The Old Curiosity Club discussion
The Haunted Man
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The Haunted Man - Part Two
I was curious if anyone to this point noted that this was the 5th and last of his Christmas books (as Peter noted in the beginning of Part 1), and I wonder why.If have the years correct, A Christmas Carol in 1843; this one in 1848. He basically did a run of one per year for five years, and then never did another, even though he continued active writing for another 20 years or so.
Perhaps nothing, but something I noticed.
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If have the years correct, A Christ..."
Hi John
Dickens was a great writer, but he was also very good at the business of writing and publishing. The Christmas books were originally planned to be both a written and a financial success. They were all written in a short period of time before the scheduled publication of each book at Christmas. The organization of the writing, multiple illustrators, and sundry other issues of what was really a series of self-published novellas was overwhelming.
By 1848 Dickens had found his way back to publication and financial success with Dombey and Son.
I have just finished reading Les Staniford’s “The Man Who Invented Christmas” which gives a solid background to ACC and recounts the other texts to a lesser degree. I have yet to see the movie but understand it does provide background information into Dickens’s state of affairs as well.
Peter wrote: "John wrote: "I was curious if anyone to this point noted that this was the 5th and last of his Christmas books (as Peter noted in the beginning of Part 1), and I wonder why.If have the years corr..."
Thanks Peter. The business end of his writing and publishing is something I have to keep in mind. At least for perspective. I would like to get to Standiford's book in the near future.
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On the other hand, I cannot help thinking that Dickens is unnecessarily wordy sometimes. Some passages, especially the scene in the Tetterby household, seem to draw themselves endlessly, and most of the characters talk as if they were players on a stage rather than real people. This makes it very hard for me to get into the story.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed little gems like this one:
“'You know, Dolphus, my dear,' said Mrs. Tetterby, 'that when I was single, I might have given myself away in several directions. At one time, four after me at once; two of them were sons of Mars.'
'We’re all sons of Ma’s, my dear,' said Mr. Tetterby, 'jointly with Pa’s.'”
Tristram wrote: "John, in my Penguin edition it says that Dickens was very busy writing Dombey and Son when he started The Haunted Man and that he felt it quite a lot of workload. At the same time, however, he conf..."Thanks Tristram.
I have read Michael Schmidt's excellent "history" of the novel, called aptly "The Novel, A Biography."
Schmidt teaches in England. What I found interesting in regard to his chapter on Dickens was that he started off with the idea that Dickens was about "making them pay" (ie., his readership).
I felt it was a little unfair, as that statement was what he wrote, but perhaps the point he was making that Dickens was one of the first writers to be concerned about the "business" side of things.
I've just begun reading chapter 2.Since I'm at the beginning of the chapter, and haven't read Peter's intro, nor have I read the comments, maybe I'm writing something that the Curiosities have already widely discussed, but I want to write it anyway: poor Johnny!! >:-(
John wrote: "Tristram wrote: "John, in my Penguin edition it says that Dickens was very busy writing Dombey and Son when he started The Haunted Man and that he felt it quite a lot of workload. At the same time,..."I'm really fascinated with Dickens's interest in the business side of things. As an editor he opened up opportunities for a lot of writers, not just himself, and as a businessman experimenting with cheap print forms like the serial, he did a lot to get fiction into more peoples' hands.
I do think the fact that he was dependent on his writing for income meant sometimes he published things that weren't as polished or as disciplined as other things--but on the other hand, it also meant he wrote A LOT and I don't think his later writing would have been as good if he hadn't been at it so long and so extensively for the cash. It's very encouraging to see through someone's lengthy record of publication how much hard work can pay off.
I guess I tend to agree with those commenting that Haunted Man maybe falls under the heading of not so polished or disciplined. There are definitely parts that go on, as Tristram points out, and I can't say I'm all that intrigued by any of the supporting characters except the Boy. I want a better understanding of why the Boy is immune to Redlaw's "gift."
Also I'm loving this story for its investigation of how many different ways sorrow and trouble make people human. It's not just that they build empathy (though they do). The part that really gave me a turn in this section (in a good way) was when the battered woman was asked to remember a time when someone hurt her--a time older than the battering, which she denies is a problem--and she falls apart. Being human would seem to mean not only that you can feel empathy for others, but also that you can feel it for yourself. If empathy is even the right word for that.
Milena wrote: "I've just begun reading chapter 2.Since I'm at the beginning of the chapter, and haven't read Peter's intro, nor have I read the comments, maybe I'm writing something that the Curiosities have alr..."
And yes, poor Johnny! This story has a funny way of defining "gift."
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Illustrated Double-Page to Chap. II by John Tenniel
Text Illustrated:
"The gentleman's room," said Tetterby, "is upstairs, sir. There's a more convenient private entrance; but as you have come in here, it will save your going out into the cold, if you'll take this little staircase," showing one communicating directly with the parlour, "and go up to him that way, if you wish to see him."
"Yes, I wish to see him," said the Chemist. "Can you spare a light?"
The watchfulness of his haggard look, and the inexplicable distrust that darkened it, seemed to trouble Mr. Tetterby. He paused; and looking fixedly at him in return, stood for a minute or so, like a man stupefied, or fascinated.
At length he said, "I'll light you, sir, if you'll follow me."
"No," replied the Chemist, "I don't wish to be attended, or announced to him. He does not expect me. I would rather go alone. Please to give me the light, if you can spare it, and I'll find the way."
In the quickness of his expression of this desire, and in taking the candle from the newsman, he touched him on the breast. Withdrawing his hand hastily, almost as though he had wounded him by accident (for he did not know in what part of himself his new power resided, or how it was communicated, or how the manner of its reception varied in different persons), he turned and ascended the stair.
But when he reached the top, he stopped and looked down. The wife was standing in the same place, twisting her ring round and round upon her finger. The husband, with his head bent forward on his breast, was musing heavily and sullenly. The children, still clustering about the mother, gazed timidly after the visitor, and nestled together when they saw him looking down."
Commentary:
John Tenniel's innovative fusing of two wood-engravings and text serves as an introduction to the introduction of the Tetterby clan and the impending arrival of Professor Redlaw, bearing his dubious "gift" as he mounts the stairs to visit his sick student. Tenniel in this double-plate distinguishes the figure of Redlaw by his broad-brimmed, black hat and long, black cloak. The mood of neither scene is upbeat, as the Phantom spreads the contagion of forgetfulness through his human double.
Although the illustration to the left depicts Mrs. Tetterby and her brood and that to the right Redlaw on the landing outside the student's rented room, the title is technically Illustrated Double-page to Chap. II in the various editions of The Christmas Books, beginning with the single volume of 1848 and continuing right through the various anthologized versions, beginning in 1852.
In this, our first encounter with the domestic characters of the subplot, whom Dickens introduces simultaneously in the text, Chapter II. The Gift Diffused, Tenniel anticipates the domestic theme struck by Leech in the ninth plate, depicting Mrs. Tetterby surrounded by seven of her eight children and her husband (back turned to her, right). In Leech's conception, Mrs. Tetterby will be heavy and middle-aged; here, Tenniel characterizes her as younger and thinner — indeed, one could easily confuse her for Milly Swidger, the young mother whose chold died in infancy. Thus, Dickens's distributing the responsibility for the plates in this manner has created a visual dissonance; furthermore, the text will not fully explicate the two-part scene until almost thirty pages later. This difficulty does not plague any of the subsequent editions, illustrated individual rather than corporately by Sol Eytinge, Jr. in 1867 for the Diamond Edition's Christmas Books, E. A. Abbey for the Harper and Brothers Christmas Stories of 1876, Fred Barnard for the Chapman and Hall Household Edition of Christmas Books (1878), and the Harry Furniss Charles Dickens Library Edition of Christmas Books in 1910.
Chapter II. The Gift Diffused to the right involves a three-quarter-page vignette right, again accompanied by printed text, on page 53. Heavily muffled and enigmatic, Redlaw, on the landing of the staircase, protects the flame of the candle he has just borrowed. Mysterious shadows in both plates are significant in that they suggest the doubt and despair connected to Redlaw's double, of whose presence The shadow reminds us. Redlaw's shadow points us back to the shadows cast by the story-telling mother and her children in Illustrated Page to Chap. I, while Redlaw himself seems to point forward, towards the student's room and the textual version of the companion plates. The overall effect of the cloak and the shadows, augmented by Redlaw's gesture, propels the reader into the second chapter of the novella.
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The Tetterbys
John Leech
Chapter 2
Commentary:
Although the scale of the illustration is significantly smaller than that of the later illustrations in the various editions of The Christmas Books, as the anthologized version was known from 1852 onwards, John Leech has successfully compressed the visual information that Dickens provides about The small newsagent's family into a single, highly detailed scene in the 1848 Bradbury and Evans edition.
