"In a transport of presence of mind and fury, he instantly caught him up in both hands, and three him over his own head out into the entry, where the check-takers received him like a game at ball" — Book 10, chap. ii, "Incident Before a Reading." The twenty-sixth illustration in the twenty-second volume of the Household Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens: John Forster's <span class="book">Life of Charles Dickens</span> (1872, rpt. 1879)

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"In a transport of presence of mind and fury, he instantly caught him up in both hands, and three him over his own head out into the entry, where the check-takers received him like a game at ball."

Fred Barnard

1879

Woodblock engraving by the Dalziels

13.9 by 10.9 cm (5 ½ by 4 ¼ inches), page 397, framed

Book 10, chap. ii. Forster's Life of Charles Dickens in volume XXII of the Household Edition.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image 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.]

Passage Illustrated: "Incident Before a Reading" in February 1868 in Washington, DC

The first reading had been four days earlier, and was described to his daughter in a letter on the 4th, with a comical incident that occurred in the course of it. "The gas was very defective indeed last night, and I began with a small speech to the effect that I must trust to the brightness of their faces for the illumination of mine. This was taken greatly. In the Carol a most ridiculous incident occurred. All of a sudden, I saw a dog leap out from among the seats in the centre aisle, and look very intently at me. The general attention being fixed on me, I don't think anybody saw this dog; but I felt so sure of his turning up again and barking, that I kept my eye wandering about in search of him. He was a very comic dog, and it was well for me that I was reading a comic part of the book. But when he bounced out into the centre aisle again, in an entirely new place, and (still looking intently at me) tried the effect of a bark upon my proceedings, I was seized with such a paroxysm of laughter that it communicated itself to the audience, and we roared at one another, loud and long." Three days later the sequel came, in a letter to his sister-in-law. "I mentioned the dog on the first night here? Next night, I thought I heard (in Copperfield) a suddenly-suppressed bark. It happened in this wise: One of our people, standing just within the door, felt his leg touched, and looking down beheld the dog, staring intently at me, and evidently just about to bark. In a transport of presence of mind and fury, he instantly caught him up in both hands, and threw him over his own head, out into the entry, where the check-takers received him like a game at ball. Last night he came again, with another dog; but our people were so sharply on the look-out for him that he didn't get in. He had evidently promised to pass the other dog, free." [Book X, "America Revisited," ch. ii, "January to April. 1868," pp. 396-398]

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Barnard, Fred, et al. Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings by Fred Barnard, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), J. Mahoney [and others] printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman & Hall, 1908. Page 583.

[The copy of the book from which these pictures were scanned is in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.]

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872 and 1874. 3 vols.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 22 vols. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879. Vol. XXII.

Created 15 September 2009

Last modified 15 January 2025