"The Nuptials of Miss Pecksniff receive a temporary check" — thirty-eighth monthly illustration by "Phiz" for Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit" (July 1844) (original) (raw)

Bibliographical Information

The original 1844 edition of Dickens's Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit placed The Nuptials of Miss Pecksniff receive a temporary check (the thirty-eighth monthly illustration of the novel) facing p. 622 in the fifty-fourth chapter (instalment XIX-XX), "Gives the Author Great Concern. For it is the Last in the Book." Descriptive headline in both 1868 and 1897 editions: "The Bridegroom Forbids The Banns."

Passage Illustrated: Another Metamorphosis

The bride was now alarmed; seriously alarmed. Good Heavens, what could have happened! Augustus! Dear Augustus!

Mr. Jinkins volunteered to take a cab, and seek him at the newly-furnished house. The strong-minded woman administered comfort to Miss Pecksniff. "It was a specimen of what she had to expect. It would do her good. It would dispel the romance of the affair." The red-nosed daughters also administered the kindest comfort. "Perhaps he'd come," they said. The sketchy nephew hinted that he might have fallen off a bridge. The wrath of Mr. Spottletoe resisted all the entreaties of his wife. Everybody spoke at once, and Miss Pecksniff, with clasped hands, sought consolation everywhere and found it nowhere, when Jinkins, having met the postman at the door, came back with a letter, which he put into her hand.

Miss Pecksniff opened it, uttered a piercing shriek, threw it down upon the ground, and fainted away.

They picked it up; and crowding round, and looking over one another's shoulders, read, in the words and dashes following, this communication:

"Off Gravesend.

"Clipper Schooner, Cupid

"Wednesday night.

"Ever Injured Miss Pecksniff

"Ere this reaches you, the undersigned will be — if not a corpse — on the way to Van Dieman's Land. Send not in pursuit. I never will be taken alive!

"The burden — 300 tons per register — forgive, if in my distraction, I allude to the ship — on my mind — has been truly dreadful. Frequently — when you have sought to soothe my brow with kisses — has self-destruction flashed across me. Frequently — incredible as it may seem — have I abandoned the idea.

"I love another. She is Another's. Everything appears to be somebody else's. Nothing in the world is mine — not even my Situation — which I have forfeited — by my rash conduct — in running away. [Chapter LIV, "Gives the Author Great Concern. For it is the Last in the Book," pp. 502-504 in the 1897 edition]

Commentary: Charity Jilted on Her Wedding Day

The guests read Mr. Moddle's farewell letter greedily, while in the bitterness of her mortification, Miss Pecksniff fainted away. [503]

In the plate facing the passage illustrated, the wedding guests greedily devour Mr. Moddle's farewell letter, while in the bitterness of her mortification before the assembled wives, mothers, and daughters of the extended clan, Miss Pecksniff finally faints away "in earnest" (as opposed to a merely staged response). Having learned that her prospective bridegroom has sailed for the Antipodes — in fact, Van Diemen's Land (re-named "Tasmania" in 1856), Miss Pecksniff has thrown his farewell epistle to the ground before theatrically shrieking and fainting into her father's arms. The cause of her mortification is not so much the loss of Augustus Moddle as the loss of status and control that the marriage would have conferred upon her. As an old maid, she may not receive another such opportunity, placing her in the Ultima Thule of the Chuzzlewit clan. With a nice piece of irony, Dickens gives the return address as "Off Gravesend. Clipper Schooner, Cupid." As she awkwardly faints, Charity causes cutlery and china to tumble from the table, implying the utter disruption of her plans for connubial dominance.

Charity's reaction is largely contrived rather than genuine, for Dickens adds at the conclusion of the reading aloud of the letter:

They thought as little of Miss Pecksniff, while they greedily perused this letter, as if she were the very last person on earth whom it concerned. But Miss Pecksniff really had fainted away. The bitterness of her mortification; the bitterness of having summoned witnesses, and such witnesses, to behold it; the bitterness of knowing that the strong-minded women and the red-nosed daughters towered triumphant in this hour of their anticipated overthrow; was too much to be borne. Miss Pecksniff had fainted away in earnest. [page 504 in the 1897 edition, facing the illustration]

But which male character, Chuzzlewit or hanger-on, reads the letter (in the absence of authorial identification of the letter-reader) is a subject for speculation as this figure does not resemble any of the males in the earlier family portrait, Pleasant Little Family Party at Mr. Pecksniff's in Chapter IV. Since Mr. Pecksniff, recognizable by his distinctive hair style, is supporting his elder daughter, the reader is probably Mr. Jinkins. Since the scene probably occurs in Todgers's, there is every likelihood that her eldest boarder, a forty-year-old book-keeper named Jinkins, has stepped forward to read the correspondence to the assembled wedding-guests. And which clan member is clambering above the reader for a better view? With a full head of hair, this cousin cannot be the splenetic Spottletoe, but may indeed be Chevy Slyme, who figures so prominently in Jonas's arrest and suicide.

