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The Boarding House. II.
George Cruikshank
1839
Etching on copper
10.5 x 9.3 cm
"The Boarding-House, Chapter II," Chapter 1 in "Tales," by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, as published in the 1839 single volume by Chapman and Hall; illustration facing p. 233.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"They're talking of us!" exclaimed the agonised Mrs. Tibbs, as the painful suspicion, and a sense of their situation, flashed upon her mind.
"I know it — I know it,"replied Evenson, with a melancholy consciousness that there was no mode of escape.
"What's to be done? we cannot both stop here!" ejaculated Mrs. Tibbs, in a state of partial derangement.
"I'll get up the chimney,"replied Evenson, who really meant what he said.
"You can't,"said Mrs. Tibbs, in despair."You can't— it's a register stove."
"Hush!" repeated John Evenson.
"Hush — hush!"cried somebody down-stairs.
"What a d-d hushing!" said Alfred Tomkins, who began to get rather bewildered.
"There they are!" exclaimed the sapient Wisbottle, as a rustling noise was heard in the store-room.
"Hark!" whispered both the young men.
"Hark!" repeated Mrs. Tibbs and Evenson.
"Let me alone, sir," said a female voice in the store-room.
"Oh, Hagnes!" cried another voice, which clearly belonged to Tibbs, for nobody else ever owned one like it, "Oh, Hagnes—lovely creature!"
"Be quiet, sir!" (A bounce.)
"Hag — "
"Be quiet, sir — I am ashamed of you. Think of your wife, Mr. Tibbs. Be quiet, sir!""My wife!" exclaimed the valorous Tibbs, who was clearly under the influence of gin-and-water, and a misplaced attachment; "I ate her! Oh, Hagnes! when I was in the volunteer corps, in eighteen hundred and —"
"I declare I'll scream. Be quiet, sir, will you?"(Another bounce and a scuffle.)
"What’s that?" exclaimed Tibbs, with a start.
"What’s what?’ said Agnes, stopping short.
"Why that!"
"Ah! you have done it nicely now, sir,"sobbed the frightened Agnes, as a tapping was heard at Mrs. Tibbs's bedroom door, which would have beaten any dozen woodpeckers hollow.
"Mrs. Tibbs! Mrs. Tibbs!"called out Mrs. Bloss. "Mrs. Tibbs, pray get up." (Here the imitation of a woodpecker was resumed with tenfold violence.)
"Oh, dear — dear!"exclaimed the wretched partner of the depraved Tibbs. "She's knocking at my door. We must be discovered! What will they think?"
"Mrs. Tibbs! Mrs. Tibbs!"screamed the woodpecker again.
"What’s the matter!" shouted Gobler, bursting out of the back drawing-room, like the dragon at Astley's.
"Oh, Mr. Gobler!"cried Mrs. Bloss, with a proper approximation to hysterics;"I think the house is on fire, or else there's thieves in it. I have heard the most dreadful noises!"
"The devil you have!" shouted Gobler again, bouncing back into his den, in happy imitation of the aforesaid dragon, and returning immediately with a lighted candle. "Why, what's this? Wisbottle! Tomkins! O'Bleary! Agnes! What the deuce! all up and dressed?"
"Astonishing!" said Mrs. Bloss, who had run down-stairs, and taken Mr. Gobler's arm.
"Call Mrs. Tibbs directly, somebody,"said Gobler, turning into the front drawing-room. — "What! Mrs. Tibbs and Mr. Evenson!!"
"Mrs. Tibbs and Mr. Evenson!" repeated everybody, as that unhappy pair were discovered: Mrs. Tibbs seated in an arm-chair by the fireplace, and Mr. Evenson standing by her side.
We must leave the scene that ensued to the reader's imagination. &mdaash; "Tales," Chapter 1, "The Boarding House," p. 232-233.
["The Boarding-House."] Two sketches, originally published in the Monthly Magazine (May, August 1834), describing romantic intrigues in Mrs. Tibbs's boarding house in Great Coram Street [Bloomsbury]. In the first, the three male boarders (Mr. Simpson, Mr. Septimus Hicks, and Mr. Calton) each arrange secret marriages to Mrs. Maplestone and her two daughters. In the second, the presence of Mrs. Bloss, a hypochrondriac widow, prompts romantic intrigues among the male boarders. — Paul Davis, p. 39.
