"Mr. Carker in His Hour of Triumph" by Phiz (Illustration for "Dombey and Son")

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Mr. Carker in His Hour of Triumph

Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)

10.3 cm by 13.3 cm, vignetted

Dickens's Dombey and Son, Chapter 54, facing 584 (Part 17: February 1848)

Click on the image to enlarge it.

Other versions: the original engraving, Mr. Carker in His Hour of Triumph, and the working drawing (Steig, No. 72)

Image scan and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Passage Illustrated

"I have never," resumed Carker, "seen you look so handsome, as you do to-night. Even the picture I have carried in my mind during this cruel probation, and which I have contemplated night and day, is exceeded by the reality."

Not a word. Not a look Her eyes completely hidden by their drooping lashes, but her head held up.

"Hard, unrelenting terms they were!" said Carker, with a smile, "but they are all fulfilled and passed, and make the present more delicious and more safe. Sicily shall be the place of our retreat. In the idlest and easiest part of the world, my soul, we’ll both seek compensation for old slavery."

He was coming gaily towards her, when, in an instant, she caught the knife up from the table, and started one pace back.

"Stand still!" she said, "or I shall murder you!" [Chapter LIV, "The Fugitives," 584]

Commentary: An Embedded Renaissance-inspired Painting

In this boudoir scene late in the novel, Phiz has invested his title with considerable irony, for Carker does not "triumph" at all, and this moment marks a sharp turning point in his fortunes in instalment 17. Michael Steig's detailed analysis of the plate considers the juxtaposition of the characters and the physical setting as both a companion to and a contrast with Secret Intelligence (Chapter LII). In particular, in terms of the composition of both plates, Steig assumes that readers of the instalment would have noticed the parallels: Phiz incorporates "direct visual parallelism (both men on the far left, both women on the right) and the inverted thematic parallelism of Dombey-Alice and Carker-Edith, each woman having used her partner in the illustration as a despised means of destroying the man with whom she has been linked" (104).

However dubious at first may seem the suggestion by John R. Reed that Edith's gesture toward Carker's groin is castrative, the emblematic details in this plate do in fact emphasize her destructive tendencies — and perhaps those of women in general, specifically in connection with their sexual allure. In the first plate of Hogarth's Marriage A-la-Mode, one of the paintings belonging to the Earl who is arranging his son's marriage portrays Judith just after she has killed Holofernes. although the large picture (larger than most of Phiz's emblematic details) behind Edith of Judith and Holofernes does not resemble this one, another, at right angles to it and barely distinguishable because of the reflected candlelight, shows a Judith in very much the pose of Hogarth's; there is an even greater resemblance between the large picture behind Edith and the frontispiece Hogarth did for William Huggins' oratorio, Judith — the outstretched left hand of the figure in that frontispiece is echoed by Edith herself. It is as though Phiz wished to make sure that we noticed the parallel between Edith and Judith. [104]

John Reed has also commented on the picture's detailing. He proposes that Phiz has both Judith's sword and the Amazon's spear pointing at Edith's head to suggest that her defiance of Carker is going to be counter-productive. "If one is hesitant to attribute such an insight to Phiz, one can imagine that Dickens said something to his illustrator about Edith's ruinous course and Browne interpreted this accordingly. For the amazon herself Browne in fact drew upon his own stock of graphic ideas" (Steig, 104). On the mantle, Phiz has placed ceramic figures of courtiers and ladies (perhaps ironically suggesting the two novel's anti-romantic couples, Edith-Dombey and Alice-Carker). The peculiar Rococo clock has conventional neoclassical figures suggestive of romantic love: a reclining Venus and a Cupid. "There is possibly no precise allegory intended here, but the notion of Time suspended over Beauty and Love seems appropriate, if not brilliant. One may also interpret the two mirrors, both facing Edith, as symbols which imply that she is fully recognizing what she herself is, in the process of spurning Carker" (Steig 105).

Curiously, no one has remarked upon the fact that Phiz has not relied on any known Renaissance, Baroque, or eighteenth-century interpretation of the Apocryphal story of the virtuous widow Judith who saves Israel from invasion by seducing and beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. Phiz's Judith seems much more modern, for example, than the female in Donatello's bronze statue of the heroic Judith slaying the tyrant Holofernes in the Piazza della Signoria, Florence, Italy (circa 1450). Nor is she the ravishing beauty of Cristofano Allori's Judith with the Head of Holofernes (1613). Phiz would also likely have known of such artistic precedents as Michelangelo's Judith carrying away the head of Holofernes in the Sistine Chapel (1508-1512).

Related Material, including Other Illustrated Editions of Dombey and Son

Dombey and Son (homepage)
Felix Octavius Carr Darley's Captain Cuttle . . . too his own [watch] down from the mantel-shelf for Volume 4 of Dombey and Son, Wholesale Retail & for Exportation, 1862
Fred Barnard's 61 Illustrations for Dombey and Son, 1877
Groome's illustrations of the Collins Pocket Edition of Dombey and Son (1900, rpt. 1934)
Kyd's five Player's Cigarette Cards for Dombey and Son, 1910
Harry Furniss's twenty-nine illustrations for Dombey and Son, Wholesale Retail & for Exportation (1910)

Bibliography

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

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

__________. Dombey and Son. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). The Clarendon Edition, ed. Alan Horsman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

Hammerton, J. A. "Chapter 16: Dombey and Son."The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition.Illustrated by Harry Furniss. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Co., 1910. Vol. 17, 294-337.

Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London (1899) edition.

Steig, Michael. Chapter 4. "Dombey and Son: Iconography of Social and Sexual Satire." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978, 86-112.

Vann, J. Don. Chapter 4."Dombey and Son, twenty parts in nineteen monthly installments, October 1846-April 1848." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: Modern Language Association, 1985, 67-68.

Created 22 September 2005

Last modified 15 January 2020