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"Goodness gracious! is that you, Mr. Bumble, Sir?"
Frederick W. Pailthorpe
1886
9 cm high by 7.8 cm wide (3 ½ inches by 3 inches)
Dickens's Oliver Twist
[Click on image to enlarge it. See below for passage illustrated, commentary and comparisons with other illustrators' work; mouse over the text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Be this as it may, however, it was [Oliver's] ninth birthday; and he was keeping it in the coal-cellar with a select party of two other young gentleman, who, after participating with him in a sound thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be hungry, when Mrs. Mann, the good lady of the house, was unexpectedly startled by the apparition of Mr. Bumble, the beadle, striving to undo the wicket of the garden-gate.
“Goodness gracious! Is that you, Mr. Bumble, sir?” said Mrs. Mann, thrusting her head out of the window in well-affected ecstasies of joy. “(Susan, take Oliver and them two brats upstairs, and wash ’em directly.) — My heart alive! Mr. Bumble, how glad I am to see you, sure-ly!” [Chapter II, "Treats of Oliver Twist’s Growth, Education, and Board," pp. 4-5 in the 1846 edition]
Both the title-page vignette and the illustration of Bumble arriving at Mrs. Mann's garden-gate suggest that Pailthorpe was filling a vacuum left by other nineteenth-century programs of illustration, notably those by George Cruikshank (1837-38) and James Mahoney (1871). Other illustrators have not been much interested in the circumstances of Oliver's birth, his infancy and childhood at the baby farm, or even his initial meeting with the parish beadle, Mr. Bumble; in contrast, Pailthorpe depicts Bumble's dragging Oliver to the workhouse on his ninth birthday in the frontispiece and then reiterates the odious figure of the beadle here. As in the text, in this illustration the self-important Bumble resents being excluded from the baby farm's garden by a lesser employee of the Parish Board. Long-faced Mrs. Mann at her cottage window wants to chat affably with her important visitor, but Bumble does not seem to be pleased with how his mission to retrieve Oliver is proceeding. In other words, Pailthorpe has avoided the prolegomena of the circumstances of the protagonist's birth, and has taken us directly to that moment at which he becomes the focal character.
Left: In the Diamond Edition, Sol Eytinge, Jr., pairs the pompous parish functionary with the Matron of the Workhouse: Mrs. Corney and Mr. Bumble (1867). Centre: James Mahoney's Household Edition illustration of Grimwig's reaction to the officious visitor: "A beadle! A parish beadle, or I'll eat my head." (1871). Right: Kyd (Clayton J. Clarke) provided a number of studies of the beadle for the Player's Cigarette Card series Character Sketches from Dickens (1910).
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. "George Cruikshank." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980. Pp. 15-38.
Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Character Sketches from Dickens. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1888.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1838; Chapman and Hall, 1846.
_______. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Angus Eassone. The Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Vol. 1 (1820-1839).
_______. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Il. F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1865.
_______. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Vol. XI.
_______. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 22 vols. Illustrated by James Mahoney. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. Vol. I.
_______. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 22 vols. Illustrated by James Mahoney. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. Vol. I.
_______. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. III.
_______. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. The Waverley Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Charles Pears. London: Waverley, 1912.
Grego, Joseph (intro). Cruikshank's Water Colours. [27 Oliver Twist illustrations, including the wrapper and the 13-vignette title-page produced for F. W. Cosens; 20 plates for William Harrison Ainsworth's The Miser's Daughter: A Tale of the Year 1774; 20 plates plus the proofcover the work for W. H. Maxwell's History of the Irish Rebellion in 1798 and Emmetts Insurrection in 1803]. London: A & C Black, 1903. OT = pp. 1-106]. Book in the Rare Book Collection of the University of Toronto.
Pailthorpe, Frederic W. (Illustrator). Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. London: Robson & Kerslake, 1886. Set No. 118 (coloured) of 200 sets of proof impressions.
Created 10 February 2015 Last modified 19 November 2021