing so regardless. Burlesques such as these mocked the actors as much as the plays. It should not be read, therefore, simply as Dickens parodying Shakespeare. Far from it. Shakespeare was a familiar source and friend that could be used thus as a mirror for Dickens, and his family, to parody themselves.— "Blogging Shakespeare."
See also "The Development of Leisure in Britain, 1700-1850:
Left: Cruikshank's far more animated and engaging bacchanal, Greenwich Fair. Centre: Cruikshank's view of the rising classes in a tea garden, London Recreations. Right: Cruikshank's scene backstage during an amateur production of Macbeth, Private Theatres. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.
Bentley, Nicholas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens: Index. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z. The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. "Mrs. Joseph Porter," Chapter 9 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890. Pp. 319-26.
Dickens, Charles. "Mrs. Joseph Porter," Chapter 9 in "Tales," Christmas Books and Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875 [rpt. of 1867 Ticknor & Fields edition]. Pp. 449-59.
Dickens, Charles. "Mrs. Joseph Porter," Chapter 9 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Pp. 202-07.
Dickens, Charles. "Mrs. Joseph Porter," Chapter 9 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. 459-64.
Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman and Hall, n. d. 2 vols. [Originally published in 3 vols., 1872-4.]
Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book: A Record of the Dickens Illustrators. The Charles Dickens Library Edition, vol. 17. London: Educational Book, 1910.
Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. Pp. 12-15.
Kitton, Frederic G. "George Cruikshank." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: Chapman & Hall, 1899. Pp. 1-28.
Orford, Pete. "O'Thello." Blooging Shakespeare: Embracing Shakespearean Conversation in the Digital Age. Stratford-upon-Avon: The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.29 May 2017. http://bloggingshakespeare.com/othello
Schlicke, Paul. Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.
Thomas, Deborah A. Dickens and the Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Last modified 30 May 2017