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"He is past relenting . . . he is dead."
Harold Copping
1911
Black-and-white lithograph
13 cm by 11.5 cm (5 by 4 ½ inches), vignetted
From A Christmas Carol (1911), p. 109.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.
He sat down to the dinner that had been boarding for him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news (which was not until after a long silence), he appeared embarrassed how to answer.
"Is it good." she said, "or bad?" — to help him.
"Bad," he answered.
"We are quite ruined."
"No. There is hope yet, Caroline."
"If he relents," she said, amazed, "there is. Nothing is past hope, if such a miracle has happened."
She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she said so, with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion of her heart. ["Stave Four: The Last of The Three Spirits," pp. 107-108]
As in Green's treatment of this subject (the only two such illustrations in nineteenth/early-twentieth century editions of A Christmas Carol), the artist's intention is to show that usury is not a victimless crime, and that the miser has accumulated his wealth on the backs of desperate lenders using extortionate rates of interest. Green's very similar illustration for this stave, Scrooge's Poor Debtor: "Is it good or bad," she said. "Bad," he answered. "We are quite ruined?" "No. There is hope yet, Caroline." (1912), comes as Scrooge confronts the strong possibility that he will die unfriended and without family. Again, as in Green's treatment, Copping's shows a solidly middle-class couple, implying that the debt was occasioned by some unusual circumstance, perhaps a business exigency (at the time, a business debt counted as a personal liability). And, like Green, Copping presents the couple as worthy of our sympathy, although no young children appear in the background of Copping's fifteenth lithograph. The inward-looking gaze of the young husband speaks volumes, but so does the order in which this illustration appears, immediately after On 'Change, amongst the merchants (page 97), and immediately prior to "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, the present, and the future . . . . Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone." (page 115) at Scrooge's grave. Significantly, in contrast to Green's full-length portrait of the careworn parents, Copping has moved in for the closeup of the young husband's face.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being A Ghost Story for Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a ghost story for Christmas. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1869.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Harold Copping. London, Paris, New, York: Raphael Tuck, 1911.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Created October 2023