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Trotty Veck and His Daughter Meg
Harold Copping
1924
Colour lithograph
Approximately 7 x 5 inches (17.9 x 12.4 cm)
An illustration for The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and A New Year In from Matz, facing p. 130.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Dickens wrote The Chimes, the successor to A Christmas Carol, in the autumn of 1844 while on sabbatical in Genoa, Italy. Although largely forgotten today, the novella sold extremely well, and was dramatized at various London theatres in late December, its humble and sensitive protagonist (a single parent, moreover) being far more appealing than the miserly curmudgeon-bachelor of the initial Christmas Book. Despite the overt sentimentality, Dickens sounds more ominous notes about social conditions in the Hungry Forties with his portrait of the Chartist rebel Will Fern.
Copping sympathetically illustrates "Trotty Veck's Dinner-Time," a scene which occurs early in the "First Quarter." Here, Meg brings Toby, waiting outside the old church hard by his dwelling for somebody to commission a delivery, his lunch of hot tripe — a nutritious and inexpensive "working class" dish. Sitting on the church steps, his usual resting place between running messages and delivering packages, ticket-porter Trotty Veck, a widower, chats with his beautiful Meg about marrying her fiancé, the handsome blacksmith Richard, as he consumes "with an unctuous and unflagging relish" a beverage, hot potato, and main course that Meggy has just delivered.
Whereas the early illustrations of Trotty Veck were largely caricatural, a convention that Furniss continued in his Charles Dickens Library illustrations of The Christmas Books (1910), Copping and Fred Barnard, the lead Household Edition illustrator, have adopted a much more realistic style to encourage reader sympathy for these working-class characters from the Hungry Forties.
Left: John Leech's caricatural Trotty Veck ("First Quarter," 1844). Centre: Fred Barnard's Household Edition dual portrait of Trotty and his daughter: "No," said Toby after another sniff. "It's — It's mellower than Polonies." (1878). Right: Trotty Veck's Dinner (1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Left: E. A. Abbey's American Household illustration of Trotty surrounded by the Spirits of the Chimes: What Trotty saw in the Belfry ("Third Quarter," 1876). Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Diamond Edition illustration of the father and daughter on the church steps: Trotty Veck and Meg (1867).
Dickens, Charles. 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: Chapman & Hall, 1844.
Dickens, Mary Angela [Charles Dickens' grand-daughter]. Dickens' Dream Children. London, Paris New, York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd., 1924.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
Created 1 March 2006 Last updated 25 September 2023