An original watercolor drawing by "Phiz," after his wood-engraving for chapter 58 of Barnaby Rudge (1841).
The artist shows poor, half-witted Barnaby in his prison cell with his beloved pet raven Grip, "who, with his head drooping and his deep black plumes rough and crumpled, appeared to comprehend and to partake, his master's fallen fortunes." Imprisonment—both literal and metaphorical—is a constant, nightmarish theme throughout Dickens's work; as Peter Ackroyd reminds us, one must never forget that Dickens's own father was imprisoned when he was a young boy.
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