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Passage Illustrated

"You'd better be quiet, young feller," remarked the boots, going through a threatening piece of pantomime with the stick.

"Or mad!" said Mr. Trott, rather alarmed. "Leave the room!" shouted Trott, ringing the bell violently: for he began to be alarmed on a new score.

"Leave that 'ere bell alone, you wretched loo-nattic!" said the boots, suddenly forcing the unfortunate Trott back into his chair, and brandishing the stick aloft. "Be quiet, you miserable object, and don't let everybody know there's a madman in the house."

"He is a madman! He is a madman!" exclaimed the terrified Mr. Trott, gazing on the one eye of the red-headed boots with a look of abject horror.

"Madman!" replied the boots — "dam'me, I think he is a madman with a vengeance! Listen to me, you unfort'nate. Ah! would you?" — [a slight tap on the head with the large stick, as Mr. Trott made another move towards the bell-handle] "I caught you there! did I?"

"Spare my life!" exclaimed Trott, raising his hands imploringly.

"I don't want your life," replied the boots, disdainfully, "though I think it 'ud be a charity if somebody took it."

"No, no, it wouldn't," interrupted poor Mr. Trott, hurriedly, "no, no, it wouldn’t! I — I —'d rather keep it!"

"O werry well," said the boots: "that's a mere matter of taste — ev'ry one to his liking. Hows'ever, all I've got to say is this here: You sit quietly down in that chair, and I'll sit hoppersite you here, and if you keep quiet and don't stir, I won't damage you; but, if you move hand or foot till half-past twelve o'clock, I shall alter the expression of your countenance so completely, that the next time you look in the glass you’ll ask vether you're gone out of town, and ven you're likely to come back again. So sit down."

"I will — I will," responded the victim of mistakes; and down sat Mr. Trott and down sat the boots too, exactly opposite him, with the stick ready for immediate action in case of emergency.

Long and dreary were the hours that followed. The bell of Great Winglebury church had just struck ten, and two hours and a half would probably elapse before succour arrived. — "Tales," Chapter 8, "The Great Winglebury Duel," p. 315.

Commentary

Brighton and Faversham are 41 miles from London, but Dickens announces that the sleepy setting of the prose farce "is exactly forty-two miles and three-quarters from Hyde Park Corner" (194); in other words, quite removed from this boundary between country and city, and therefore far removed from the more sophisticated milieu of the metropolis. However, Great Winglebury is a market town not unlike Rochester in Kent (albeit, only 32 miles from central London); Chatham, the other Medway town that Dickens knew well from boyhood, is just 34 miles. Both towns are now connected by rapid rail service to central London, but rail service occurred later in Dickens's life, so that a coach journey was the only alternative for both Alexander Trott in this sketch and Samuel Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers. As a young author, Charles Dickens used such somnolent settings to appeal to Victorian readers' nostalgic longing for the old usages of life in county towns and villages, a way of life that was rapidly vanishing even in the early decades of Victoria's reign. Certainly there is a strong resemblance between the general layout of the buildings in the Winglebury High Street and that of the shops in Rochester High Street, and the inn as described by Dickens at the opening looks markedly like The Bull at Rochester, the inn at which Mr. Pickwick stops in chapter 5, and rents a carriage.

The short story "The Great Winglebury Duel" became the basis for Dickens's early farce "The Strange Gentleman," which débuted at the St. James's Theatre, London, on 29 September 1836, with the names of the principals slightly altered, possibly for comic effect: "Alexander Trott," the "Strange Gentleman," becomes "Walter Trott"; "Horace Hunter," Trott's rival, becomes "Horatio Tinkles"; and "Lady Julia" becomes plain "Miss Julia Dobbs." Paul Davis admirably sums up the short story's complicated romantic plot of mistaken identity:

When Alexander Trott tries to avoid fighting a duel with Horace Hunter over the hand of Emily Brown by soliciting the influence of the mayor of Winglebury, he inadvertently becomes entangled with Lady Julia Manners and Lord Peter. The duel is averted, but Trott is taken for Lord Peter. When he is bundled off in a carriage with Lady Julia, the two decide to marry, thus allowing Emily Brown to marry Horace Hunter. [162]

Although most of the sketches in this work were originally published as separate entries in various magazines and journals between 1833 and 1836, the 1837 "Second Series" edition does represent the first appearance of five of the sketches: "A Visit to Newgate," "The Black Veil," "The Great Winglebury Duel," "Our Next-Door Neighbour," and "The Drunkard's Death." Accordingly, the illustration of Alexander Trott and the boots is one of the last which Cruikshank produced for the series. Precisely the same scene is realised by George Cruikshank (1839), Sol Eytinge, Junior (1867), Fred Barnard (1876), and Harry Furniss (1910) in The Great Winglebury Duel, although the Household Edition version bears a lengthy caption derived from the boots's dialogue to point the reader towards the precise moment realised. All four visual interpretations of the scene occur in Trott's room at the Winglebury Arms.

