"Are you ill?"
Harold Hume Piffard
circa 1900
12 cm high by 7.7 cm wide (4 ⅝ by 3 inches)
Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood, facing p. 160.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Charles Dickens —> Harold Hume Piffard —> Mystery of Edwin Drood —> Next]
"Are you ill?" — Harold Hume Piffard's third lithograph for Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the Collins Pocket Edition, referencing page 196. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Passage Illustrated: Edwin encounters Princess Puffer near the Monks' Vineyard
[Edwin Drood] strikes into that path, and walks up to the wicket. By the light of a lamp near it, he sees that the woman is of a haggard appearance, and that her weazen chin is resting on her hands, and that her eyes are staring — with an unwinking, blind sort of steadfastness — before her.
Always kindly, but moved to be unusually kind this evening, and having bestowed kind words on most of the children and aged people he has met, he at once bends down, and speaks to this woman.
“Are you ill?”
“No, deary,” she answers, without looking at him, and with no departure from her strange blind stare.
“Are you blind?”
“No, deary.”
“Are you lost, homeless, faint? What is the matter, that you stay here in the cold so long, without moving?”
By slow and stiff efforts, she appears to contract her vision until it can rest upon him; and then a curious film passes over her, and she begins to shake.
He straightens himself, recoils a step, and looks down at her in a dread amazement; for he seems to know her.
“Good Heaven!” he thinks, next moment. “Like Jack that night!”
As he looks down at her, she looks up at him, and whimpers: “My lungs is weakly; my lungs is dreffle bad. Poor me, poor me, my cough is rattling dry!” and coughs in confirmation horribly.
"Where do you come from?" [Chapter XIV, "When Shall These Three Meet Again," pp. 195-196]
Commentary: The Meeting of Princess Puffer and Edwin Drood
One of the book's most remarkable characters, the London opium dealer Princess Puffer, lifts Piffard's illustrations out of the mundane. The respectably clad, bourgeois young men of the Piffard illustrations convey only one side of Dickens's social equation in the novel. The reader notes the extreme contrast between the fashionably attired young walker and the female derelict hunched on the ground, soliciting funds to support her addiction. Through the chapter title's obliquely quoting Shakespeare's Weird Sisters in Macbeth the author anticipates Princess Puffer's witch-like appearance as she greets the upper-middle-class youth who identifies himself as "Edwin" in this out-of-the-way spot as dusk begins to settle on the streets of Cloisterham (Rochester). On this Christmas Eve, the lavish profusion of seasonal decorations in the cathedral sharply contrasts with the indigent, ragged condition of the solitary beggar.
When Edwin has contributed three shillings and sixpence to see the addict on her way back to her 'business' in London, she confides that a man named "Ned" may be in mortal danger, but from whom she fails to mention.
Relevant Illustration of Princess Puffer from the First Edition (originally, Sept. 1870)
Above: Luke Fildes's earlier illustration emphasizes the debilitating effects of jasper's opium addition in Sleeping It Off (Chapter XXII).
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Other Stories. Illustrated by Sir Luke Fildes, R. A. London: Chapman and Hall Limited, 193, Piccadilly. 1880.
Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Other Stories, illustrated by Harold Hume Piffard. LOndon & Glasgow: Collins' Clear-Type Press, circa 1904.
Created 29 June 2022