The Great Winglebury Duel

[Tristram]

The second Sketch we are dealing with this week is called “The Great Winglebury Duel” and was published in February 1836, one month before Dickens published his first instalment of Pickwick Papers. I find this quite noteworthy for two reasons: First of all, as the title implies, the story centres on a duel, and we also get a duel in the first instalment of Pickwick Papers. Dickens was using the same situation twice at roughly the same time. In both situations, the duel does not come off, and one of the duellists is infinitely less experienced at the fine art of shooting other people down than the other. However, there are differences: In PP, the misunderstanding is cleared up after Mr. Winkle, having in vain tried to get out of his plight by making ominous remarks to Mr. Snodgrass, has resigned himself to the deadly challenge. In our Sketch, Mr. Trott tries to prevent the duel by writing an anonymous letter to the mayor Overton, but a misunderstanding of another kind is got out of the line of fire. In other words, in PP a misunderstanding is resolved whereas here, it is through a misunderstanding that the duel is prevented.

There is another interesting detail – my second reason – that links this story to Pickwick Papers: Great Winglebury boasts two opposing gentlemen’s clubs, the club of the Blues, and the club of the Buffs – an idea that Dickens should use some months later for his Eatonwill chapters when the Pickwickians are tossed into the maelstrom of political campaigning.

According to my Penguin edition, “The Great Winglebury Duel” was dramatized as “The Strange Gentleman”, “a comic burletta [whatever that is] in two acts by Dickens under the pseudonym ‘Boz’” in the autumn of September 1836, and if you look at the text, you can see why: It has the typically Dickensian feel of being written for the stage, containing a lot of dialogue and swift action. Among its cast, we have:

- a rather mercenary tenderfoot by the name of Trott, who wants to marry a young woman for her money but is reluctant to face her ireful suitor and therefore contrives a way of getting out of the duel without losing face,
- the middle-aged Julia Manners, who wants to get married, and who manages her affairs very skilfully and ruthlessly, even employing blackmail,
- the lawyer-mayor Overton, who embezzled some money and now finds himself an involuntary party in Miss Manners’s plot, and
- a one-eyed boots, who can be seen as a template for Mr. Weller in that he is rather world-wise and insinuating. At the same time, however, the boots in this story is by far less likeable than Mr. Weller because he is quite coarse and ruthless.

The dialogues in this story carry the action a lot, but sometimes I could not help thinking them quite unnatural, e.g. when a character loudly reflects on his options, as here:

”‘Desperate-minded villain! I knew how it would be!’ ejaculated the terrified Trott. ‘I always told father, that once start me on this expedition, and Hunter would pursue me like the Wandering Jew. It’s bad enough as it is, to marry with the old people’s commands, and without the girl’s consent; but what will Emily think of me, if I go down there breathless with running away from this infernal salamander? What shall I do? What can I do? If I go back to the city, I’m disgraced for ever—lose the girl—and, what’s more, lose the money too. Even if I did go on to the Browns’ by the coach, Hunter would be after me in a post-chaise; and if I go to this place, this Stiffun’s Acre (another shudder), I’m as good as dead. I’ve seen him hit the man at the Pall-mall shooting-gallery, in the second button-hole of the waistcoat, five times out of every six, and when he didn’t hit him there, he hit him in the head.’ With this consolatory reminiscence Mr. Alexander Trott again ejaculated, ‘What shall I do?’”

It is quite obvious that these reflections were written with an eye on getting the reader into the picture, as no real person would utter such a monologue. Consequently, this passage comes over as rather histrionic and heavy-handed – or what would you say?

Which of the persons did you like best? There is, in my opinion, a lot to say for Miss Manners, because she is a clever and strong-willed woman, playing on the vanity of men. On the other hand, the text also shows Dickens’s disdain for that kind of woman, e.g when she says that unless she shows a lot of herself, people might take her to be “Dear Lord Peter’s” mother. Apropos “Dear Lord Peter”: What do you think of him? A typical example of the slightly degenerated nobleman we sometimes come across in Dickens?

