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Jenny Wren dreaming over her dolls (Tailpiece)
Harold Copping
1924
Line-drawing (vignetted)
5 ½ by 5; inches (14.2 x 13 cm)
"Jenny Wren," Chapter 4 in Children's Stories from Dickens, 48
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Her room grew pretty comfortable, for she was in great request in her "profession" as she called it, and there was now no one to spend and waste her earnings. But nothing could make her life otherwise than a suffering one till the happy morning, when her child-angels visited her for the last time and carried her away to the land where all such pain as hers is healed for evermore. ["Jenny Wren" in Children's Stories from Dickens, pp. 47-48]
Whereas Mary Angela Dickens ends her abbreviated "Life of Jenny Wren" with the conventional piety of "child-angels" carrying off the Doll's Dress-maker as George Cattermole had depicted the soul of Little Nell being transported Heavenward by a youthful angelic choir in The Spirit's Flight — The soulof Little Nell ascending (6 February 1841), Copping shows a very different aspect of Jenny's post-Mr. Dolls existence. Parentless and without such onerous responsibility, she is free to ponder how to approach her artistic creations. Liberated from the drudgery of slaving to support her alcoholic father's substance abuse, she is free to wonder, imagine, and dream. She is not "suffering" at all, but smiles as she looks upward from her worktable.
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. London: Chapman and Hall, 1867.
Dickens, Mary Angela [Charles Dickens' grand-daughter]. Dickens' Dream Children. London, Paris New, York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd., 1924.
Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. "Jenny Wren." Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Pp. 42-48.
Created 13 October 2023