Like all the plates that follow, except the concluding one, "The Tetterbys" occupies somewhat less than a full page, sharing the page with the text. Since Leech had wanted a subject more congenial to his abilities as a graphic humorist, Dickens had proposed that the Punch illustrator realize this hectic scene of an extended family of the type he himself endured as a child: two adults, the infant Sally ("Moloch"), and the seven male children. As we turn the page, we come upon the scene with Mrs. Tetterby grudgingly setting the table and the children gathered about in anticipation.
Leech conveys an impression of congested space and close living conditions with the small fireplace, insufficient table, inadequate floor space, and room full of small children. This is not the cheery yuletide repast of the Cratchits — the only food visible here is a small loaf. The placement of this plate is masterful since it occurs at precisely the moment that one finds Mrs. Tetterby setting the table in the accompanying text. Despite the confined living conditions and constrained financial circumstances, the mantelpiece's ornaments have a humanizing influence on the chaotic scene.
Deborah A. Thomas in Dickens and the Short Story (1982) notes that reading and remembering are recurring motifs in the novella that anticipate the conflicting wisdoms of the head and the heart in Hard Times (1854). Figures especially associated with reading, Redlaw and Tetterby, are both members of the Information Age as the former spreads scientific thinking beyond the restricted communities of the privileged and politically connected universities of Oxford and Cambridge, while Adolphus Tetterby earns his living by selling journals and newspapers to those unable to afford purchasing books and even paying a lending library subscription. But reading and study can also be retreats from emotional engagement, as Leech suggests in this scene:
The motif of reading is also echoed in the subplot, dealing with the impoverished Tetterby family whose attitudes directly reflect the baneful influence of Redlaw, while he is afflicted with the Phantom's gift. When they are first introduced, despite their large numbers and cramped living quarters, the Tetterbys are cheerful. Mr. Tetterby, a news vender by occupation, is attempting to read a newspaper. . . . The "small scraps of newspapers" covering Mr. Tetterby's screen prove to be clippings which he is in the habit of reading to his eight children for instructively emotional effect. [Thomas 54]
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The boy before the fire
Chapter 2
John Leech
Text Illustrated:
The boy watched him as he made the door fast, and withdrew behind the table, when he looked round.
“Come!” he said. “Don’t you touch me! You’ve not brought me here to take my money away.”
Redlaw threw some more upon the ground. He flung his body on it immediately, as if to hide it from him, lest the sight of it should tempt him to reclaim it; and not until he saw him seated by his lamp, with his face hidden in his hands, began furtively to pick it up. When he had done so, he crept near the fire, and, sitting down in a great chair before it, took from his breast some broken scraps of food, and fell to munching, and to staring at the blaze, and now and then to glancing at his shillings, which he kept clenched up in a bunch, in one hand.
Commentary:
In "The Christmas Books," John Butt describes the Boy as neither a type nor an abstraction like "Ignorance" in A Christmas Carol, but "a clearly recognizable slum child" . This child, for example, experiences various emotions: before, confronted by Redlaw, he was cringing in terror; here, he gives himself over to whole-hearted enjoyment of food, fire, and money. This is the sort of fire, a fire of blazing coals in a grate, that Scrooge initially forbids Bob Cratchit from building, but in conclusion exhorts him to construct with a newly-purchased coal-scuttle: in Stave One, Bob cannot "replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own" (Penguin I: 47). Coal is thus established in the Carol's printed text as an expensive luxury, but only in the pictorial text of The Haunted Man.
Leech's Boy, then, is no mere abstraction, but a child whose realism is conveyed through his various emotions and his size relative to the chair. The artist has given him tumbling mounds of hair, trousers far too short for his legs, and bare feet to emphasize his poverty, The passage illustrated is immediately above the plate, but the artist has positioned the Boy sitting as near as possible to the fire, his feet approaching the fender. We have just read about an old man being reduced to an egocentric sensualist by Redlaw's gift, desiring to be waited on and fed, and seeing no merit in the holly-berries because they are inedible. He is more savage than the urchin because humanizing memory does not soften him as the physical warmth does the Boy.
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Milly and the student
Chapter 2
Frank Stone
Commentary:
In his contributions to the visual program, Stone focuses on the figures, their states of mind, and the foreground, and avoids any suggestion as to background, creating an almost flat picture. The sacred atmosphere of "Milly and the Student" has affinities with the paintings of the German Nazarenes in that they share close attention to detail, a rejection of aerial perspective, a self-conscious religiosity in the unnatural stillness of the scene, and an avoidance of shadow in order to show everything clearly. Stone's first plate, depicting Milly and the Student and her brood, lacks focus because it attempts to take in the whole scene. Stone's second production is more effective because it is a close-up that utilizes symbolic poses that convey both the characters' roles and feelings. Elegantly simple, the design (anticipating the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, reminiscent of early Renaissance art, has foreshortened the daybed (as Giotto has done with the Virgin Mary's bed in his narrative-pictorial sequence of the life of Christ in the Arena Chapel, Padua) to frame the despondent student, Mr. "Denham" and emphasize his discomfort. The text and plate precisely coincide, since Milly is in the act of adjusting the student's pillow in both. We note that the student is grasping a locket which hangs on a chain about his neck, a detail not mentioned in the text but undoubtedly intended by the artist to suggest the source of the student's abstraction and melancholy. He does not look away, towards the fire as in the text, but within. He does not seem to notice that his pillow is being adjusted, and appears neither uncivil nor ungrateful, as in the line at the top of the page. The young man's body language does, however, communicate Edmund's pensiveness: "you have often been thinking of late".
Since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at about the time that The Haunted Man was published, it would be a mistake to regard Stone's "Milly" illustrations as consciously Pre-Raphaelite in style. Stone, already forty-eight at the time, was a self-taught artist, while Pre-Raphaelites were younger and were associated with the Royal Academy schools, against the teachings of which they reacted.
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Clarkson Stanfield
Commentary:
The Exterior of the Old College
Commentary:
Clarkson Stanfield's second plate is enclosed by textual description of the same scene, above and below. As in Tenniel's double-plate, the figure of Redlaw is distinguished by his large (seventeenth-century Puritan) hat. The mood of the scene is sombre and tranquil, the white of the snow on the roof contrasting picturesquely with the shadowed portions of the courtyard. The scene depicted is actually several pages further on, for it involves both Redlaw and the Boy. Seen as a series, Stanfield's plates are moving us from the limits of human habitation (the lighthouse) towards the center of urban civilization, not merely the metropolis or the university, but the extended family of his final offering, "The Christmas Party in the Great Dinner Hall". The skeletal trees (left), the shadows, and the night sky impart an appropriate gloominess as Redlaw's "gift" continues to be diffused.
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"The Tetterbys"
Chapter 2
Sol Eytinge Jr.
Text Illustrated:
"Mr. Tetterby sought upon his screen for a passage appropriate to be impressed upon his children's minds on the occasion, and read the following: —
"'It is an undoubted fact that all remarkable men have had remarkable mothers, and have respected them in after life as their best friends.' Think of your own remarkable mother, my boys," said Mr. Tetterby, "and know her value while she is still among you!"
He sat down again in his chair by the fire, and composed himself, cross-legged, over his newspaper."
Commentary:
Eytinge make clear that the focus of the Diamond Edition's wood-engraving is character study rather than narrative exposition or elaboration of setting (details of which are minimal in his illustration). Whereas in "The Tetterbys" in the original 1848 Bradbury and Evans edition, John Leech has attempted to group the entire Tetterby clan around a diminutive table at dinner time, conveying an impression of congested space and close living conditions with the small fireplace, insufficient table, inadequate floor space, Eytinge has been able to dispose of his nine figures more comfortably. He achieves this effect by not attempting to show too much and by focusing on Mr. Tetterby and his screen, while he seems oblivious to the antics of the children behind him. Eytinge seems to be conveying his impression of the first two pages of the second chapter, but in fact has captured the very moment before the put-upon newsagent issues "a general proclamation" to the children, and just prior to Johnny's sitting on the stool (far left).
Looking a good deal like Sol Eytinge's own Bob Cratchit in "Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim", the frontispiece for the entire 1867 volume, Adolphus Tetterby here is more consistent with the "good-hearted, struggling, little newsagent" that John Leech gives us in "The Gift Diffused" and a figure far more congruent with Dickens's text than the realistically modeled illustration by E. A. Abbey in the next decade. Using several models from the 1848 novella, Eytinge has nevertheless provided his American readers of 1867 with a more realistic and less cartoonish version of the lower-middle-class family that corresponds in its domestic felicity to the Cratchits in the original Christmas Book. In contrast, E. A. Abbey's chiding father is a far cry from mild-mannered Bob Cratchit.
