[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Henry Furniss —> The Pickwick Papers —> Next]
Mr. Weller's First Love
Harry Furniss
1910
13.6 cm x 7.9 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, facing II, 353.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The pretty housemaid had stood the candle on the floor; and, as it gave a very dim light, Sam was obliged to go down on his knees before he could see whether it really was his own hat or not. It was a remarkably small corner, and so — it was nobody's fault but the man’s who built the house — Sam and the pretty housemaid were necessarily very close together.
"Yes, this is it," said Sam. "Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!" said the pretty housemaid.
"Good-bye!" said Sam; and as he said it, he dropped the hat that had cost so much trouble in looking for.
"How awkward you are," said the pretty housemaid. "You'll lose it again, if you don't take care."
So just to prevent his losing it again, she put it on for him. [Chapter XXV, "Showing among a variety of pleasant matters, how majestic and impartial Mr. Nupkins was; and how Mr. Weller returned Mr. Job Trotter's shuttlecock as heavily as it came — with another matter, which will be fund in its place," 362-363]
Furniss, who had read John Forster's Life of Dickens, would have known that an actual Mary Weller served as Charles Dickens's nurse in childhood, and was the originator of such terrifying "Nurse's Stories" as "Captain Murderer" (recorded in The Uncommercial Traveller, No. 15). Dickens's fond memories of her go back to the five years when the family lived at Chatham, Kent, between 1817 and 1822. Mary Weller, Dickens's Cockney nurse, is usually "considered the original of Mary, the Nupkins' maid in Pickwick, and Clara Peggotty in Copperfield" (Davis 404). At the conclusion of the novel, Sam marries Mary, now Arabella Allen's maid, and the couple move to Dulwich to look after Mr. Pickwick in retirement. Furniss depicts Mary as charmingly flirtatious and wasp-waisted, and Sam as thoroughly enjoying her attentions below in the corridor off the kitchen at the close of Chapter XXV. The relationship between the pretty maid and the witty servant complements the more complicated and conflicted middle-class romance of the inept Winkle and Arabella Allen, whose brother Ben has intended that she marry his drinking and business partner, medical student Bob Sawyer.
Perhaps Furniss felt that previous illustrators had made too much of the introduction of Job Trotter, as in Phiz's kitchen scene Mr. Job Trotter encounters Sam in Mr. Muzzle's Kitchen (December 1836). Rather than dwell on the image of the lugubrious and devious valet of Alfred Jingle, Furniss focuses on the "below-stairs" romance of the pretty maid and the street-wise valet of Mr. Pickwick. Since Furniss was drawn to the figure of the witty Cockney by Sam Weller's comic possibilities in the visual program, he made his follow-up illustration to The Election a closeup of Sam and the young woman he marries at the end of the novel, Mary, one of the maids at Mr. Nupkins'. The kitchen scene is important textually because through his sly servant Jingle sets Pickwick up to become a trespasser at the nearby ladies' seminary when he tries to forestall Jingle's supposed elopement with one of the school-girls. Sam proves instrumental in revealing Jingle's villainy, and thereby effecting magistrate Nupkins' release of the Pickwickians on a trumped-up charge of planning to participate in a duel.
Phiz revises his approach to kitchen scene which introduces Jingle's duplicitous servant, Job Trotter, in The kitchen door opened, and in walked Mr. Job Trotter, page 177, Chapter XXV.
Nast has rendered all the figures in a less natural, more rigid manner, making the confrontation between Job Trotter and Sam Weller the picture's focus, in "Well, now," said Sam," page 153, Chapter XXV. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Robert Seymour and Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman & Hall, 1836-37.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873. Vol. 4.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. Vol. 5.
_____. Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 2.
Created 10 December 2019
Last modified 5 February 2020