Dickens's "Mrs. Pipchin," by Harold Copping (1893) (original) (raw)

Passages Illustrated: The dour Child-minder meets her match in Little Paul (1846 and 1893)

At this exemplary old lady, Paul would sit staring in his little arm-chair by the fire, for any length of time. He never seemed to know what weariness was, when he was looking fixedly at Mrs. Pipchin. He was not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old moods of his, she seemed to have a grotesque attraction for him. There he would sit, looking at her, and warming his hands, and looking at her, until he sometimes quite confounded Mrs. Pipchin, Ogress as she was. Once she asked him, when they were alone, what he was thinking about. [Chapter VIII, "Paul’s Further Progress, Growth and Character"]

Mrs. Pipchin was a marvellously ugly old lady with a hook nose and stern cold eyes. Two other children lived at present under her charge, a mild blue-eyed little girl who was known as Miss Pankey, and a Master Bitherstone, a solemn and sad looking little boy whose parents were in India, and who asked Florence in a depressed voice whether she could give him any idea of the way back to Bengal.

"Well, Master Paul, how do you think you will like me?" said Mrs. Pipchin, seeing the child intently regarding her.

"I don't think I shall like you at all," replied Paul, shaking his head. "I want to go away. I do not like your house."

Paul did not like Mrs. Pipchin, but he would sit in his arm-chair and look at her, just as he looked at his father at home. Her ugliness seemed to fascinate him. [Mary Angela Dickens, pp. 104-5]

Commentary: A Glacial Portrait of a Child-Minder

Harold Copping had a marvellous precedent upon which to base a fireside scene involving the repulsive child-minder, Phiz's Paul and Mrs. Pipchin (November 1846), but avoids reducing the aged child-minder to the mere nutcracker-faced crone that one sees in Phiz's original serial engraving. Copping has taken a single, brief description to produce a character study that smacks of caricature, and yet is realistic. Moreover, Copping has elected to study her without any visual reference to Paul. The child-reader, then, is to see Mrs. Pipchin as Paul sees her, fascinatingly ugly and marvellously old in her widow's weeds. In her frigid aloofness she must be almost comical, as if her crossed arms keep her upright and comfort her since she has lost her husband to depression (a fact to which Mary Angela Dickens does not allude, although her grandfather reiterates this point for comic effect). She furnishes comic relief in a brief chapter filled with melancholy.

Relevant Illustrations by Phiz, Barnard, and Furniss (1846, 1877, and 1910)

Left: Phiz's November 1846 introduction of the dour child-minder in Paul and Mrs. Pipchin in Chapter VIII. Centre: Harry Furniss's impressionist revision of the November 1846 Phiz scene, Paul Puzzling Mrs. Pipchin (1910). Right: Paul sits quietyly beside his father in an evening; on this occasion he broaches the subject of money in the 1877 Household Edition: Dombey and Son (1877).

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). [1846-48] The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon and Company, 1862. Vols. 1-4.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr., and engraved by A. V. S. Anthony. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. III.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by W. L. Sheppard. The Household Edition. 18 vols. New York: Harper & Co., 1873.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard [62 composite wood-block engravings]. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.

__________. Dombey and Son. With illustrations by H. K. Browne. The illustrated library Edition. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, c. 1880. II.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 61 wood-engravings. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. XV.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by W. H. C. Groome. London and Glasgow, 1900, rpt. 1934. 2 vols. in one.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. IX.

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). 8 coloured plates. London and Edinburgh: Caxton and Ballantyne, Hanson, 1910.

Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Chapter 10, "Little Paul Dombey," Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893. Pp. 101-109.

Created 25 January 2022