Interestingly, Eytinge introduces the comic and sentimental subplot ahead of the main (melodramatic) plot involving the distribution and consequences of chemistry professor Redlaw's dubious "gift" in The Haunted Man. For the last of the Christmas Books, Eytinge, feeling that he could devote two of the eight allotted Christmas Book illustrations to the twenty-year-old text, created two scenes with visual interest. However, in focusing on Mr. Tetterby and Redlaw, Eytinge neglected the sentimental and quasi-religious thread of the story dealing with the angelic college servant, Milly Swidger, and the poor student, Edmund Longford (alias "Denham"). In "The Tetterbys," Eytinge has combined aspects of two of the original 1848 illustrations, John Leech's "The Tetterbys" and "Johnny and Moloch". Eytinge's version is especially successful at capturing the single-minded concentration of Adolphus Tetterby as he reads his news-screen, but fails to distinguish the various children (except Johnny and his charge) and to render Sophia Tetterby (right) of any interest.
Eytinge shows seven children, Leech eight, as occupying the small parlor behind the newsagent's shop. Eytinge's Tetterby looks comparatively unruffled compared to Leech's, but his children — like Leech's — bear a marked family resemblance in their facial features. Conversely, in his sole Tetterby illustration for the British Household Edition (1878) Fred Barnard in "It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the Tumblers," etc. entirely avoids the parents and their place of business and focuses entirely upon the host of children who overflow the street outside the Jerusalem buildings.
American illustrator E. A. Abbey in the Harper and Brothers Household Edition focuses on the relationship between Adolphus Tetterby, his son Johnny, the baby-minder, and the Moloch of a baby, Sally, in "'You bad boy!' said Mr. Tetterby" in a fashion at once more natural and more serious than Eytinge's, which thus blends realism with humor and character study rather the other nineteenth-century illustrations alluded to. Of his six illustrations for the same novella, Harry Furniss, following Leech's practice sixty years earlier, realized both "Tetterby's Temper" and "The Tetterby's Baby," but failed to achieve a comic effect, in spite of his far superior modeling of the figures. Leech's and Eytinge's plates enlist the reader's sympathy for both Johnny and his harassed father, whereas Barnard's engraving merely establishes the fact that the area around the Jerusalem Buildings, overrun with children, is pandemonium.
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"It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the Tumblers," etc.
Fred Barnard
1878
Text Illustrated:
It was a very Moloch of a baby, on whose insatiate altar the whole existence of this particular young brother was offered up a daily sacrifice. Its personality may be said to have consisted in its never being quiet, in any one place, for five consecutive minutes, and never going to sleep when required. "Tetterby's baby" was as well known in the neighbourhood as the postman or the pot-boy. It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the Tumblers or the Monkey, and came up, all on one side, a little too late for everything that was attractive, from Monday morning until Saturday night. Wherever childhood congregated to play, there was little Moloch making Johnny fag and toil. Wherever Johnny desired to stay, little Moloch became fractious, and would not remain. Whenever Johnny wanted to go out, Moloch was asleep, and must be watched. Whenever Johnny wanted to stay at home, Moloch was awake, and must be taken out. Yet Johnny was verily persuaded that it was a faultless baby, without its peer in the realm of England, and was quite content to catch meek glimpses of things in general from behind its skirts, or over its limp flapping bonnet, and to go staggering about with it like a very little porter with a very large parcel, which was not directed to anybody, and could never be delivered anywhere.
Commentary:
As Dickens's original illustrators — John Leech, Clarkson Stanfield, John Tenniel, and Frank Stone — realized, Dickens's last Christmas Book offered plenty of material for realizing moments of character comedy, pathos, the supernatural, and the picturesque. Once again, however, the British and American Household Editions of The Christmas Books offer illustrations largely lacking in these respects, the realism of Barnard and Abbey being entirely the wrong mode for the cautionary tale. In Barnard's illustration, we have a street full of children — a minor moment in the narrative. In the equivalent American Household Edition scene, we cannot even discern Mr. Tetterby's facial expression as he admonishes second-eldest son, Johnny, for interrupting him as he attempts to escape into the great (adult) world reported in the daily paper. Barnard's riotous street scene with Johnny (centre) carrying Moloch at least conveys a sense of the "surplus population" of working-class children in the London of the 1840s, so numerous a throng that they must bring themselves up, even as Johnny is given sole responsibility for his sister Sally. Neither Barnard's nor Abbey's illustration has the charm of Leech's "The Tetterbys," however, which also has the virtue of showing the entire family and their cramped quarters rather than merely the children, as in Barnard's illustration, or Johnny, Moloch, and their father in Abbey's.
The original cartoon entitled "The Tetterbys" accomplishes a number of narrative-pictorial tasks that neither Barnard nor Abbey attempted to address. With his illustration sharing the page with the text realized, Leech has seamlessly integrated his illustration of Mrs. Tetterby's attempting to set the table for dinner while her husband and sons look on, the image below coinciding exactly with the line "slapping [the table] with the plates" . Leech's interpretation of the lower-middle class family is that family life is relentlessly communal, and young children are omnipresent: there is no escape for either parent. Abbey more realistically dramatizes this point by showing Mr. Tetterby turn on the hapless Johnny, the only child who is in fact not a disturber of his peace. As he swings around on Johnny, the real culprits watch through the partially open door (left). At least Abbey's illustration, lacking in Leech's energy and detail though it may be, advances the reader's understanding of the secondary characters, whereas Barnard's merely establishes the fact that the area around the Jerusalem Buildings is overrun with children.
The original John Leech cartoon of 1848 depicts the boisterous chaos of the Tetterbys' domestic establishment, without conventional Victorian sentimentality, despite idealized pictures of the royal family's parade of infants and toddlers that occasionally appeared in the illustrated press of the period. Leech, shortly to be joined on the staff of Punch by fellow Haunted Man illustrator John Tenniel after Richard Doyle's resignation in 1850 over the journal's anti-Catholic stance, naturally falls into the mode of caricature and lampoon here. Whereas the Punch-like illustration "The Tetterbys" indicates that the struggling newsagent and his incompetent wife have seven children, the author at the point of writing (October-30 November 1848) had a growing brood of six children — and Catherine was very pregnant that autumn with their seventh child, who would be known as Henry Fielding Dickens (born January 1849); but it may well have seemed to Dickens, struggling to find time for sustained writing and having had to put off the latest Christmas Book by a year, that he and Catherine, married twelve years, already had a brood of Tetterby dimensions, there being four sons and two daughters ranging in age that fall from eleven to one. In contrast to the Dickenses, the Tetterbys have only one daughter (the infant Sally, the perpetual burden of the second-oldest son, Johnny, seen struggling under his charge in the centre of Leech's wood engraving) but six sons. The cartoon-like style and cramped parlor are both well-suited to Leech's subject, the "downside" (as we might say today) of the strained domestic circumstances depicted far more optimistically in the Cratchit family of the first Christmas Book. "The very looseness of Leech's lines in his pictures of Johnny coping with baby Moloch at home, and abroad reinforces the good humor". In contrast to Leech's rough exuberance, Barnard offers a crowded street scene of modeled figures in vigorous motion, as if the children constitute a mob.
American illustrator E. A. Abbey has combined a visual introduction of Mr. Tetterby in his shop with John Leech's "Johnny and Moloch" in his second illustration for the novella, "'You bad boy!' said Mr. Tetterby", but fails to capture either Johnny's frustration or the sheer size of "Moloch." Abbey's lacks the detail of Leech's densely-packed parlor scene, with its diminutive dining table and bric-a-brac effectively communicating the text's sense of the inadvertent tyranny of the Tetterby children and their father's feeling of being oppressed, and unable to concentrate on reading his paper. Significantly, Dickens has identified the young father with the publishing trade, although the hapless newsvendor merely has to market and not actually generate printed matter; undoubtedly, Dickens saw Tetterby as an extension of himself, surrounded by numerous progeny and unable to find a moment's peace. An only child, Leech must have wondered how his friend Charles Dickens could have grown up in such a chaotic domestic situation. The novelist, the second of seven siblings, lost a brother and a sister in childhood, and might well as a child have been made the "baby-minder" for Letitia, four years his junior, and even Harriet, born in 1819. The family life of the Tetterbys may reflect that of John and Elizabeth Dickens in Camden Town, London, in the early 1820s, prior to John's incarceration in the Marshalsea Prison for debt in 1824.
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"'You bad boy!' said Mr. Tetterby"
E. A. Abbey
Household Edition (1876)
Text Illustrated:
Tetterby himself, however, in his little parlor, as already mentioned, having the presence of a young family impressed upon his mind in a manner too clamorous to be disregarded, or to comport with the quiet perusal of a newspaper, laid down his paper, wheeled, in his distraction, a few times round the parlour, like an undecided carrier-pigeon, made an ineffectual rush at one or two flying little figures in bed-gowns that skimmed past him, and then, bearing suddenly down upon the only unoffending member of the family, boxed the ears of little Moloch's nurse.
