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Mr. Peerybingle's Welcome Home
L. Rossi after Charles Green
1912
Lithograph
7.6 cm high x 9 cm wide, exclusive of text and frame
Fourth illustration for Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, The Pears' Centenary Edition, III, 21.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Where the baby came from, or how Mrs. Peerybingle got hold of it in that flash of time, I don’t know. But a live baby there was, in Mrs. Peerybingle’s arms; and a pretty tolerable amount of pride she seemed to have in it, when she was drawn gently to the fire, by a sturdy figure of a man, much taller and much older than herself, who had to stoop a long way down, to kiss her. But she was worth the trouble. Six foot six, with the lumbago, might have done it.
"Oh goodness, John!" said Mrs. P. "What a state you are in with the weather!"
He was something the worse for it, undeniably. The thick mist hung in clots upon his eyelashes like candied thaw; and between the fog and fire together, there were rainbows in his very whiskers. ["Chirp the First," Pears Centenary Edition, 20]
In the "List of Illustrations" on page 11 this one has the title, Mr. Peerybingle's Welcome Home, but a different caption appears beneath it on page 21. This practice of having a short title but a much longer caption has been carried over from the previous Pears volumes, illustrated by Charles Green, who died before the publisher could complete the "Centenary Edition" of the Christmas Books: Volume 1, A Christmas Carol (1892: twenty-seven lithographs); Volume 4, The Battle of Life (1893: twenty-nine lithographs); Volume 2, The Chimes (1894: thirty lithographs); and Volume 5, The Haunted Man (1895: thirty lithographs). Presumably, as this was to be a "Centenary" project, A & F Pears was in no rush to get these books into print. However, Green's death in 1898 necessitated the hiring of another illustrator, and Luigi Rossi, a newcomer to British book-illustration, completed the project in the sane realistic vein with which Green had illustrated the others. Rossi does not particularize the muffled carrier, merely making him massive in the doorway, compared to his much shorter and much younger wife, who greets him cheerfully.
Left: Doyle's interpretation of the carrier's homecoming in Chirp the First (1845). Centre: Stanfield's reiteration of John's homecoming, The Carrier's Cart (1845). Right: Barnard's realistic description of the middle-aged John and his young wife, John Peerbingle's Fireside (1878).
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
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].
_____. The Cricket on the Hearth. Illustrated by L. Rossi. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Last modified 2 April 2020