As Frederic G. Kitton notes, Cruikshank, having designed a program of illustration for the February 1836 two-volume first edition of Sketches, had to re-engrave the original 1836 illustrations for the larger-paged Chapman and Hall serialisation, and the subsequent 1839 anthology, which contained thirteen entirely new plates:
During the following year (1837) Macrone published a Second Series of the "Sketches" in one volume, uniform in size and character with its predecessors, and containing ten etchings by Cruikshank; for the second edition of this extra volume two additional illustrations were done, viz., "The Last Cab-Driver" and "May-day in the Evening." It was at this time that Dickens repurchased from Macrone the entire copyright of the "Sketches," and arranged with Chapman & Hall for a complete edition, to be issued in shilling monthly parts, octavo size, the first number appearing in November of that year. The completed work contained all the Cruikshank plates (except that entitled "The Free and Easy," which, for some unexplained reason, was cancelled) and the following new subjects: "The Parish Engine," "The Broker's Man," "Our Next-door Neighbours" [sic], "Early Coaches," "Public Dinners," "The Gin-Shop," "Making a Night of It," "The Boarding-House," "The Tuggses at Ramsgate," "The Steam Excursion," "Mrs. Joseph Porter," and "Mr. Watkins Tottle." — "George Cruikshank, p. 4.
The copper-plate engravings contribute to the visual effects of these "sketches." As opposed to the modern short story, the Victorian "sketch" requires little character analysis or thematic organisation; rather, it places an emphasis on the amusing surfaces of quirky characters and the improbable situations of farce translated from the stage to the page — often a magazine page. True to the inferior genre, Dickens makes his rooming-house boarders mere types, odd young men with shallow personalities and superficial tastes; Tibbs, on the other hand, in "The Boarding-House" receives a sympathetic treatment verging on individualisation:
By combining the type with the individual, Dickens modified the convention and brought tension into his characters. . . . . In Boz, Dickens distinguished sketches from stories; the sketch lacks the plot and character development of short stories. The most immediate models for Dickens's sketches were those of Washington Irving, whose Sketch Book influenced Dickens's early work in particular. — Paul David, "Sketch," p. 354.
This is not to say that the two "Boarding-House" narratives of 1834 adhere to the strict definition that Edgar Allen Poe articulated for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842), which, incidentally the great American short-story writer had published previously in various American magazines and annuals, so that his volume-title reflects the notion of "re-publication" in just the manner of Dickens's 1836 and 18398 anthologies. Dickens's title, however, Sketches by 'Boz,' Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People emphasizes the normal and contemporary nature of the pieces, as opposed to the more exotic and historical settings of Hawthorne and Scottish Romantic short-story writer Sir Walter Scott. In other words, in 1834, twenty-two-year-old Charles Dickens was still developing hisconception as to what constituted a short story as opposed to a "sketch," but, by 1839 had begun to move away from mere sketches and had classified "The Boarding-House" as at least a "tale."
The pair of illustrations that Cruikshank developed especially for the 1839 collected anthology of Sketches by 'Boz' establish the characters of the male roomers, and then depict the comic "discovery" scene; unfortunately, the expository and descriptive nature of the first illustration renders it somewhat static and utterly devoid of the exuberant comic drama one finds in this second illustration.
The drawing-room scene has certainly been inspired by similar expository scenes in British comedy, but may have biographical antecedents, too. When Charles's father, John, was incarcerated in the Marshalea Prison for debt, the boy roomed in Little College Street with Mrs. Elizabeth Roylance. When on the 28th of May 1825 John Dickens was released from prison under the Insolvent Debtors' Act by coming to an arrangement with his creditors, he and his family moved in with Mrs. Roylance. Thus, the story written in 1834 may be based on reminiscences of the Camden Town boarding house ten years earlier. The area of Camden Town was familiar to the Dickenses from their having lived at No. 16 Bayham Street, the likely model for the Cratchits' home in A Christmas Carol. Dickens and his family lived in a second-floor flat above a grocer's shop in 1815 at age of three, before returning to live there as teenager between 1828 and 1831 in Fitzrovia, just across the road from the former Cleveland Street Workhouse. The setting of the story, however, is Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden, between Euston Road and Holborn, and Great Coram Street, the street on which the Tibbses have their boarding house, which lies near Russell Square.