The plot of the story is skilfully woven but I could not help thinking that the resolution came very quickly, the ending falling slightly flat, as though Dickens had suddenly lost interest and rushed towards the denouement. The denouement itself, however, seemed to work well with the characters. What do you think?

[John]

I may sound confused.

Are we to read three separate sketches rather than two?

Or is it three or more?

[Peter]

Tristram

You are so right about Dickens and how many of his scenes and much of the speech seems best suited for the stage. The example you give is perfect. I picture the dialogue being delivered with wildly flapping arms and much scrunching of the face. After each question “What should I do” I imagine the character facing the theatre audience.

And since dueling was becoming only a memory to the Victorian reading audience this scene/short story would have appealed to them as a recently bygone fact now fading rather than to us as readers who have not connection or memory to dueling at all.

[Tristram]

John wrote: "I may sound confused.

Are we to read three separate sketches rather than two?

Or is it three or more?"

John,

we started threads for four different Sketches. Peter started one thread for "Horatio Sparkins" and "The Black Veil" last week, and I started two separate threads, one for "The Steam Excursion" and this one. Sorry we should have caused any inconvenience.

[Tristram]

Peter wrote: "Tristram

You are so right about Dickens and how many of his scenes and much of the speech seems best suited for the stage. The example you give is perfect. I picture the dialogue being delivered w..."

I find it very interesting to trace the influences of the theatre and esp. of melodrama on such a writer as Dickens. In this Sketch, I think they were extremely strong.

It's also fun to see how very early silent movies were running in the ruts of stage conventions. If you ever get a chance to watch the world's first western, and maybe also motion picture, Edwin S. Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" - it runs only about 10 minutes - you will see a lot of melodrama acting going on. Plus, characters always enter from the right or left side of the picture, as though it were two-dimensional.

When Alfred Hitchcock made "The Farmer's Wife" (1928), he deliberately tried (with success) to break open the stage-perspective.

[Kim]

"The Winglebury Duel"

George Cruikshank

1839

Text Illustrated:

"You'd better be quiet, young feller," remarked the boots, going through a threatening piece of pantomime with the stick.

"Or mad!" said Mr. Trott, rather alarmed. "Leave the room!" shouted Trott, ringing the bell violently: for he began to be alarmed on a new score.

"Leave that 'ere bell alone, you wretched loo-nattic!" said the boots, suddenly forcing the unfortunate Trott back into his chair, and brandishing the stick aloft. "Be quiet, you miserable object, and don't let everybody know there's a madman in the house."

"He is a madman! He is a madman!" exclaimed the terrified Mr. Trott, gazing on the one eye of the red-headed boots with a look of abject horror.

"Madman!" replied the boots — "dam'me, I think he is a madman with a vengeance! Listen to me, you unfort'nate. Ah! would you?" — [a slight tap on the head with the large stick, as Mr. Trott made another move towards the bell-handle] "I caught you there! did I?"

"Spare my life!" exclaimed Trott, raising his hands imploringly.

"I don't want your life," replied the boots, disdainfully, "though I think it 'ud be a charity if somebody took it."

"No, no, it wouldn't," interrupted poor Mr. Trott, hurriedly, "no, no, it wouldn’t! I — I —'d rather keep it!"

"O werry well," said the boots: "that's a mere matter of taste — ev'ry one to his liking. Hows'ever, all I've got to say is this here: You sit quietly down in that chair, and I'll sit hoppersite you here, and if you keep quiet and don't stir, I won't damage you; but, if you move hand or foot till half-past twelve o'clock, I shall alter the expression of your countenance so completely, that the next time you look in the glass you’ll ask vether you're gone out of town, and ven you're likely to come back again. So sit down."

"I will — I will," responded the victim of mistakes; and down sat Mr. Trott and down sat the boots too, exactly opposite him, with the stick ready for immediate action in case of emergency.

Long and dreary were the hours that followed. The bell of Great Winglebury church had just struck ten, and two hours and a half would probably elapse before succour arrived. — "Tales," Chapter 8, "The Great Winglebury Duel".

