The Streets, Morning (full-page illustration) by George Cruikshank. Copper-plate engraving ( 1836) and steel-engraving (1839). Original dimensions: 10 cm high x 8 cm wide (4 by 3 ⅛ inches); dimensions of the revised engraving 11.5 x 9.3 cm (4 ½ by 3 ¾ inches), vignetted, facing page 36. Cruikshank's original illustration for the 1836 Second Series of Dickens's Sketches by Boz, duodecimo, faces page 6. First published by John Macrone, St. James's Square, London. The chief difference between the 1836 and 1839 engravings lies in the darkness of the street scene between the two lampstandards in the later steel; the original defines that space as much lighter, and Cruikshank's detailing of the building fronts and the spire is much delicate in the copper-plate engraving. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Passage Illustrated
The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise, on a summer's morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is very impressive.
The last drunken man, who shall find his way home before sunlight, has just staggered heavily along, roaring out the burden of the drinking song of the previous night: the last houseless vagrant whom penury and police have left in the streets, has coiled up his chilly limbs in some paved comer, to dream of food and warmth. The drunken, the dissipated, and the wretched have disappeared; the more sober and orderly part of the population have not yet awakened to the labours of the day, and the stillness of death is over the streets; its very hue seems to be imparted to them, cold and lifeless as they look in the grey, sombre light of daybreak. The coach-stands in the larger thoroughfares are deserted: the night-houses are closed; and the chosen promenades of profligate misery are empty.
An occasional policeman may alone be seen at the street corners, listlessly gazing on the deserted prospect before him; and now and then a rakish-looking cat runs stealthily across the road and descends his own area with as much caution and slyness — bounding first on the water-butt, then on the dust-hole, and then alighting on the flag-stones — as if he were conscious that his character depended on his gallantry of the preceding night escaping public observation. A partially opened bedroom-window here and there, bespeaks the heat of the weather, and the uneasy slumbers of its occupant; and the dim scanty flicker of the rushlight, through the window-blind, denotes the chamber of watching or sickness. With these few exceptions, the streets present no signs of life, nor the houses of habitation.
An hour wears away; the spires of the churches and roofs of the principal buildings are faintly tinged with the light of the rising sun; and the streets, by alm slowly along: the sleepy waggoner impatiently urging on his tired horses, or vainly endeavouring to awaken the boy, who, luxuriously stretched on the top of the fruit-baskets, forgets, in happy oblivion, his long-cherished curiosity to behold the wonders of London.["Scenes," Chapter One, "The Streets — Morning," page 36 in the 1839 edition; pp. 3-6 in the 1836 edition]
Commentary: The evolution of an article into a sketch (1835-36)
The hour-by-hour description of the City of London's awakening to another day of commerce and consumption did not originally alongside its companion piece which became the second chapter in "Scenes," "The Streets — Night." Whereas the latter was first published under the pseudonym "Tibbs" in Bell's Life in London on 17 January 1836 as "Scenes and Characters No. 17, The Streets at Night," the complementary essay appeared under the pen-name "Boz" almost a year earlier in The Evening Chronicle on 21 July 1835 as "Sketches of London No. 17." Dickens seems to have been thinking that they might well be published together as he chose the number "17" for both.
The prominent lamp-post in the centre of the Cruikshank composition establishes a strong vertical that is echoed by the client at the coffee stand, the strong verticals of the narrow buildings, and the city church (centre background) — all of which carry the eye upward, towards the patch of clearing sky between the buildings. Against these cutting-edge verticals are the meandering streets of cobblestone, deserted at this tranquil hour except for the street boy, the proprietress of the coffee-wagon, the static customer, and a police officer, lounging in the background. Cruikshank has juxtaposed signs indicative of modern commerce and food services — "Baker" and "The Rising Sun" — against the symbol of social and historical continuity, the seventeenth-century spire of the Wren City church, pointing heavenward as the clouds retreat and daylight supervenes. The customer in a shopman's apron, perhaps on his way to Covent Garden Market, is one of those reputable denizens who have replaced the drunks and vagrants of the night just ended, but the shutters of the shops have yet to open and greet another day of buying and selling. Although Dickens is rather general in his description of the streets, Cruikshank has inserted the sign of the The Rising Sun public house in Tottenham Court Road, Fitzrovia — the same area as the Cleveland Street Workhouse, across the street from the shop above which the Dickenses lived when they came up to London from Kent (they had two residents in that area, 1829-32). Thus, apart from being a sort of visual pun pointing towards the time of day, the public-house's sign, upper centre, holds additional significance for Dickens's London readers since the detail situates the sketch much more specifically than the opening of the essay:
Licensed in 1730 as the Sun and rebuilt in 1897 by Treadwell & Martin. The rising sun is a natural name for a pub with its associations with good weather and good fortune, but it also forms a large part of the coat of arms of the Distillers' Company which makes it even more popular as a pub name.
Karl Marx is reputed to have used this pub in the 1850s when 18 pubs then existed along the Tottenham Court Road.— "The Rising Sun" in WhatPub. "The Campaign for Real Ale."
Since Covent Garden is contiguous with the districts of Bloomsbury and Holborn, and is within reasonable walking distance of The Rising Sun, not far from The British Museum, the visual reference to this particular public house would seem to be Cruikshank's way of pointing the informed reader towards the areas of London covered by these opening essays in "Scenes." Moreover, The Cleveland Street Workhouse, Norfolk Square, is actually the basis for the poorhouse in Oliver Twist, begun in the autumn of 1836, just after the publication of "The Streets — Night."
The Relevant Illustration from The Household Edition (1876): The Evening
Above: Fred Barnard's kinetic scene of passengers struggling against intense wind and rain on the London streets, It is nearly eleven o'clock, and the cold thin rain, which has been drizzling so long, is beginning to pour down in good earnest. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image, image correction, formatting, and caption by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and 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, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. Second series. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: John Macrone, 1836.
Dickens, Charles. "The Streets — Morning," Chapter 1 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890. Pp. 36-40.
Dickens, Charles. "The Streets — Night," Chapter 2 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Vol. XIII. Pp. 25-27.
Dickens, Charles. "The Streets — Morning," Chapter 1 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. 46-51.
Dickens, Charles, and Fred Barnard. The Dickens Souvenir Book. London: Chapman & Hall, 1912.
Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. Pp. 12-15.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.
""The Rising Sun: The Campaign for Real Ale." WhatPub. Web. Accessed 20 April 2017, 17 May 2023.
Created 20 April 2017 Last updated 17 May 2023