Whereas Eytinge's version shows a sour-faced boots's raising his cane and Trott asking to be spared, Cruikshank's is much more static, as the boots (looking very much like the wild-eyed and potentially dangerous London cabbie in The Last Cab-Driver) merely stares malevolently at the surprised young gentleman, sitting next to a nicely appointed table with fruit, a wine decanter, and a small glass of wine (presumably, Madeira, mentioned earlier) poured. Since these details are consistent with Eytinge's 1867 wood-engraving (which also has a landscape painting on the wall behind Alexander Trott), it is likely derived from Cruikshank's illustration. Since these details are consistent with Eytinge's 1867 wood-engraving (which also has a landscape painting on the wall behind Alexander Trott), it is likely derived from Cruikshank's illustration. The provenance of the Barnard interpretation is not so obvious, as his "upper-boots," not seated as in the Cruikshank original, and now holding a countryman's walking-stick aloft, is a much more dynamic figure as he attempts to grab the terrified young gentleman, cowering in his armchair. The Cruikshank composition is static, as each adversary studies the other, awaiting his next move, and Trott has left his glass of port, poured before the arrival of Mayor Overton, unfinished. The oil-painting of a landscape on the wall behind Trott in the Cruikshank plate implies the rural locale, but the portrait of a lady between the two seated figures is more significant as she may represent the heiress, Emily Brown, who has unwittingly caused these plot complications since her parents and Trott's have arranged the marriage, or even Lady Julia Manners, who has facilitated Overton's utterly misconstruing Trott's note and misidentifying him as the demented young aristocrat. That the boots and Trott have subsided into postures suggestive of watchful waiting implies that they have been thus for some time, and that the violent confrontation which began the scene is several hours in the past. In gaiters and breeches, the shag-haired, one-eyed, middle-aged boots is a thorough contrast to the fashionably dressed urbanite opposite him whom everybody seems to have mistaken for Lady Julia's young fiancé, the "slightly deranged, though perfectly harmless" (311) Lord Peter.

The confusion of sane but cowardly Alexander Trott for the benign madman, Lord Peter, like the relationship between the laconic ex-cab-driver of this story written in late 1835 or early 1836 and the peculiar cabbie of the seventeenth sketch of "Scenes" (published in November 1835) may of course be coincidental. However, the similarity in Cruikshank's depictions of the "upper-boots" and the last cab-driver would seem to imply that mental aberration is the key to making sense of both the earlier sketch and the later short story, in which the boots believes the young man to be a lunatic, and the young man, held "under restraint" until called for, regards his handler as mad:

the last four tales seem indicative of more than simply their author's growing fictional expertise. In each of these last pieces, the subject of some form of mental disorder recurs. The presence of this motif is made all the more remarkable by its absence, in large part, from the earlier tales. In "The Great Winglebury Duel" and "The Tuggses at Ramsgate," the respective topics of madness and extreme nervous excitability are treated farcically. The plot of the former tale deals with a case of mistaken identity in which a cowardly young man, attempting to escape from a duel, is assumed to be a young nobleman whose middle-aged fiancée has instructed him to feign madness so that they may elope without detection. As an illustration by Cruikshank emphasizes, the high point of the story is an episode at the inn at Winglebury in which the supposed "wretched loo-nattic" is guarded by a one-eyed boots, brandishing a large stick, whose behaviour seems so erratic to "the victim of mistakes" that the latter assumes that the boots, in turn, is mad. — Deborah A. Thomas "Imaginative Overindulgence," p. 15.

Relevant Illustrations from other editions (1867-1910)

Left: Fred Barnard's depiction of the enraged boots, a former London cabbie, and the terrified Alexander Trott, "Leave that 'ere bell alone, you wretched loo-nattic!" said the boots, suddenly forcing the unfortunate Trott back into his chair, and brandishing the stick aloft. Right: Harry Furniss's 1910 depiction of the same incident, likely derivative, The Great Winglebury Duel. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Above: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s duel character study of the one-eyed boots and the terrified young traveller at the Winglebury Arms, room no. 19, The Great Winglebury Duel. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

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 Great Winglebury Duel," Chapter 8 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890. Pp. 305-18.

Dickens, Charles. "The Great Winglebury Duel," Chapter 8 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 & Fields edition]. Pp. 449-59.

Dickens, Charles. "The Great Winglebury Duel," Chapter 8 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Pp. 194-202.

Dickens, Charles. "The Great Winglebury Duel," Chapter 8 in "Tales," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. 391-408.

Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book: A Record of the Dickens Illustrators. The Charles Dickens Library Edition, vol. 17. London: Educational Book, 1910.

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.

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