Frontispiece by Daniel Maclise from Dickens's "The Cricket on the Hearth" (1845)

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Frontispiece: John and Dot Peerybingle before the Fire

Daniel Maclise and G. Dalziel (engraver)

1845

Wood engraving

16.3 cm high x 9.7 cm wide, framed

Frontispiece: full-page illustration for Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth: "Chirp the First," facing the engraved title.

Daniel Maclise, a Royal Academician, possessed a style of illustration markedly different from that of the lead artist on the project, John Leech (essentially a caricaturist and cartoonist), but leaving publication so late in the autumn of 1845 Dickens could not rely on a single illustrator to meet his publication deadline.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Commentary: The Noble Couple in the Frontispiece

Readers of the third Christmas Book must have instantly noticed the disparity of styles between Daniel Maclise's elegant, almost Pre-Raphaelite frontispiece showing the fairies playing about the figures of the middle-aged husband and fashionably coiffed young wife here, and a far more prosaic version of the same moment, Doyle's "Chirp the First" on the opening page of the novella. Each artist visualises the couple somewhat differently, creating dissonances in reader reception. Although the cricket and the kettle compete with one another in the opening scene to welcome the carrier home, the brief appearance of the fairies — "All night, the household Fairies had been busy with him" (128) — does not occur until "Chirp the Third."

Reference

Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edwin Landseer. Engraved by George Dalziel, Edward Dalziel, T. Williams, J. Thompson, R. Graves, and Joseph Swain. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846 [December 1845].

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Last modified 26 June 2019