"You bad boy!" said Mr. Tetterby, "haven't you any feeling for your poor father after the fatigues and anxieties of a hard winter's day, since five o'clock in the morning, but must you wither his rest, and corrode his latest intelligence, with your wicious tricks? Isn't it enough, sir, that your brother 'Dolphus is toiling and moiling in the fog and cold, and you rolling in the lap of luxury with a — with a baby, and everything you can wish for," said Mr. Tetterby, heaping this up as a great climax of blessings, "but must you make a wilderness of home, and maniacs of your parents? Must you, Johnny? Hey?" At each interrogation, Mr. Tetterby made a feint of boxing his ears again, but thought better of it, and held his hand.
"Oh, father!" whimpered Johnny, "when I wasn't doing anything, I'm sure, but taking such care of Sally, and getting her to sleep. Oh, father!"
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The Tetterby's Temper
Harry Furniss
1910
Text Illustrated:
"Ah, dear me, dear me, dear me!" said Mrs. Tetterby. "That's the way the world goes!"
"Which is the way the world goes, my dear?" asked Mr. Tetterby, looking round.
"Oh, nothing," said Mrs. Tetterby.
Mr. Tetterby elevated his eyebrows, folded his newspaper afresh, and carried his eyes up it, and down it, and across it, but was wandering in his attention, and not reading it.
Mrs. Tetterby, at the same time, laid the cloth, but rather as if she were punishing the table than preparing the family supper; hitting it unnecessarily hard with the knives and forks, slapping it with the plates, dinting it with the salt-cellar, and coming heavily down upon it with the loaf.
Commentary:
Dickens had specifically designed the Tetterby scenes with Punch illustrator John Leech in mind. In consequence, given the very different proclivities of the other illustrators that Dickens had recruited for The Haunted Man in the autumn of 1848, the book is "a baffling mixture of intensity and eccentricity" (Cohen 148), with the domestic comedy of the news agent's family and the Swidgers sharply contrasting the melodrama of the haunted chemistry professor. Providing five illustrations for the 1848 volume, Leech deals with all three sets of characters, but seems most comfortable with mining the vein of domestic comedy: "The very looseness of Leech's lines in his pictures of Johnny coping with baby Moloch at home and abroad reinforces the good humor" (Cohen 149). Thus, although Leech could easily be surpassed by later illustrators in his handling of Redlaw and the boy, his Tetterby illustrations were a challenge for the Diamond Edition illustrator (Sol Eytinge, Jr.), the Household Edition illustrators E. A. Abbey and Fred Barnard, as well as for Harry Furniss. Although Furniss probably had not have seen the 1867 Diamond Edition illustration entitled The Tetterbys, Eytinge's version, like Furniss's, is especially successful at capturing the single-minded concentration of the usually genial Adolphus Tetterby as he attempts read, oblivious to the antics his various offspring in the overcrowded parlor. Abbey's Tetterby, in contrast, is anything but benevolent in his confrontation with Johnny.
Furniss is making the scene acceptable to early twentieth century tastes has radically adjusted the composition; moved Tetterby from left to right and Mrs. Tetterby from centre to far left; and modeled the three chief figures: the substantial Mrs. Tetterby (left), Johnny carrying the weighty Sally (centre, instead of far right in Leech's composition), and Adolphus Tetterby, Sr. (far right), swinging around in his chair as he attempts to read the large newspaper sheet, folded in half. Gone entirely is the familial hearth and mantelpiece, from the vantage point of which we witness the scene; accordingly, Harry Furniss offers none of the homey bric-a-brac from John Leech's version. More significantly, whereas Leech's figures were amusing caricatures verging on the actors of a cartoon, these Tetterbys — two adults and nine children — coexist in a larger space, despite the small dining table. Furniss has also taken pains to incorporate Mr. Tetterby's newspaper screen (upper right). He manages all his characters and properties with artistic aplomb, but fails to communicate as Leech does the essential humor in the scene, which is not nearly so chaotic as that of the 1848 original and is much closer in spirit to the realistic treatment of E. A. Abbey in the 1876 American Household Edition. Like Abbey, Furniss gives us a respectably clad, thoroughly middle-class Tetterby, rather than Leech's frowsy, harassed, ill-kempt news agent trying to read a news sheet in the midst of domestic turmoil.
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Redlaw and the boy
Chapter 2
Sol Eytinge Jr.
1867 Diamond Edition
Text Illustrated:
"The fire, to which he had directed the boy last night, shining brightly through the glass, made an illuminated place upon the ground. Instinctively avoiding this, and going round it, he looked in at the window. At first, he thought that there was no one there, and that the blaze was reddening only the old beams in the ceiling and the dark walls; but peering in more narrowly, he saw the object of his search coiled asleep before it on the floor. He passed quickly to the door, opened it, and went in.
The creature lay in such a fiery heat, that, as the Chemist stooped to rouse him, it scorched his head. So soon as he was touched, the boy, not half awake, clutching his rags together with the instinct of flight upon him, half rolled and half ran into a distant corner of the room, where, heaped upon the ground, he struck his foot out to defend himself.
"Get up!" said the Chemist. "You have not forgotten me?"
"You let me alone!" returned the boy. "This is the woman's house — not yours."
Commentary:
As David Parker notes, "The power of The Haunted Man . . . lies in Dickens's supremely assured control of mood. And the predominant mood is grim". This critic even talks about the book's "Morbid fascination" — even though its finish was consistent with that of its predecessors, "elaborate and festive." Eytinge, with limited scope for illustration in the Diamond Edition volume, could not provide such atmospheric scenes as Clarkson Stanfield's "The Old College", and had to be highly selective. Having studied the somewhat psychological representations of the chemist and the street-boy in the 1848 novella, Eytinge decided to use Redlaw's confrontation with the savage child of the streets as one of the chief moments in the story, the other being a raucous scene in Mr. Tetterby's back parlor. In this second full-page dual character study for the novella in the anthology, Eytinge compares and contrasts two social isolates, the melancholy chemistry professor, Dickens's only intellectual character in his enormous fictional cast, a thinker who takes little pleasure from anything in life, and the savage street-boy whose atavistic pleasure in something so simple as a fire is consistent with his animalistic nature.
Although Eytinge was responding directly to Dickens's description of this second "Ignorance and Want" urchin in the Christmas Books, he was also attempting to synthesize a number of John Leech's 1848 illustrations, in particular, "Redlaw and The Boy", in which the street child (hardly in the tatters of the original "Ignorance" of 1843) cowers in a corner before the blow he anticipates that a pillar-like Redlaw will deliver, rather than from the elements. Whereas little of Leech's usual sense of comedy and caricature appears in the original plate, Eytinge invests the moment of discovery with a curious power, partly because, in spite of the difference in their ages and social stations, their faces resemble one another and the hairiness of the lines describing the boy's costume is consistent with the graphics describing the fire. In the other pertinent Leech illustration, "The Boy Before the Fire" boy gives himself over to whole-hearted enjoyment of food, fire, and money. This is the sort of fire, a cheerful fire of blazing coals in a grate, that Scrooge initially forbids Bob Cratchit from building, but in conclusion exhorts him to construct with a newly-purchased coal-scuttle. And yet Leech's study of the Boy is entirely lacking in conflict or apprehension. Deftly Eytinge has taken these separate illustrations and presented the essential elements of each simultaneously. The artfulness and success of Eytinge's approach can best be assessed by comparing his revision to the Leech originals and the Household Edition derivative by Barnard (1878). Particularly telling as details of portraiture are the concealing cape (a sartorial element with a Satanic suggestion) and the disheveled hair, an opportunity that Barnard missed in dressing his Redlaw in a large hat. Capturing the Boy and Redlaw in a moment of stasis rather than action seems to impart a somber, contemplative tone entirely missing in Barnard's far more dynamic interpretation a decade later. Nothing in Eytinge's unadorned background suggests the specimen-crammed laboratory of the natural scientist that one sees in Leech's "Redlaw and The Phantom". Eytinge's professor leads a spartan, bare-bones existence devoid of material comforts and consolations.
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"I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!"
Fred Barnard
1878
Commentary:
Fred Barnard's program of seven illustrations for The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain would be incomplete in terms of the original political and social agenda of Dickens's Christmas Books if it failed to include the savage street boy who reiterates Leech's iconic image of human degradation in "Ignorance and Want" from A Christmas Carol. Aside from his psychological significance, the ragged Boy is important because he grounds the cautionary tale in the miseries of the Hungry Forties, and reminds modern readers that the year in which Dickens completed the sequence of Christmas Books as "tracts for the times" was the Year of Revolutions throughout Europe, including the still-remembered March of the Chartists on Parliament on 10 April 1848 at Kennington Common. All these symbolic portraits of the effects of urban blight upon its denizens are by a single illustrator, Punch staffer John Leech. As John Butt has noted, the Boy of the last Christmas Book is not merely a repetition of Ignorance in the first, but "a clearly recognizable slum child".
