Looks that he had long forgotten were fixed upon him once more. . . — Fred Barnard's thirty-third illustration for "Sketches by Boz"

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Looks that he had long forgotten were fixed upon him once more. . . .

Fred Barnard

13.8 cm x 10 cm, vignetted, p. 237.

three-quarter-page wood-engraving for Chapter 12 in "Tales," in Dickens's Sketches by Boz, the thirteenth volume of the Household Edition (1876).

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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham

Full caption: "Looks that he had long forgotten were fixed upon him once more; voices long since hushed in death sounded in his ears like the music of village bells."

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Passage Illustrated

At last, one bitter night, he sunk down on a door-step faint and ill. The premature decay of vice and profligacy had worn him to the bone. His cheeks were hollow and livid; his eyes were sunken, and their sight was dim. His legs trembled beneath his weight, and a cold shiver ran through every limb.

And now the long-forgotten scenes of a misspent life crowded thick and fast upon him. He thought of the time when he had a home — a happy, cheerful home — and of those who peopled it, and flocked about him then, until the forms of his elder children seemed to rise from the grave, and stand about him — so plain, so clear, and so distinct they were that he could touch and feel them. Looks that he had long forgotten were fixed upon him once more; voices long since hushed in death sounded in his ears like the music of village bells. But it was only for an instant. The rain beat heavily upon him; and cold and hunger were gnawing at his heart again.

He rose, and dragged his feeble limbs a few paces further. The street was silent and empty; the few passengers who passed by, at that late hour, hurried quickly on, and his tremulous voice was lost in the violence of the storm. Again that heavy chill struck through his frame, and his blood seemed to stagnate beneath it. He coiled himself up in a projecting doorway, and tried to sleep.

But sleep had fled from his dull and glazed eyes. His mind wandered strangely, but he was awake, and conscious. The well-known shout of drunken mirth sounded in his ear, the glass was at his lips, the board was covered with choice rich food — they were before him: he could see them all, he had but to reach out his hand, and take them — and, though the illusion was reality itself, he knew that he was sitting alone in the deserted street, watching the rain-drops as they pattered on the stones; that death was coming upon him by inches — and that there were none to care for or help him. — "Tales," chap. xii, p. 237.

Commentary

Once again, as the narrator of "The Drunkard's Death" declares, the events of the plot that lead to the climax at the end of the story are familiar ones, "of too frequent occurrence to be rare items in any man's experience" (p. 484). In this case, an alcoholic father neglects his saintly wife who eventually dies of a broken heart, drives his sons away from home, and exploits his daughter. The latter, in turn, eventually leaves him when one of her brothers, now a murderer who has returned to their slum apartment for refuge, is drunkenly betrayed by the father "into the hangman's hands" (p. 491). Once again, the primary purpose of this piece appears to be not its deliberately conventional account of the road to run — in this instance along the route later depicted in Cruikshank's The Bottle [eight illustrations, 1847] — but rather its presentation of an irrational state of mind. In particular, this irrational mental state is that of the reprobate father whose drunkenness is equated with madness. — Deborah A. Thomas, pp. 17-18.

Without even a room after the loss of his family, the down-and-out drunkard shelters in doorways at night, so that the portrait of the protagonist of the fifty-sixth and last selection in Sketches by Boz ("Second Series") is contextualised as the reader immediately realizes that the decrepit, ill-clad, unshaven homeless person shivering in the darkened doorway has nowhere to go, and no prospects in life. Although Dickjens names his children (Mary, John, Henry, and William) the hopeless drunkard lacks a Christian name, and therefore a fully individualized identity — this deficit Fred Barnard attempts to address by hinting at something of a better life left long ago in Looks that he had long forgotten were fixed upon him once more; voices long since hushed in death sounded in his ears like the music of village bells (p. 237). The protagonist will determine to die, alone and friendless, like Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend, but he will not have the dignified death of the self-reliant old woman who has supported herself all her life and is not about to stoop to taking charity in her final days. Whereas the reader easily extends sympathy to the fiercely independent Betty as she is determined not to be a burden to the parish and die in a workhouse, Dickens and Barnard have to manipulate the reader through a sympathetic and sentimental portrayal of an incorrigible alcoholic whose addiction has led inevitably towards his suicide — as if he were one of the unfortunates in George Cruikshank's cautionary visual sequence The Drunkard's Children (1848). Dickens's including such a degenerate among his views of "Every-day People" implies that the author felt the problems caused by poverty and addiction were far more prevalent than his upper-middle-class readers would like to believe. Barnard enforces the reader's belief in the drunkard's essential goodness through the three-quarter-page portrait in which a spiritual gaze upward and clenched hands seem to betoken a prayer for forgiveness, whether of his absent and dead children or the judgmental, middle-class reader who has been able to afford the cost of the "Second Series" volume of 1837.

