Mr. Tulkinghorn visits the Copyist's Lodging
Felix Octavius Carr Darley
Engraver: G. Caisman, Sr.
1912
Photogravure
9.2 cm wide by 10.5 cm high
Vignetted frontispiece illustrating Volume XV, 176, in Dickens's Bleak House in the Co-operative Publication Society Edition
Text illustrated: "Hello my friend! " he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick against the door.
Terry-Lynn Johnson Collection
Passage Illustrated: Tulkinghorn confronts the delirious law-writer (Capt. Hawdon)
Mr. Tulkinghorn with a nod goes on his way. He comes to the dark door on the second floor. He knocks, receives no answer, opens it, and accidentally extinguishes his candle in doing so.
The air of the room is almost bad enough to have extinguished it if he had not. It is a small room, nearly black with soot, and grease, and dirt. In the rusty skeleton of a grate, pinched at the middle as if Poverty had gripped it, a red coke fire burns low. In the corner by the chimney, stand a deal table and a broken desk: a wilderness marked with a rain of ink. In another corner, a ragged old portmanteau on one of the two chairs, serves for cabinet or wardrobe; no larger one is needed, for it collapses like the cheeks of a starved man. The floor is bare; except that one old mat, trodden to shreds of rope-yarn, lies perishing upon the hearth. No curtain veils the darkness of the night, but the discolored shutters are drawn together; and through the two gaunt holes pierced in them, famine might be staring in — the Banshee of the man upon the bed.
For, on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking, and coarse sacking, the lawyer, hesitating just within the doorway, sees a man. He lies there, dressed in shirt and trousers, with bare feet. He has a yellow look in the spectral darkness of a candle that has guttered down, until the whole length of its wick (still burning) has doubled over, and left a tower of winding-sheet above it. His hair is ragged, mingling with his whiskers and his beard — the latter, ragged too, and grown, like the scum and mist around him, in neglect. Foul and filthy as the room is, foul and filthy as the air, it is not easy to perceive what fumes those are which most oppress the senses in it; but through the general sickliness and faintness, and the odor of stale tobacco, there comes into the lawyer's mouth the bitter, vapid taste of opium.
"Hallo, my friend!" he cries, and strikes his iron candlestick against the door. — Volume One, Chapter 10, "The Law-writer," pp. 199-201 [1863 edition].
Links to Related Material
- "For on a low bed opposite the fire, a confusion of dirty patchwork, lean-ribbed ticking. . ." by Darley (1863)
- Phiz's original conception of Tulkinghorn: The old man of the name of Tulkinghorn in Ch. XXXIII (January 1853)
Image scan and text 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
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. New York: Seldon and Company, 1863. Vol. 2.
Dickens, Charles. Works. Photogravure-Illustrated Edition. New York and London: Co-operative Publication Society, [n. d., 1912?].
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Created 12 August 2012
Last modified 30 January 2025