Michael Steig in Dickens and Phiz gives a detailed exposition of this illustration in which he utilizes the instructions which Dickens posted to Phiz:

2nd Subject.

represents Miss Charity Pecksniff on the bridal morning. The bridal [table] breakfast is set out in Todgers's drawing-room. Miss Pecksniff has invited the strong-minded woman, and all that party who were present in Mr Pecksniff's parlor in the second number. We behold her triumph. She is not proud, but forgiving. Jinkins is also present and wears a white favor in his button hole. Merry is not there. Mrs. Todgers is decorated for the occasion. So are the rest of the company. The bride wears a bonnet with an orange flower. They have waited a long time for Moddle. Moddle has not appeared. The strong-minded woman has [frequently] expressed a hope that nothing has happened to him; the daughters of the strong-minded woman (who are bridesmaids) have offered consolation of an aggravating nature. A knock is heard at the door. It is not Moddle but a letter from him. The bride opens it, reads it, shrieks, and swoons. Some of the company catch it and crowd about each other, and read it over one another's shoulders. Moddle writes that he can't help it — that he loves another — that he is wretched for life — and has that morning sailed from Gravesend for Van Deimen's Land.

Lettering. The Nuptials of Miss Pecksniff receive a temporary check. ["Dickens to Phiz," June 1844; reproduced in Steig, page 78, and Cardwell, page 845]

The most remarkable thing about this communication is that it contains details (such as colors) and events which cannot possibly be shown in the illustration, some of which are not even in the novel's text, such as the hopes of the strong-minded woman and the consolations of her daughters. Phiz drew a vertical line in the margin next to the last four lines of the note which are extraneous to what an illustrator can depict. Perhaps this nondepictable material is not totally irrelevant, since by giving a sense of the drama behind the actual moment the author aided the artist in portraying characters' expressions and physical attitudes. However, Dickens clearly tended to get carried away: the note shows that he was going on still further and checked himself, as though suddenly aroused from his enthusiastic vision of the scene. [Steig, Chapter Three, pp. 78-79]

Although the design is necessarily cluttered by its having so many figures, Phiz manages to individualise through their postures and facial expressions, and organizes the design around the reading of Moddle's letter (right of centre) and the theatrical fainting of Charity Pecksniff, left of centre. Although the assembled Chuzzlewits (largely an undistinguished female audience, in contrast to the male-dominated Pleasant Little Family Party at Mr. Pecksniff's in Chapter IV) apparently all judge Charity severely; moreover, ironically the reader feels that Moddle has escaped a toxic relationship, and a lifetime of buying such things as rosewood chairs that he neither wants nor needs. As if to comment upon Moddle's fortunate escape, Phiz has embedded a fishing painting above the door in which the angler in reaching for his catch, wriggling on the line, is about to go off balance — an ironic reference, perhaps, to Franz Schubert's popular lyric Die Forelle, composed in early 1817. And the now-familiar cherub as an architectural elaboration (upper right) is busily writing a letter, although undoubtedly it is a letter of a rather different caste.

Above: Fred Barnard's realisation of a earlier part of the same sequence in Chapter 54, revealing Charity's concern about the patriarch's seeing her only partially dressed for the impending ceremony "Yes, sir," returned Miss Pecksniff, modestly. "I am — my dress is rather — really, Mrs. Todgers!" (1872). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.

_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Edited by Andrew Lang. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). The Gadshill Edition: 34 volumes. London: Chapman and Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1897. 2 vols.

_____. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit. Edited by Margaret Cardwell. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). The Clarendon Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.

Monod, Sylvère. "External and Additional Material." Martin Chuzzlewit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. Pp. 173-185.

Steig, Michael. "From Caricature to Progress: Master Humphrey's Clock and Martin Chuzzlewit." Ch. 3, Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U.P., 1978. Pp. 51-85. [See e-text in Victorian Web.]

_____. "Martin Chuzzlewit's Progress by Dickens and Phiz." Dickens Studies Annual, 2 (1972): 119-149.

Vann, J. Don. "Martin Chuzzlewit, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, January 1843 — July 1844." New York: Modern Language Association, 1985. Pp. 66-67.

Modified 3 May 2019

Last updated 12 November 2024