Instead of showing the savage slum child enjoying himself by the fire, or that same boy's being terrified by Redlaw's entrance (the scenes so effectively realized by John Leech in the original publication), Barnard synthesizes the earlier images of the Boy. On the one hand, he stoops before a roaring fire, pointing a skeletal arm towards the hot coals, reminding the reader of the twelfth illustration in the 1848 volume; on the other hand, he draws back from a cloaked Redlaw in the professor's wainscotted office behind the lecture theatre, as he does in the earlier volume's seventh illustration. Consequently, Barnard has also synthesized Dickens's description of the Boy in "The Gift Bestowed" with Dickens's description of the Boy's second confrontation of Redlaw, in "The Gift Diffused." The first passage particulars both the Boy's ragged condition and abject terror:
The cry responding, and being nearer, he caught up the lamp, and raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to pass into and out of the theatre where he lectured, — which adjoined his room. Associated with youth and animation, and a high amphitheatre of faces which his entrance charmed to interest in a moment, it was a ghostly place when all this life was faded out of it, and stared upon him like an emblem of Death.
"Halloa!" he cried. "Halloa! This way! Come to the light!" When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and crouched down in a corner.
"What is it?" he said, hastily.
He might have asked "What is it?" even had he seen it well, as presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered up in its corner.
A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant's, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man's. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy, — ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.
Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow.
"I'll bite," he said, "if you hit me!" ["Chapter One: The Gift Bestowed," The Household Edition by Chapman & Hall, p. 167]
In the entirely new series of illustrations for the fifth Christmas Book, Fred Barnard does not simply repeat Leech's savage boy. Rather, he presents savagery in action as the Boy, feeling threatened by the cloaked adult who has suddenly invaded his fireside idyll, threatens the intruder. Thus, under Barnard's hand the Boy from the streets and the slums becomes a figure consistent with the social realism of "Saturday Night in the East End," a famous painting (now lost) which Barnard completed in two years before he illustrated The Christmas Books for Chapman and Hall's Household Edition (1878). The scene, which appealed to Barnard's social conscience, is this:
"Come with me," said the Chemist, "and I'll give you money."
"Come where? and how much will you give?"
"I'll give you more shillings than you ever saw, and bring you back soon. Do you know your way to where you came from?"
"You let me go," returned the boy, suddenly twisting out of his grasp. "I'm not a going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!"
He was down before it, and ready, with his savage little hand, to pluck the burning coals out.
What the Chemist had felt, in observing the effect of his charmed influence stealing over those with whom he came in contact, was not nearly equal to the cold vague terror with which he saw this baby- monster put it at defiance. It chilled his blood to look on the immovable impenetrable thing, in the likeness of a child, with its sharp malignant face turned up to his, and its almost infant hand, ready at the bars.
"Listen, boy!" he said. "You shall take me where you please, so that you take me where the people are very miserable or very wicked. I want to do them good, and not to harm them. You shall have money, as I have told you, and I will bring you back. Get up! Come quickly!" He made a hasty step towards the door, afraid of her returning.
"Will you let me walk by myself, and never hold me, nor yet touch me?" said the boy, slowly withdrawing the hand with which he threatened, and beginning to get up.
"I will!"
"And let me go, before, behind, or anyways I like?"
"I will!"
"Give me some money first, then, and go."
The Chemist laid a few shillings, one by one, in his extended hand. To count them was beyond the boy's knowledge, but he said "one," every time, and avariciously looked at each as it was given, and at the donor. He had nowhere to put them, out of his hand, but in his mouth; and he put them there.
The approach here is analeptic in that the reader has already encountered the boy twice, most recently three pages prior to the illustration, so that the reader has already developed a mental image of the urchin against which to compare Barnard's rendering of the "baby-monster" who defies Redlaw in his own intimate space. Barnard gives us effectively the "fiery heat" of the fireplace and the malignant-faced, bare-footed, ragged Boy before it, but fails to suggest the Chemist's "cold vague terror." This creature of the shank end of the Capitalist system is ironically untouched by Redlaw's baleful influence, for he has never known anything but "Sorrow, wrong, and trouble". Barnard realized from his own assessment of the original illustrations that the fireplace as a symbol of domestic comfort could be used to associate such disparate characters as Redlaw and Longford (seen in front of a fireplace in the third of his illustrations), the wild urchin here, and the Phantom in the third-to the-last illustration. As Jane Rabb Cohen remarks of the original Leech illustrations,
the dark, close strokes with which he portrays Redlaw both with the Phantom and the wild boy perfectly capture the requisite sense of strangeness, and the way he positions the child before the fireplace not only recalls Redlaw's posture there in Tenniel's frontispiece as well as his own earlier portrayal, but visually reinforces Dickens's linkage of the civilized man and the wild boy.
The Boy, who appears again in Barnard's sequence, as rolled up into a prenatal ball in the scene between the Phantom and Redlaw five pages later, is, if anything, an improvement of Leech's images, with leaner, almost emaciated limbs, a sharp nose and ears suggestive of a ferret's, swirling rags, and a profusion of curly hair. The portrait of the Boy asleep reveals his prominently sunken and bruised eye-sockets that repeat the Phantom's own haunted orbs, as if, without the balm of memory, the psyche is inevitably unbalanced.
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"'Mr. Redlaw!' he exclaimed, and started up."
Fred Barnard
1878
Text Illustrated:
The Chemist glanced about the room; — at the student's books and papers, piled upon a table in a corner, where they, and his extinguished reading-lamp, now prohibited and put away, told of the attentive hours that had gone before this illness, and perhaps caused it; — at such signs of his old health and freedom, as the out-of-door attire that hung idle on the wall; — at those remembrances of other and less solitary scenes, the little miniatures upon the chimney-piece, and the drawing of home; — at that token of his emulation, perhaps, in some sort, of his personal attachment too, the framed engraving of himself, the looker-on. The time had been, only yesterday, when not one of these objects, in its remotest association of interest with the living figure before him, would have been lost on Redlaw. Now, they were but objects; or, if any gleam of such connexion shot upon him, it perplexed, and not enlightened him, as he stood looking round with a dull wonder.
The student, recalling the thin hand which had remained so long untouched, raised himself on the couch, and turned his head.
"Mr. Redlaw!" he exclaimed, and started up.
Redlaw put out his arm.
"Don't come nearer to me. I will sit here. Remain you, where you are!"
He sat down on a chair near the door, and having glanced at the young man standing leaning with his hand upon the couch, spoke with his eyes averted towards the ground.
"I heard, by an accident, by what accident is no matter, that one of my class was ill and solitary. I received no other description of him, than that he lived in this street. Beginning my inquiries at the first house in it, I have found him."
Commentary:
Whereas Dickens's original illustrators — John Leech, Clarkson Stanfield, John Tenniel, and Frank Stone — were constrained by Dickens's and John Forster's oversight in their productions for the last Christmas Book, the illustrators of the British and American Household Editions of The Christmas Books, Fred Barnard and E. A. Abbey could offer fresh ideas and realize situations that their predecessors had not. In the case of Redlaw's meeting the sick student in his rooms in the Jerusalem Buildings, Barnard has created classical chiaroscuro, highlights and Rembrantesque deep shadows, by inserting a roaring fire behind the figures to inject a sense of the numinous, whereas the text (emphasizing the room's unwholesome environment) is quite clear about the inferior heating in the garret:
A meagre scanty stove, pinched and hollowed like a sick man’s cheeks, and bricked into the centre of a hearth that it could scarcely warm, contained the fire, to which his face was turned. Being so near the windy house-top, it wasted quickly, and with a busy sound, and the burning ashes dropped down fast. [British Household Edition, 175-176]
Above all, Barnard and Abbey fail to realize the despondency of Longford that Stone so effectively communicates in his posture and expression.
Frank Stone's analeptic image of the student with a secret pertaining to Redlaw's past shows Longford as deeply depressed and confined to a couch that is not necessarily as "realistic" as Barnard's comfortably padded piece of furniture, but which implies his emotional and physical discomfort. Nevertheless, the striking image of the meeting of the Chemist and his Student is an important addition to the narrative-pictorial text of the 1848 novella. Barnard, moreover, with artistic license emphasizes the figures by reducing the scale of the student's "couch"; moreover, Barnard offers the sketchiest suggestion of the occupant's belongings and bric-a-brac.
