An episode in Dombey and son by Charles Dickens: the interior of "The wooden midshipman", a shop in the City of London for navigational instruments; a boy ("Rob the Grinder") is conversing with a pugilist known as "The Game Chicken". Etching by Phiz (Hablot K. Browne).

In the centre background is the wooden statue of "The wooden midshipman", described in chapter IV of the novel as one of the "little timber midshipmen in obsolete naval uniforms, eternally employed outside the shop doors of nautical Instrument-makers in taking observations of the hackney carriages": it shows a sailor wearing a cocked hat holding a sextant, and in opening hours it was placed on the pavement outside to attract customers. In the background, Captain Cuttle covers his face with his hands as Mr Toots reads to him an account from the Shipping intelligence newspaper stating that Dombey's ship "the Son and Heir, port of London, bound for Barbados, ... broke up in the last hurricane; and that every soul on board perished". The dead included Walter Gill, the son of the proprietor of the shop

Also on show in the shop are two globes, two telescopes, an alembic, a theodolite, two further sextants, a compass, etc. The sextants are incomplete. Above the door are electric batteries, and in the back parlour is a marine painting. Dickens's description: "The stock-in-trade ... comprised chronometers, barometers, telescopes, compasses, charts, maps, sextants, quadrants, and specimens of every kind of instrument used in the working of a ship's course, or the keeping of a ship's reckoning, or the prosecuting of a ship's discoveries."

[London] : [Bradbury & Evans], [1847]

1 print : etching ; image 11.4 x 10 cm

A visitor of distinction. Phiz.

Philip V. Allingham., 'A visitor of distinction', The Victorian web, https://victorianweb.org

Wellcome Collection 29536i