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Tilly Slowboy's Dance of Joy
L. Rossi after Charles Green
1912
Lithograph
6.8 cm high x 5.3 cm wide, vignetted
Third illustration for "Chirp the Third" in Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, The Pears' Centenary Edition, III, 128.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Will you bring him sometimes, to see his father, Tilly," inquired her mistress, drying her eyes; "when I can’t live here, and have gone to my old home?"
"Ow if you please don’t!" cried Tilly, throwing back her head, and bursting out into a howl — she looked at the moment uncommonly like Boxer. "Ow if you please don’t! Ow, what has everybody gone and been and done with everybody, making everybody else so wretched! Ow-w-w-w!"
The soft-hearted Slowboy trailed off at this juncture, into such a deplorable howl, the more tremendous from its long suppression, that she must infallibly have awakened the Baby, and frightened him into something serious (probably convulsions), if her eyes had not encountered Caleb Plummer, leading in his daughter. This spectacle restoring her to a sense of the proprieties, she stood for some few moments silent, with her mouth wide open; and then, posting off to the bed on which the Baby lay asleep, danced in a weird, Saint Vitus manner on the floor, and at the same time rummaged with her face and head among the bedclothes, apparently deriving much relief from those extraordinary operations.
"Mary!" said Bertha. "Not at the marriage!" ["Chirp the Third," 115-16]
Dot has not revealed the actual identity of the Old Strenger to her husband, and, in consequence, Dickens has been able to sustain the adultery plot until late in the story. Because she has kept Edward's return a secret, probably to aid him in his plan to marry May before Tackleton can act against him, John suspects her of marital infidelity after what Tackleton has revealed to him. He now offers to send her, the baby, and nurse Tilly to the cottage of Dot's parents. This news of the breakup of the Peerybingle household naturally distresses the kind-hearted Tilly. John has nobly determined to relieve his young wife "from the daily pain of an unequal marriage" (112), but, since the action of the story occurs prior to the divorce acts of the late 1850s onward, Dot's divorcing John to marry the handsome youth would have been out of the question. He feels strongly that Dot has "made herself a party to his treachery by concealing it" (113), but that she is not technically culpable. "She leaves me without blame" (114), John tells Tackleton, when she returns with her parents to their home later on that day. Tilly is "quite horrified" (115) by this turn of events. Shortly, however, the arrival of Edward Plummer in his own person will untangle all these confusions, and restore Dot to John.
Rossi's somewhat theatrical presentation of Tilly's distress seems consistent with Tilly's role as the story's Comic Woman. And, indeed, in many a 19th c. production of the novella on stage (with, upon occasion, the part of Tilly being enacted by a male), particularly in Dion Boucicault's Dot!, Tilly was the chief source of character comedy.
Left: Leech's version of John's Arrival at the opening of the novella shows us what John sees: the cheerful parlour, his wife, Tilly, the Baby, and, just arrived, Boxer. Centre: Leech's detail of Tilly from the previous scene, in which she rocks the infant in the nursing chair: Tilly Slowboy (1845). Right: Abbey's frontispiece highlights the importance in the story of the purely comic Tilly: Tilly Slowboy and the "Precious Darling" (1876).
John Leech's illustrations of Tilly from the first, rocking the Peerybingles' baby in the nursing chair, reinforce the notion that she is present in the story largely as comic relief, and that she is merely the Comic Woman of melodrama, a caricature and nothing more. Later illustrators such as Fred Barnard (1878) and Luigi Rossi (1912) attempt to distinguish her from a simple-minded "natural" (a person of low intellect) or "cony" (a country bumpkin), and individualise her in a realistic manner so different from the cartoon figure of the 1845 first edition of the novella. While E. A. Abbey in the American Household Edition (1876) communicated the odd-looking adolescent's fascination with the "precious" infant, Barnard extended his sympathy to the young nurse from the foundling home, making her gangly and awkward but also animated by utter devotion to her charge. Rossi, on the other hand, features the aptly named Tilly Slowly only once, in this simple thumbnail illustration; however, he treats her realistically rather than as a grotesque.
Left: Barnard's version of John's long night of anguish, headnote illustration Chirp the Third, the direct consequence of the misunderstood scene in the gallery. Centre: Brock's version of the scene in which John wrestles with his conscience: John's Reverie (1845). Right: Furniss's line-drawing depicts both the anguished husband and the spirit of the Fairy Cricket, rather than, as in Rossi's interpretation, a literal cricket: "Chirp the Third" (1910).
Although Boucicault debuted his celebrated adaptation at New York's Wintergarden Theatre over fifty years before Rossi worked on the book (14 September 1859), and took it to London, the provinces, and Scotland in 1862, as a piece of popular theatre it probably continued to exert some influence over book illustrations as it continued to run on stage at Christmas throughout the nineteenth century. By the time that Rossi might have seen a stage version of The Cricket in London at the Court Theatre (opening 9 January 1912), D. W. Griffith had already filmed a version in 1909. Although the play, either by Boucicault or other adapters such as Albert Smith, appeared on the London stages throughout the decade preceding the publication of the Pears' Centenary edition of the novella, Rossi is more likely to have seen the 1911 Brussels French-language adaptation at Le Parc. Whenever and wherever staged, it would have featured Tilly as the principal comedic foil to the story's overwhelming sentimentality.
In the fourteen illustrations of the 1845 novella, Tilly Slowboy appears some four times, including by herself in Tilly Slowboy (see below) by John Leech in the middle of "Chirp the Second" and The Dance, again by Leech, in which she is depicted prominently, dancing with the story's Comic Man, Caleb Plummer. Leech had established her peculiar face and form, so that Abbey in Tilly Slowboy and the "Precious Darling", frontispiece for The Cricket on the Hearth (1876) and Barnard in "Did its mothers make up its beds, then!" ( merely had to render her less cartoon-like and more realistic.
Abbey's less cartoonish illustration of this 19th c. Holy Family, with Tilly to one side as a general servant and nurse: "Ain't he beautiful, John?" (1876).
By virtue of her prominence in both Household Edition volumes, Tilly wqould have struck later 19th c. readers as an important secondary character, even though she barely contributes anything to the main or the subplot, because she is a Dickensian "original."
Indeed, the comedy which Tilly and Caleb Plummer afford contributed mightily to the popularity of the stage adaptations, most notably Boucicault's Dot, in which comedian Mrs. John Wood starred as Tilly. The spectacular piece, with a large cast of fairies for the pantomime-style disclosure scene, crossed the Atlantic two years later to open at the Adelphi, London, debuting on 14 April 1862, with well-known comic J. L. Toole as Caleb and Sarah Woolgar as Tilly. In the hundred and thirty-three stage adaptations which Bolton lists as preceding Rossi's edition of the novella, a young actress typically took the part of Tilly. Certainly by the time of the Household Edition volumes in England and America, the eccentric, laughable Tilly had become a fast favourite with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and a centrepiece of subsequent illustrated versions of the novella. Despite this character's strong theatrical history over the nineteenth century, Rossi does not feature her prominently in any other illustration, although she is present in two other illustrations. One may conclude that, unlike previous illustrators, Rossi did not regard the gangly Tilly as worthy of focus.
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Bolton, H. Philip. "The Cricket on the Hearth." Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, 273-295.
Boucicault, Dion. Dot. A Drama in Three Acts. 10 April 1862. Add. MS. 53013 (E). Licensed 11/04/1859. The Lord Chamberlain's Manuscript Collection, The British Library, London.
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.
Created 25 April 2020
Last modified 23 May 2020