Although E. A. Abbey's treatment of the scene in the American Household Edition may seem more faithful to the text because it includes such personal items and furnishings as Dickens specifies, it shows the room's occupant in a nightshirt and in bed, rather than dressed (as in Stone's illustration "Milly and the Student," which must have had Dickens's sanction). The original text reiterates that Longford is lying on a "couch" rather than a bed, and places the room's sole chair "near the door," rather than by the bed, which in the somewhat crowded wood-engraving effectively blocks Redlaw from advancing upon the student. The student's "books and papers, piled upon a table in a corner" in the text are now on a chest-of-drawers (left); furthermore, Abbey has omitted the "extinguished reading-lamp," and the "clothing hanging on the wall," and has made very little of the "little miniatures upon the chimney-piece, and the drawing of home." The principal deviation in the American Household Edition is that Abbey's Edmund Longford (alias, "Denham") is hardly consistent with the handsome but care-worn youth of Frank Stone's "Milly and The Student". Abbey's tail-coated Redlaw, with respectable middle-class cane and silk hat, facing away from the reader and towards the surprised student, lacks the sense of the ominous and mysterious that Tenniel so effectively conveys in his black-cloaked visitor holding a lantern at the top of the landing in the "Illustrated Double-page to Chapter Two". In respect of feeling and atmosphere, then, Barnard's much simpler illustration is closer in spirit to the letterpress, especially in his conveying the numinous presence of the "pale man in a black cloak" (British Household Edition).
However, while Abbey's illustration has the virtue of being presented almost simultaneously with the text it illustrates of the American Household Edition, facilitating a reciprocal reading of image and text, Barnard's full-page illustration, facing the text's description of Redlaw's entrance, is still somewhat analeptic, in that it draws on details of Redlaw's attire mentioned earlier; nevertheless, Barnard effectively realizes an important textual moment in the emotional trials of the protagonist that the original illustrators failed to underscore. Tenniel leads the reader up the staircase and to the door, as it were, but does reveal what Redlaw finds in the room, or how he reacts to the revelation that "Denham" is in fact "Longford," the son of his former sweetheart who has not, like his fellow students, returned home for the holidays. Utilizing the freedom of Sixties illustrators to interpret a text without fidelity to textual details, Barnard and Abbey both must have felt that the original illustrators should have realized the scene in which Redlaw will have to confront the product of a "wrong inflicted on [him]" in his youth, and grapple with powerful emotions that have been numbed by the Phantom's dubious "gift."
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"'Mr. Redlaw!' he exclaimed, and started up" by E. A. Abbey
1876 Household Edition
Text Illustrated:
The Chemist glanced about the room; — at the student's books and papers, piled upon a table in a corner, where they, and his extinguished reading-lamp, now prohibited and put away, told of the attentive hours that had gone before this illness, and perhaps caused it; — at such signs of his old health and freedom, as the out-of-door attire that hung idle on the wall; — at those remembrances of other and less solitary scenes, the little miniatures upon the chimney-piece, and the drawing of home; — at that token of his emulation, perhaps, in some sort, of his personal attachment too, the framed engraving of himself, the looker-on. The time had been, only yesterday, when not one of these objects, in its remotest association of interest with the living figure before him, would have been lost on Redlaw. Now, they were but objects; or, if any gleam of such connexion shot upon him, it perplexed, and not enlightened him, as he stood looking round with a dull wonder.
The student, recalling the thin hand which had remained so long untouched, raised himself on the couch, and turned his head.
"Mr. Redlaw!" he exclaimed, and started up.
Redlaw put out his arm.
"Don't come nearer to me. I will sit here. Remain you, where you are!"
He sat down on a chair near the door, and having glanced at the young man standing leaning with his hand upon the couch, spoke with his eyes averted towards the ground.
"I heard, by an accident, by what accident is no matter, that one of my class was ill and solitary. I received no other description of him, than that he lived in this street. Beginning my inquiries at the first house in it, I have found him."
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Spring Killed by Haggard Winter —
Harry Furniss
1910
Text Illustrated:
. . . he pushed the yielding door, and went in.
There was a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or forlorn, whose head was bent down on her hands and knees. As it was not easy to pass without treading on her, and as she was perfectly regardless of his near approach, he stopped, and touched her on the shoulder. Looking up, she showed him quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the spring.
With little or no show of concern on his account, she moved nearer to the wall to leave him a wider passage.
"What are you?" said Redlaw, pausing, with his hand upon the broken stair-rail.
"What do you think I am?" she answered, showing him her face again.
He looked upon the ruined Temple of God, so lately made, so soon disfigured; and something, which was not compassion — for the springs in which a true compassion for such miseries has its rise, were dried up in his breast — but which was nearer to it, for the moment, than any feeling that had lately struggled into the darkening, but not yet wholly darkened, night of his mind — mingled a touch of softness with his next words.
Commentary:
The original illustrators of the 1848 edition and the Household Edition illustrators of the 1870s did not shy away from depicting the poverty-stricken proletariat's representative, the cowering, ragged child in the Redlaw and the Boy and The Boy before the Fire. But neither of the Household Editions' renditions of the street boy includes his sordid origins, the East End slum from which he has come. In "Chapter 3: The Gift Reversed," Fred Barnard realizes this lean, atavistic denizen of the London slums in "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!". Furniss, then, is both conventional (in presenting an allegorical figure realistically) and daring, in that he has elected to depict a marginal figure who rarely appears in Victorian book illustrations, the Fallen Woman, a type whom Dickens was shortly to explore more fully in the characters of Martha and Little Em'ly in Daavid Copperfield (1849-50).
Since one of the chief functions of Victorian book illustration auto draw the reader's attention to specific scenes, events, and characters, Furniss here is actually reshaping the reception of the novella along the lines of social relevance. Perhaps previous illustrators hah elected not to draw the reader's attention to this sequence of events in the urchin's slum residence because it involves the gross improbability of Redlaw's encountering the dying George Swidger and his father and brother, Philip and William, in the apartment there. However, Furniss focuses not on this coincidence, but on the effect that Redlaw's dubious gift has upon most people — except those whose miserable existence has never permitted the formation of distinctively unpleasant memories. The depressed young prostitute whom Redlaw meets on the staircase of the slum dwelling has only the barest recollection of a more pleasant existence, and there cannot benefit from Redlaw's influence.
The composition is not particularly noteworthy in its depiction of Redlaw, wearing as in previous editions a black, full-length cloak and broad-brimmed hat to muffle his features. The first instance of this image occurs in John Tenniel's 1848 Illustrated Double-page to Ch. II, but the cloak occurs in the Eytinge (1867) and Barnard (1878) illustrations, too, specifically in Redlaw and the Boy and 'Mr. Redlaw!' he exclaimed, and started up. To better engage the reader in the process of visualization, Furniss has Redlaw turned away from the reader so that he or she must try to determine both Redlaw's expression and reaction. He has highlighted the girl to make her a contrasting figure to the black-clad, pillar-like Redlaw, so that the reader must revert to the actual passage some eight pages earlier to determine whether the girl could be considered virtuous in any sense, or whether she has brought "Sorrow, wrong, and trouble" upon herself. The gift of forgetfulness, learns Redlaw, is no blessing for such a person (one among "the type of thousands,") in this part of the metropolis. The picture is thus far more complex than the good-evil dichotomy of light (the girl's dress) and dark (Redlaw's hat and cloak) would suggest. The girl whom Redlaw took for a drab may be redeemed by her past as a gardener's daughter in the country, since she is clearly a victim of forces beyond her control, whereas her common-law husband, George, is a victim of his own addiction to gambling and riotous living.
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Milly
Harry Furniss
1910
Commentary:
Although previous illustrators have depicted Milly Swidger, the "Angel in the House" whose beneficent influence counteracts the dreadful "gift" of Redlaw's Phantom or baneful double, in juxtaposition with such figures as the poor student, "Denham," in Frank Stone's Milly and the Student and the Tetterby children in Frank Stone's penultimate illustration in the original novella, and the Old Man, Philip Swidger, in 'Merry and happy, was it?' asked the Chemist in a low voice, Furniss has chosen to study her in near isolation, with only Longford's (alias "Denham") head on his daybed setting the context.