What exactly did the term "middle class" signify in London of the 1830s when Dickens wrote a series of "sketches" to describe "Every-day Life and Every-day People"? Dickens's own anxieties about his own place in this somewhat nebulous but growing constituent of English society are reflected in the range of young men who somehow exemplify le bourgeoisie Anglais. Hence, he begins with the local authority, the Beadle, and the parish council who traditionally elected this parochial figure. He includes in his description of middle-class types a small property owner, as in "Our Neighbour Next-door," and even a prosperous stock-brocker, the acme of the commercial class, Mr. Sempronius Gattleton of suburban Clapham Rise in "Mr. Joseph Porter," and even aspiring shop-people such as Jemima Evans and her beau ("Miss Evans and The Eagle"). Members of this class indulge in music, amateur theatricals, excursions, and even vacations. They seem much closer to modern, middle-class readers than, for example, the mixed bag of bourgeoisie who comprise Chaucer's pilgrims in The General Prologue to 'The Canterbury Tales'. They yearn for comfort, affluence, and family life, like the wealthy spinster Miss Lillerton, the timid bachelor Watkins Tottle, and the Kitterbells. But in "The Drunkard's Death" Dickens confronts what lies below the middle class, the under-class that his profligate father John very nearly joined once incarcerated in the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison. Although to modern readers the final vision of the lower echelons of English society is depressing and thought-provoking, to young Charles Dickens just breaking into print and making his way up the class structure, the prospect of alcoholism, degeneracy, and an ignominious death in the waters of the Thames must have been terrifying. After berating the father, Warden, as a cowardly, anguished drunkard in the family's flat in an obscure court off Fleet Street as his son is escorted away by the minions of the legal system, Barnard makes him worthy of the upper-middle-class reader's sympathy by revealing a sensibility not coarsened by drink and poverty, even as Warden drifts downward after the loss of his family. Alienated and homeless, the drunkard returns in memory to childhood in a village, the core of English society where everyone matters and everyone has an identity and familial roots. Barnard describes the alcoholic as an almost spiritual type, a human being certainly worthy to be the subject of imaginative engagement as his yearning, almost aesthetic gaze upward and to the right suggests that he is revisiting that golden age.

Darley's Frontispieces for "Sketches by Boz" (1864)

Left: Felix Octavius Carr Darley's initial frontispiece showing desperate female penitentiary inmates, A Visit to Newgate. Right: Darley's second frontispiece, depicting the pathetic scene in which Mrs. Warden dies, probably of a combination of malnutrition and disease, The Drunkard's Death. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Above: The initial Barnard illustration, depicting the apprehension of the fugitive murderer, the drunkard's rebellious son, in He raised his manacled hands in a threatening attitude, fixed his eyes on his shrieking parent, and slowly left the room. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Above: The final Barnard illustration, depicting the drunkard's body washed up on the shore of Thames, Uncaptioned tailpiece, also called The body was washed ashore, some miles down river, a swollen disfigured mass — "Tales," Ch. 12, in Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens, Being Eight Hundred and Sixty-six Drawings by Fred Barnard, Gordon Thomson, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), J. McL. Ralston, J. Mahoney, H. French, Charles Green,, E. G. Dalziel, A. B. Frost, F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes (1907). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Some Barnard Portraits of Dickens's Leading Characters in The Household Edition, 1871-79

Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim in The Christmas Books (1878)

Bibliography

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

Bentley, Nicholas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens: Index. 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, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. "The Drunkard's Death," Chapter 12 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890. Pp. 368-76.

Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. Works ofCharles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley. 2 vols. New York: Sheldon & Company, 1864.

Dickens, Charles. "The Drunkard's Death," Chapter 12 in "Tales," Christmas Books and Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875 [rpt. of 1867 Ticknor and Fields edition]. Pp. 494-500.

Dickens, Charles. "The Drunkard's Death," Chapter 12 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Pp. 233-40.

Dickens, Charles. "The Drunkard's Death," Chapter 12 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. 472-83.

Hawksley, Lucinda Dickens. Chapter 3, "Sketches by Boz." Dickens Bicentenary 1812-2012: Charles Dickens. San Rafael, California: Insight, 2011. Pp. 12-15.

Schlicke, Paul. "Sketches by Boz. Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1999. Pp. 530-535.

Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.

Thomas, Deborah A. Dickens and the Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

Last modified 3 June 2017