The standard for comedic "discovery scenes" is not a moment from a French farce, but "The Screen Scene" from Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Comedy of Manners The School for Scandal (1777):
Jos. Surf. Notwithstanding all this, Sir Peter, Heaven knows — Sir Pet. That you are a villain! and so I leave you to your conscience. Jos. Surf. You are too rash, Sir Peter; you shall hear me. The man who shuts out conviction by refusing to — Sir Pet. Oh, damn your sentiments! [Exeunt Sir Peter and Joseph Surface, talking.] — Act IV, Scene iii, lines 210-213.
The scene once again, as in Cruikshank's first illustration for this story, is a drawing-room in Mrs. Tibbs's rooming-house, but the different pattern in the carpet suggests that this is "the front drawing-room" of the boarding-house in Great Coram Street, Bloomsbury. The comic situation appears to be that the wife and her lover have been caught in a compromising situation, but the audience (or, in the case of a short story, the reader) is aware that the husband or the community has misinterpreted the situation. As in the famous "Screen Scene," in the climactic scene in Dickens's "The Boarding-House," the assembled household discovers the meticulous, middle-aged, self-righteous bachelor and political radical (i. e., a supporter of parliamentary reform in 1832) balding John Evenson with Mrs. Tibbs, the prudish landlady, in the middle of the night, just outside his room — as if they have been interrupted in an assignation: "Mrs. Tibbs seated in an arm-chair by the fireplace, and Mr. Evenson standing by her side." In fact, it is her self-pitying husband, acting under the influence of gin-and-water, who has been romancing a woman who is not his wife, Mrs. Bloss's lady'smaid, Agnes, who has been giving the maudlin little Mr. Tibbs little encouragement, just as Lady Teazle has resisted the advances of suave sentimentalist, Joseph Surface. And, like Sheridan, Dickens draws the scene out, delaying the "discovery" as long as possible for maximum comic effect.
Adding a magnificent piano (rear) to amplify the effect of the candle, Cruikshank has composed the discovery scene according to Dickens's description, with Mrs. Tibbs, in distress, crying and wearing a shawl over her nightgown, seated, and the slender, composed senior bachelor John Everson in his dressing-gown standing beside her. In contrast, the boarders to the right, led by their torch-bearer, Mr. Gobler, holding a lighted candle leading the other roomers, Wisbottle, Alfred Tomkins, and the stereotypical Irishman, O'Bleary (far right). Whereas the other gentlemen are fully dressed, the bare-legged and bare-fotted Gobler, a long-faced comic type, is in his nightgown and nightcap, having just burst "out of the back drawing-room." The portly, middle-aged woman on his arm is the wealthy widow, Mrs. Bloss, who, although a recent arrival to Great Coram Street, apparently has already agreed to become Mrs. Gobler. Her left left, held up, denotes alarm and surprise. All in all, the effect is that of a tableau vivant, complete from the text even to the presence of the fireplace in the left-hand margin.
Left: George Cruikshank'sexpository illustration for the first instalment of the short story, The Boarding House, the discussion of the young women boarders by the male boarders, The Boarding House. (1839).Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.s's comic study of the drunken Mr. Tibbs's confronted by the shrewish landlady, The Boarding-House (1867). Right: Harry Furniss's comic study of a most animated Mr. Tibbs, tryingto kiss one of the young, attractive housemaids, in The Boarding House: Mr. Tibbs (1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: The Household Edition illustration for the first part of the story, depicting young Mr. Septimus Hicks abd the invalid, Mr. Calton, about to reveal to each other their secret marriage plans in "I received a note —" he said very tremulously, in a voice like a Punch with a cold. —"Yes," returned the other, "You did." —"Exactly."—"Yes." (1876). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Above: Fred Barnard's second illustration for the story, in which the new boarder, the wealthy widow Mrs. Blossis confused about Mrs. Tibbs's use of the expression "no stomach" (as in "no appetite"), "No what?" inquired Mrs. Bloss with a look of the most indescribable alarm. "No stomach," repeated Mrs. Tibbs with a shake of the head (1876). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Last modified 12 May 2017