Commentary

Brighton and Faversham are 41 miles from London, but Dickens announces that the sleepy setting of the prose farce "is exactly forty-two miles and three-quarters from Hyde Park Corner"; in other words, quite removed from this boundary between country and city, and therefore far removed from the more sophisticated milieu of the metropolis. However, Great Winglebury is a market town not unlike Rochester in Kent (albeit, only 32 miles from central London); Chatham, the other Medway town that Dickens knew well from boyhood, is just 34 miles. Both towns are now connected by rapid rail service to central London, but rail service occurred later in Dickens's life, so that a coach journey was the only alternative for both Alexander Trott in this sketch and Samuel Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers. As a young author, Charles Dickens used such somnolent settings to appeal to Victorian readers' nostalgic longing for the old usages of life in county towns and villages, a way of life that was rapidly vanishing even in the early decades of Victoria's reign. Certainly there is a strong resemblance between the general layout of the buildings in the Winglebury High Street and that of the shops in Rochester High Street, and the inn as described by Dickens at the opening looks markedly like The Bull at Rochester, the inn at which Mr. Pickwick stops in chapter 5, and rents a carriage.

The short story "The Great Winglebury Duel" became the basis for Dickens's early farce "The Strange Gentleman," which débuted at the St. James's Theatre, London, on 29 September 1836, with the names of the principals slightly altered, possibly for comic effect: "Alexander Trott," the "Strange Gentleman," becomes "Walter Trott"; "Horace Hunter," Trott's rival, becomes "Horatio Tinkles"; and "Lady Julia" becomes plain "Miss Julia Dobbs." Paul Davis admirably sums up the short story's complicated romantic plot of mistaken identity:

When Alexander Trott tries to avoid fighting a duel with Horace Hunter over the hand of Emily Brown by soliciting the influence of the mayor of Winglebury, he inadvertently becomes entangled with Lady Julia Manners and Lord Peter. The duel is averted, but Trott is taken for Lord Peter. When he is bundled off in a carriage with Lady Julia, the two decide to marry, thus allowing Emily Brown to marry Horace Hunter.

Although most of the sketches in this work were originally published as separate entries in various magazines and journals between 1833 and 1836, the 1837 "Second Series" edition does represent the first appearance of five of the sketches: "A Visit to Newgate," "The Black Veil," "The Great Winglebury Duel," "Our Next-Door Neighbour," and "The Drunkard's Death." Accordingly, the illustration of Alexander Trott and the boots is one of the last which Cruikshank produced for the series. Precisely the same scene is realised by George Cruikshank (1839), Sol Eytinge, Junior (1867), Fred Barnard (1876), and Harry Furniss (1910) in The Great Winglebury Duel, although the Household Edition version bears a lengthy caption derived from the boots's dialogue to point the reader towards the precise moment realised. All four visual interpretations of the scene occur in Trott's room at the Winglebury Arms.

Whereas Eytinge's version shows a sour-faced boots's raising his cane and Trott asking to be spared, Cruikshank's is much more static, as the boots (looking very much like the wild-eyed and potentially dangerous London cabbie in The Last Cab-Driver) merely stares malevolently at the surprised young gentleman, sitting next to a nicely appointed table with fruit, a wine decanter, and a small glass of wine (presumably, Madeira, mentioned earlier) poured. Since these details are consistent with Eytinge's 1867 wood-engraving (which also has a landscape painting on the wall behind Alexander Trott), it is likely derived from Cruikshank's illustration. Since these details are consistent with Eytinge's 1867 wood-engraving (which also has a landscape painting on the wall behind Alexander Trott), it is likely derived from Cruikshank's illustration. The provenance of the Barnard interpretation is not so obvious, as his "upper-boots," not seated as in the Cruikshank original, and now holding a countryman's walking-stick aloft, is a much more dynamic figure as he attempts to grab the terrified young gentleman, cowering in his armchair. The Cruikshank composition is static, as each adversary studies the other, awaiting his next move, and Trott has left his glass of port, poured before the arrival of Mayor Overton, unfinished. The oil-painting of a landscape on the wall behind Trott in the Cruikshank plate implies the rural locale, but the portrait of a lady between the two seated figures is more significant as she may represent the heiress, Emily Brown, who has unwittingly caused these plot complications since her parents and Trott's have arranged the marriage, or even Lady Julia Manners, who has facilitated Overton's utterly misconstruing Trott's note and misidentifying him as the demented young aristocrat. That the boots and Trott have subsided into postures suggestive of watchful waiting implies that they have been thus for some time, and that the violent confrontation which began the scene is several hours in the past. In gaiters and breeches, the shag-haired, one-eyed, middle-aged boots is a thorough contrast to the fashionably dressed urbanite opposite him whom everybody seems to have mistaken for Lady Julia's young fiancé, the "slightly deranged, though perfectly harmless" Lord Peter.

