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Jo
Jo, shaking and chattering, slowly rises and stands, after the manner of his tribe in a difficulty, sideways against the hoarding, resting one of his shoulders against it.
Harry Furniss
1910
14.7 cm x 8.6 cm, vignetted
Dickens's Bleak House, The Charles Dickens Library Edition, Chapter 46, "Stop Him!" — facing XI, 641.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"You hear what she says. But get up, get up!"
Jo, shaking and chattering, slowly rises and stands, after the manner of his tribe in a difficulty, sideways against the hoarding, resting one of his high shoulders against it and covertly rubbing his right hand over his left and his left foot over his right.
"You hear what she says, and I know it's true. Have you been here ever since?"
"Wishermaydie if I seen Tom-all-Alone's till this blessed morning," replies Jo hoarsely."Why have you come here now?"Jo looks all round the confined court, looks at his questioner no higher than the knees, and finally answers, "I don't know how to do nothink, and I can't get nothink to do. I'm wery poor and ill, and I thought I'd come back here when there warn't nobody about, and lay down and hide somewheres as I knows on till arter dark, and then go and beg a trifle of Mr. Snagsby. He wos allus willin fur to give me somethink he wos, though Mrs. Snagsby she was allus a-chivying on me — like everybody everywheres." [Chapter 46, "Stop Him!" 638]
Whereas Phiz had set a sombre mood for the chapter with the dark plate entitled Tom-all-Alone's (May 1853), a plate containing no figures whatsoever, and a dominating church spire (for the purpose of irony), Furniss has simply depicted Jo and his broom at the point in the text when Dr. Alan Woodcourt runs him down. The physician has responded to a woman's cry of "Stop him!" (suggesting that the boy has just stolen something), and now hears how Inspector Bucket drove the contagious street urchin out of Bleak House, put him in a hospital, and given him a little money. Believing that he is dying, the boy has now returned to his familiar neighbourhood, where he expects to expire in the street, not far from Nemo's resting place. Jo is oblivious to the fact that he infected Charley, Esther Sommerson's maid, and thereby infected her mistress with smallpox, too. He will die in George's shooting gallery in the next chapter, melodramatically repeating the lines of "The Lord's Prayer," which his compassionate physician recites. There is neither indignation nor sentimentality in Furniss's portrait of the homeless, parentless urban waif, but there is considerable sympathy in the cowering urchin's timorous look, as if appealing for middle-class compassion and understanding.
Left: Phiz's September 1853 engraving serves as the title-page vignette for the volume edition: Jo, The Crossing-sweeper. Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s 1867 Diamond Edition of Joe at work outside Tom-all-Alone's: Jo. Right: Fred Barnard's 1873 Household Edition full-page composite woodblock wood-engraving of Joe in a crowd on London Bridge: Frontispiece: Jo.
Left: for the fifth monthly part, Phiz's On Consecrated Ground (Ch. 16: July 1852). Centre and right, Kyd's Player's Cigarette Card No. 50, Jo the Crossing-Sweeper (1910).
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Created 20 January 2021