A great deal, of course, ails Longford in that he has just succumbed to the Phantom's curse as communicated by Professor Redkaw, and is now quite unappreciative of Milly's ministrations. Furniss's wasp-waisted Milly in fashionable bonnet and gown is somewhat less angelic than her counterpart in the three in which she appears: Frank Stone's Milly and the Old Man, Milly and the Student, and Milly and the Children. In redrafting the heroine for the early twentieth century, Furniss has accentuated her height and angularity, giving her the demure face and stylish figure of fin de siecle magazine heroines, but failing to show her as exemplifying her virtue in action. Indeed, a contemporary review of The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain in the a prominent literary magazine singled out Stone's contributions for the moral tone and specificity of description that they communicate:
Stone, the only artist who escaped [the reviwers'] hostility, was, in fact, praised at Dickens's expense. "Were it not that Milly has been rendered 'palpable to the sense' by the pencil of Mr. Frank Stone," observed the Athenaeum, who felt that Dickens had uncharacteristically failed to individualize his characters, "we should regard her as a quality rather than a person." [Henry Chorley? 23 December 1848, 1293; cited in Cohen, 187-188]
Although a bad review in the Athenaeum (1828-1921), which was the prime vehicle at the time for advertising new books and which commanded a weekly circulation of some 20,000 at its peak, could have a disastrous effect the sales of a new work of literature, Dickens enjoyed initial sales of about 18,000 copies for The Haunted Man. However, the fact that between its initial appearance and Furniss's illustrating it the book was adapted for the stage in England and America only twenty-three times (as opposed to thirty-five for the Carol and thirty-one for The Battle of Life) does suggest that it lacked the staying power of the earlier Christmas Books. Moreover, Robert L. Patten indicates that, by Christmas 1861, Chapman and Hall still had a stock of almost two thousand copies of the original Bradbury and Evans text, both bound and unbound. Certainly, in attempting to provide illustrations that would engage contemporary readers in 1910, Harry Furniss preferred to dwell upon the sensational, melodramatic, and the comic, and underplay the all too obvious strain of Victorian sentimentality that Milly Swidger embodies.
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Illustrated Double-Page to Chap. II by John Tenniel
Text Illustrated:
"The gentleman's room," said Tetterby, "is upstairs, sir. There's a more convenient private entrance; but as you have come..."
Kim:
Thank you. You have given us many illustrative treats for our pre-Christmas read. There will be special presents for you under the tree I’m sure.
Yes indeed. The shadow of Redlaw cast on the wall to the left is very suggestive of the connection between Redlaw and the Spectre. A study of the various illustrations and a reading of the letterpress clearly suggest that the Spectre is a part of Redlaw, not an external or separate being. It’s all very eerie and distressing. Gone by the fifth of the Christmas books is any feeling of joy, laughter, humour or the exaggeration of ACC.
While I, of course, miss the work of Hablot Browne in the Christmas books, it is really quite something to consider the fact that both John Tenniel and John Leech are illustrating this 1848 edition of the book, and not forgetting Clarkson Stanfield as well. Very impressive lineup of the great 19C illustrators
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Clarkson Stanfield
Commentary:
The Exterior of the Old College
Commentary:
Clarkson Stanfield's second plate is enclosed by textual description of the same scene, above and below. As in Tenn..."
Funny how some illustrations jump out at you. I find this Stanfield illustration very evocative and moving. Perhaps the gloom, perhaps the snow, perhaps the tone, I’m not sure, but it is powerful to me.
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I found this comment of interest as we try to puzzle out the source of Redman’s Spectre/ghost. If Dickens sees himself as having two selves, then that would suggest that he may also see this as a method to construct a character as well. Another such character who carries two distinct selves is Sydney Carton.
I know that Dickens may have had OCD. One of the symptoms is having obsessive thoughts that are dark or taboo. This could explain why Dickens "felt the opposite." For example, someone with OCD might see a neighbor's flowerbed and imagine stomping on it. The individual would not really want to do such a thing. Nonetheless, the thought would occur again and again. So all Dickens would have had to do was endow his villains with such desires, turning them into candid wishes instead of the bullying thoughts he suffered from.
Only one man runs A. Tetterby and Co., Newsmen. The business does so poorly that Dickens says Co. is the best position in the firm. This is so because, as Co. doesn't exist, it can't get hungry and thirsty, be charged taxes or have to support children. The irony is superb!Johnny has to carry his pudding in his pocket while tending to the baby. I guess the pudding is like a sweet bread. Most often you would imagine people doing that on the go. It's ironic that he has to do this in his own home. His pocket must get sticky and full of crumbs. It's a great character detail.
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As to me, Dickens's hand for business and the fact that he was aware of writing for a living (and very successful at it) do not detract from the enjoyment I derive from his works. Neither does it lower or lessen his status as an artist for me. After all, people have to eat, drink and live.
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An interesting thought, Julie. Some writers grow hackneyed the more they write, but Dickens improved.
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A very interesting bit of information, Peter, not the less so since Dostoyevsky is another of my favourite writers. The statement of two people Dickens felt inside himself may also account for the darker sides we sometimes get in him - I remember the story of Dickens's frightening a young lady once that was told in the old club -, and it would also account for his creativity. I also felt reminded of Carton, like you - but also of John Jasper and partly of Bradley Headstone, whose passionate inner self hid behind a guise of respectability until it was unleashed by Lizzie.
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For example, someone with OCD mi..."
This reminds me of Poe's story "The Imp of the Perverse" but also of situations I found myself in, e.g. when standing on the bank of a river and having the stupid thought of throwing my purse or something else of importance into it. The thought is ridiculous but can become quite strong - as yet, I have never yielded it, though. I thought OCD was about always going back to check whether the stove is turned off or the door is locked. Unluckily, I've got that kind of thing but since I have got a smartphone, I just take a photo of the electric stove before leaving my house. But don't tell anyone.
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Another thing I noticed is that Redlaw finds something in the facial expression of the young waif that reminds him of himself. I wonder if we are getting to know more of this in the last chapter.
Thanks for the wonderful illustrations and the comments, Kim! Leech is the only one to make the nameless young waif look slightly like a poor boy, whereas the other illustrators give him a wolfish, very wild appearance. In a way, the sullen aggressiveness of the little guy seems to foreshadow Deputy from The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
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Yes. Jasper and Headstone are perfect examples.
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I don't know about that, The Old Curiosity Shop was one of his earlier novels.
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I'm intrigued by the street boy's immunity to Redlaw's gift. It strikes me that the boy doesn't have much of a past to lose - his life has only been one of survival, trying to meet his immediate needs, with little variation.I also appreciated that Redlaw still has some residual compassion, in not wanting to infect Milly in particular. And how ironic that he goes to a place of misery in hopes that his gift might benefit them, only to find he does even more damage there.
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Hi Vanessa
Yes. The street boy is an interesting character. In fact, he may be one the most interesting characters in the story. Only Redlaw, to me anyway, is as intriguing. Your phrase that he “doesn’t have much of a past to lose” cuts to the heart of the story. It seems all the Christmas stories talk of loss.
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Which is probably because in spite of the Happy Occasion we cannot but feel that another year has passed.
Tristram wrote: "I wonder what Redlaw's effect on the beaten wife is: It's not that he made her forget that it was her husband who beat her, is it? The woman covers her husband because she is afraid of him, and may..."It's an interesting exchange, Tristram. My impression was that Redlaw's 'gift' to the woman was not immediate -- she is still able to remember her childhood in the country, and her old sorrow restores her feelings. When Redlaw hurries past her, he fears that his presence will cut her off from that past. She probably is dependant on her 'husband' economically, so like the street urchin is struggling for survival.
Peter wrote: "Vanessa wrote: "I'm intrigued by the street boy's immunity to Redlaw's gift. It strikes me that the boy doesn't have much of a past to lose - his life has only been one of survival, trying to meet ..."Hi Peter,
Yes the losses -- Redlaw's "sorrow, wrongs, and trouble" -- connects him to everyone and the human experience. The poor street boy is treated like a human by very few, which underlies the Christmas Carol, too.
Merry Christmas to you and all the Curiosities!
I found a great new Dickens quote in this section: "...but for some trouble and sorrow we should never know half the good there is about us.”
The statement shows an enduring optimism that I attribute to Dickens, despite his ability to write very dark and sinister scenes. It reminds me of this story Mr. Rogers once told, that has been repeated a lot since 9/11:
"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping." To this day, especially in times of "disaster," I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world."
Unlike others, it seems, I was taken with the story of the Tetterbys, particularly poor Johnny and baby Sally. I was not familiar with Moloch, so had to look it up, and found this:Moloch, also spelled Molech, a Canaanite deity associated in biblical sources with the practice of child sacrifice. The name derives from combining the consonants of the Hebrew melech (“king”) with the vowels of boshet (“shame”), the latter often being used in the Old Testament as a variant name for the popular god Baal (“Lord”).
In the Hebrew Bible, Moloch is presented as a foreign deity who was at times illegitimately given a place in Israel’s worship as a result of the syncretistic policies of certain apostate kings. The laws given to Moses by God expressly forbade the Jews to do what was done in Egypt or in Canaan. “You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God” (Leviticus 18:21). Yet kings such as Ahaz (2 Kings 16:3) and Manasseh (2 Kings 21:6), having been influenced by the Assyrians, are reported to have worshipped Moloch at the hilled site of Topheth, outside the walls of Jerusalem. This site flourished under Manasseh’s son King Amon but was destroyed during the reign of Josiah, the reformer. “And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son or his daughter as an offering to Moloch” (2 Kings 23:10).