The confusion of sane but cowardly Alexander Trott for the benign madman, Lord Peter, like the relationship between the laconic ex-cab-driver of this story written in late 1835 or early 1836 and the peculiar cabbie of the seventeenth sketch of "Scenes" (published in November 1835) may of course be coincidental. However, the similarity in Cruikshank's depictions of the "upper-boots" and the last cab-driver would seem to imply that mental aberration is the key to making sense of both the earlier sketch and the later short story, in which the boots believes the young man to be a lunatic, and the young man, held "under restraint" until called for, regards his handler as mad:

the last four tales seem indicative of more than simply their author's growing fictional expertise. In each of these last pieces, the subject of some form of mental disorder recurs. The presence of this motif is made all the more remarkable by its absence, in large part, from the earlier tales. In "The Great Winglebury Duel" and "The Tuggses at Ramsgate," the respective topics of madness and extreme nervous excitability are treated farcically. The plot of the former tale deals with a case of mistaken identity in which a cowardly young man, attempting to escape from a duel, is assumed to be a young nobleman whose middle-aged fiancée has instructed him to feign madness so that they may elope without detection. As an illustration by Cruikshank emphasizes, the high point of the story is an episode at the inn at Winglebury in which the supposed "wretched loo-nattic" is guarded by a one-eyed boots, brandishing a large stick, whose behaviour seems so erratic to "the victim of mistakes" that the latter assumes that the boots, in turn, is mad. — Deborah A. Thomas "Imaginative Overindulgence."

[Kim]

"Leave that 'ere bell alone, you wretched loo-nattic!" said the boots, suddenly forcing the unfortunate Trott back into his chair, and brandishing the stick aloft.

Fred Barnard


Commentary

Although most of the sketches in this work were originally published as separate entries in various magazines and journals between 1833 and 1836, the 1837 "Second Series" edition does represent the first appearance of five of the sketches: "A Visit to Newgate," "The Black Veil," "The Great Winglebury Duel," "Our Next-Door Neighbour," and "The Drunkard's Death." Accordingly, the illustration of Alexander Trott and the boots is one of the last which Cruikshank produced for the series. Precisely the same scene is realised by George Cruikshank (1839), Sol Eytinge, Junior (1867), Fred Barnard (1876), and Harry Furniss (1910) in The Great Winglebury Duel, although the Household Edition version bears a lengthy caption derived from the boots's dialogue to point the reader towards the precise moment realised. All four visual interpretations of the scene occur in Trott's room at the Winglebury Arms.

Whereas the later American version by Sol Eytinge, Junior, shows a sour-faced boots's raising his cane and Trott's asking (somewhat melodramatically) to be spared, Cruikshank's is much more static, as the "upper-boots" (looking very much like the wild-eyed London cabbie in The Last Cab-Driver) merely stares malevolently at the surprised young gentleman, sitting next to a nicely appointed table with fruit, a wine decanter, and a small glass of wine. Since these details are consistent with Eytinge's 1867 wood-engraving (which also has a landscape painting on the wall behind Alexander Trott), it is likely derived from Cruikshank's illustration. The provenance of the Barnard interpretation is not so obvious, as his boots, not seated as in the Cruikshank original, and now holding a countryman's walking-stick aloft, is a much more dynamic figure as he attempts to grab the terrified young gentleman, cowering in his armchair. The action is intensified by the vigorous crosshatching that has replaced the patterned carpet in the Cruikshank copper-engraving, and the lightness with which Barnard has sketched in the bell-pull and painting in the backdrop brings the eye forward, as if Barnard is making use of the photographic effect of blurring the background in order to emphasize figures in the foreground. The Furniss illustration of thirty-five years later is much more a caricature of both the bolt-upright young gentleman and thoughtful, determined boots, holding his fur cap (mentioned earlier in the story) on his knee as he menaces Trott with his heavy-headed walking-stick.

