"The Dinner on the Steps" from Dickens's "The Chimes"

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The Dinner on the Steps

Richard Doyle

1844

Wood engraving dropped into the text

Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Chimes: First Quarter

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Whereas Daniel Maclise's frontispiece and engraved title enjoin the reader to regard this as a tale of the supernatural, with beautiful spirits encircling Richard and Meg, Doyle takes a different approach, at once realistic (the church tower) and light-hearted (the whimsical goblins playing at the four corners of the picture-frame).

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Introduced by the Headpiece

First Quarter,

There are not many people — and as it is desirable that a story-teller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible, I beg it to be noticed that I confine this observation neither to young people nor to little people, but extend it to all conditions of people: little and big, young and old: yet growing up, or already growing down again — there are not, I say, many people who would care to sleep in a church. I don’t mean at sermon-time in warm weather (when the thing has actually been done, once or twice), but in the night, and alone. ["First Quarter," pp. 1-2]

Details

Commentary: The Tower of St. Dunstan's, Fleet Street, London

The tower of St. Dunstan's-in-the-West on Fleet Street, long a landmark, disappeared with the demolition of the old church in 1830-32 intended to facilitate the widening of Fleet Street. The rebuilding of the church, accomplished by 1842, included a square tower with an octagonal lantern in the neo-Gothic style, resembling those of St. Botolph's in Boston and St. Helen's in York (perhaps modelled on an actual Gothic lantern at Ely Cathedral in south-west England). The form of the lantern might have been immediately inspired by that of St. George's Church in Ramsgate, built in 1825. Dickens does not mention the old church's associations with John Donne, William Tyndale, and Sir Isaac Walton, but in calling St. Dunstan's simply "The old church" the writer is establishing the chronological setting as pre-1830, even though Will Fern, a radical from Dorset, is clearly a contemporary figure of working-class and agrarian rebellion of the Hungry Forties.

Illustrations from the American and British Household Edition, and Pears' Centenary Edition

Left: Clarkson Stanfield's atmospheric rendering of The Old Church. Right: Charles Green's atmospheric illustrated title-page, The Tower of the Chimes (Pears' Centenary Edition, circa 1912). [Click on images to enlarge them.]

Above: E. A. Abbey's 1876 wood-engraving of Trotty's terrifying dream-vision, What Trotty saw in the Belfry. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. The Chimes. Introduction by Clement Shorter. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Pears' Centenary Edition. London: A & F Pears, [?1912].

_____. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1844 [Printed title-page dated "1845."].

_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated byFred Barnard. 22 vols. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878. Vol. XVIII.

_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876. Vol. V.

Reynolds, H. The Churches of the City of London. London: Bodley Head, 1922.

Created 20 February 2001

Last modified 20 October 2023