Of course, I felt sorry for poor Johnny, who was saddled with Sally, "on whose insatiate altar the whole existence of this particular young brother was offered up a daily sacrifice."
But what a horrible label for a poor baby to be burdened with! Her primary caregiver a young boy who can probably barely care for himself, wee Sally is already at a disadvantage, Add to that the fact that she's the youngest of ... what? Eight children? All of her "bad" behaviour can probably be solved by a bit of parental attention. And yet she's labeled as Moloch! There's a therapy session just waiting to happen!
I realize Johnny and Sally really have little to do with the main plot of Redlaw and his haunting. As usual, the little vignettes of a large, poor, but (generally) happy family have distracted me and captured my attention like a shiny piece of tinsel attracts the proverbial magpie. Someday I'll have to undergo therapy to find out why that happens in every Dickens novel I read. :-)
Mary Lou wrote: "I found a great new Dickens quote in this section: "...but for some trouble and sorrow we should never know half the good there is about us.”
The statement shows an enduring optimism that I attr..."
I haven't finished the story yet, but can't help but wonder if this brief statement doesn't actually sum up the whole novel. I'm guessing that Redlaw will come to realize that there can be no light without darkness. Back to part 3 to find out if I'm right.....
One more observation on part 2, and how the things Dickens wrote in 1848 still resonate 169 years later. At George's deathbed, he writes:“The waste since then, the waste of life since then!”
“But he was a child once,” said the old man. “He played with children. Before he lay down on his bed at night, and fell into his guiltless rest, he said his prayers at his poor mother’s knee. I have seen him do it, many a time; and seen her lay his head upon her breast, and kiss him. Sorrowful as it was to her and me, to think of this, when he went so wrong, and when our hopes and plans for him were all broken, this gave him still a hold upon us, that nothing else could have given. Oh, Father, so much better than the fathers upon earth! Oh, Father, so much more afflicted by the errors of Thy children! take this wanderer back! Not as he is, but as he was then, let him cry to Thee, as he has so often seemed to cry to us!”
Reading this passage immediately took me to friends, whose son "went so wrong" as a young man and drowned following an overdose last spring. He'd made his parents' lives a living hell over the last few years (and it was no picnic for us, nor our other neighbors, who also were impacted by his addiction and the presence of his less-than-reputable friends). But when he died, all we could think about was the sweet little boy who grew up playing with our daughters and the other kids in the neighborhood. All the sentiments Mr. Philip (aged 87) expressed above were things we, and, I'm sure, our friends thought about their son.
Dickens is a master at illustrating the Human Condition. Our common hopes, dreams, fears, and sorrows are so beautifully illustrated in his stories.
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“The waste since then, the waste of life since then!”
“Bu..."
Mary Lou
Your reading and understanding of this section of The Haunted Man goes beyond the words and symbols to reach the essence of the story. You have provided a compass for us to reflect upon the meaning of the words rather than the simple presence of the phrases.
Thank you.
The Old Curiosity Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Charles Dickens (other topics)The Mystery of Edwin Drood (other topics)
Charles Dickens (other topics)
Charles Dickens (other topics)
The Gift Diffused
Part One of The Haunted Man opened with a gloomy setting and a solitary man. It ends with the sentence “[f]or now he was, indeed, alone. Alone, alone.” Part Two, in contrast, opens in a small parlour in the Tetterby’s home, one that is overflowing with children, sights, sounds, and energy. In Part Two the repeated words “small” and “little” replace the repeated words “who” and “when” in Part One. I see this as a clear indication that Dickens was consciously establishing a contrasting setting, tone, and mood in the opening of the two separate parts. In fact, I think he was also establishing the central theme that will unfold in our Christmas story this year.
When Mrs Tetterby comes home to her husband and her tumbling brood of children she also brings a slight edge of dissatisfaction with her life for some inexplicable reason. Yet, once settled at home, she realizes that her past and the family struggles are what “have made us one” and that only through an understanding of the past can one truly embrace the present. At that moment, Mrs Tetterby screams and hides behind her husband because she sees “a pale man in a black coat who had come into the room.” Mrs Tetterby tells her husband that she had seen this man before in the street when he stood near her. The unsettling figure turns out to be Mr Redlaw who has come in search of the Tetterby’s boarder Mr Denham, the student of Redlaw’s who is ill. Mr Tetterby is also unsettled by Redlaw’s presence. Redlaw’s bargain with the Spectre seems to radiate from his body and his gaze which is then picked up by other people, people who are both innocent and good.
Redlaw goes up some stairs and knocks on the door of his student Mr Denham. Redlaw is invited to enter. Ah, another mention of a door. Let’s put that in our basket of recurring symbols. Redlaw enters the room and he and Denham begin to talk. Here, a Dickensian coincidence occurs. Denman’s last name, it turns out, is Longford, and he is “the child of a marriage that has not proved itself a well-sorted or a happy one.” Denman then goes on to say how the name Redlaw has always been spoken of by his mother “with honour and respect - with something that was almost reverence.” So now we have a mystery on our hands. How is Longford, a.k.a. Denman, linked to Redlaw? The more Longford/Denham And Redlaw converse the more Redlaw seals up his mind and heart. Clearly, Redlaw is under the Spectre’s power.
Then next thing that happens is Millie Richard knocks on the door. And then knocks again. And then knocks again. OK. What’s up? Well, all this knocking gives Redlaw time to figure out how to avoid Milly because “there is a steady goodness in her.” Redlaw hides - where else -behind a door that leads to the garret-roof. At this point, in comes Millie.
Thoughts
Clearly, Redlaw And Denham are linked somehow from their past. How effectively does Dickens create, maintain, and develop the concept of Redlaw’s lack of memory in this scene with Denham.
As we go through the second part of the story it appears Dickens will show how Redlaw’s presence will be disruptive, disorientating, and perhaps even destructive to those he meets. How destructive have Redlaw’s early encounters been with innocent people?
When Millie enters the room she notices Denham is cool towards her. Still, she bustles about the room making it a pleasant as can be. Denham, for his part, is ungrateful. Obviously, the earlier encounter with Redlaw has soured Denham. Milly leaves the room, Redlaw comes out of hiding, and Denman is shocked by his own behaviour to Milly. To his credit, Denman is angry at Redman and says “What have you done ... What change have you wrought in me? What curse have you brought upon me? Give me back myself!” In response to this Redman laments “I am infected! I am infectious! I am charged with poison for my own mind, and the minds of all mankind. Where I felt compassion, sympathy, I am turning into stone.”
Thoughts
The Spectre has clearly worked his evil curse on Redlaw. The garret setting with Millie, Denman and Redlaw is critical to our story. How do you see and interpret each of these three characters as representative of an idea, a symbol, a human representation or emblem in the story.
If we take Redman’s understanding and acknowledgement of his “curse” as being a key point in the story, what would be its equivalent in A Christmas Carol?
Although Redman is highly agitated, he does realize that one of the people immune to his curse is the young, odious, wild thing of a boy he encountered earlier ... there was Millie as well, but we need to remember that Redman was hiding from her behind a door. There is a door again! Redman hustles back to his college to find the lad, and he does, but the grimy lad has been cleaned up by Milly. Redlaw notices that he has no negative effect on the boy, and so he tells the lad to take him to a place “where people are very miserable or very wicked. I want to do them good.” And so off go this unlikely pair into the night, which is, we must remember, Christmas Eve. They visit a graveyard, Redlaw sees a host of stars in the sky, and then they listen to music. Finally, they end up in front of “a ruinous collection of houses” where one house bears the sign “Lodgings for Travellers’ “. Redlaw believes that he can bring relief to the poor downtrodden people who live inside. How? By making them forget their past? He first meets a young woman who is a battered woman, perhaps prostitute. Next, we have yet another door and through it Redlaw meets old Philip who is watching over his dying son George. Soon, however, old Phillip’s heart turns against his dying son. Redlaw has touched and turned Philip’s mind against the joy and remembrances he has of his son. Symbolically, Philip then finds in his pocket a bit of holly and berries, but he is unable to connect them with good memories of the past. He nibbles the leaves of the holly and then spits the morsels out.
Thoughts
Let’s have a look at the symbolism that’s going on here. What are your thoughts about the ragged boy, the journey to the “Lodging for Travellers’, the doors that keep appearing, the girl in the hall, the presence of Philip and his son, the possible symbolic meaning of George, and the eating of the holly? So much going on in such a compact scene. What’s your take on all the action?
Near the end of this section we see Redlaw in agony and begging to have his memories back, be they good or bad. At least, he begs, to allow the others he has infected to get their memories back. He is willing to sacrifice himself for the good of others. This section ends with the words “pray, pray, let me in!”
“Let me in.” That phrase is interesting, isn't it? Sounds like a phrase used to gain passage through a door.