[Kim]

The Great Winglebury Duel

Harry Furniss

1910

Text Illustrated:

"You'd better be quiet, young feller," remarked the boots, going through a threatening piece of pantomime with the stick.

"Or mad!" said Mr. Trott, rather alarmed. "Leave the room!" shouted Trott, ringing the bell violently: for he began to be alarmed on a new score.

"Leave that 'ere bell alone, you wretched loo-nattic!" said the boots, suddenly forcing the unfortunate Trott back into his chair, and brandishing the stick aloft. "Be quiet, you miserable object, and don't let everybody know there's a madman in the house."

"He is a madman! He is a madman!" exclaimed the terrified Mr. Trott, gazing on the one eye of the red-headed boots with a look of abject horror.

"Madman!" replied the boots — "dam'me, I think he is a madman with a vengeance! Listen to me, you unfort'nate. Ah! would you?" — [a slight tap on the head with the large stick, as Mr. Trott made another move towards the bell-handle] "I caught you there! did I?"

"Spare my life!" exclaimed Trott, raising his hands imploringly.

"I don't want your life," replied the boots, disdainfully, "though I think it 'ud be a charity if somebody took it."

"No, no, it wouldn't," interrupted poor Mr. Trott, hurriedly, "no, no, it wouldn’t! I — I —'d rather keep it!"

"O werry well," said the boots: "that's a mere matter of taste — ev'ry one to his liking. Hows'ever, all I've got to say is this here: You sit quietly down in that chair, and I'll sit hoppersite you here, and if you keep quiet and don't stir, I won't damage you; but, if you move hand or foot till half-past twelve o'clock, I shall alter the expression of your countenance so completely, that the next time you look in the glass you’ll ask vether you're gone out of town, and ven you’re likely to come back again. So sit down."

"I will — I will," responded the victim of mistakes; and down sat Mr. Trott and down sat the boots too, exactly opposite him, with the stick ready for immediate action in case of emergency.

Long and dreary were the hours that followed. The bell of Great Winglebury church had just struck ten, and two hours and a half would probably elapse before succour arrived. — "Tales," Chapter 8, "The Great Winglebury Duel,"

[Kim]

"The Great Winglebury Duel"

Sol Eytinge Jr.

1867

[Peter]

Kim

As always, thanks for the illustrations. From looking at them, I think it is fair to say that the “stick” is a character as much as any of the people in the illustration.

I found the Cruikshank rather stiff and unemotional. On the other hand, the Harry Furniss was really good. The difference in the characters was striking. Their facial expressions and their posture was very expressive.

I note you have a new picture. Very nice.

[Tristram]

Great illustrations, Kim! My favourite one is the one by Furniss, where you really get the impression as though the boots were taking aim when he is probably just showing his stick to Mr. Trott to lay down the situation, or alternatively Mr. Trott, for him. The illustration is very dynamic and lively, but I don't think Cruikshank's bad, either. I like the rather milksoppish posture of Mr. Trott there.

Sol Eytinge's rendition is a failure in my eyes, because the people don't look like human beings at all whereas Barnard's illustration is a bit too aggressive and menacing to my taste. After all, we are dealing with an amusing and light-hearted sketch here.

[Suki]

I thought this story was quite funny, especially the scenes where the "wretched loon-attic" "Lord Peter" is held by the boots until the chaise arrives. I laughed out loud at the "Wellerism" by the boots ( I know it's not really a Wellerism because the boots isn't a Weller, but I could easily imagine the line coming from Sam or Tony):

"...if you move hand or foot till half-past twelve o'clock, I shall alter the expression of your countenance so completely, that the next time you look in the glass you'll ask vether you're gone out of town, and ven you're likely to come back again. So sit down."