Mr. Lambkin has to be nursed, and to go through a regular course of medicine
George Cruikshank
1844
Steel-engraving
9.9 cm high by 8.7 cm wide, framed
Eighteenth illustration for The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin (Gent.), in the Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement, p. 35 (right-hand side of the ninth plate).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Mr. Lambkin has to be nursed, and to go through a regular course of medicine, taking many a bitter pill and requiring all the sweet persuasive powers of Mrs. Slops to take his "regular doses" of that horrid nasty stuff. [page 35]
Readers of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit will recognize in Mrs. Slops the figure of the private nurse so humorously represented by the bibulous Mrs. Gamp in Mrs. Gamp Has Her Eye on the Future (October 1843) and Mrs. Gamp Propoges a Toast (June 1844). Cruikshank's specimen is far tidier and less slatternly than the boozy Mrs. Gamp, an untrained, illiterate private attendant. Later in the decade, in emulation of the Catholic nursing orders on the continent, nursing sisterhoods were inaugurated (partially in response to Dickens's exposé) to raise the standards of the nursing profession in Great Britain.
Cruikshank has added such telling details as the bottles of medicine and gruel on the table, and the portraits of Lambkin as a schoolboy (readily identifiable by his nose) and the donkey over the mantlepiece. The schoolboy portrait serves to remind the patient of the health and vigour he once enjoyed, and the donkey may constitute Cruikshank's editorial aside about Lambkin's recent folly. Since the previous frame, when Lambkin's physician made a house-call, the protagonist's state of health has markedly declined. He coughs and sneezes as the nurse tries to persuade him to take a glass of cough medicine. Already he is indulging in a little Hydropaphy by immersing his feet in a bath of hot water and warming himself before a coal fire.
Left: Cruikshank's suggestion of Lambkin's vanity, Portrait of Lambkin as a Schoolboy. Right: Cruikshank's editorial comment on Lambkin's stubbornness and folly, Portrait of a Donkey. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Cruikshank, George. The Bachelor’s Own Book; Or, The Progress Of Mr. Lambkin, In The Pursuit Of Pleasure And Amusement. Glasgow: David Bryce, 1844, rpt. 1880.
Last modified 25 May 2018
