[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Dickens's A Christmas Carol —> Next]

The profile, pose, nightgown, and nightcap of Scrooge, too, in Eytinge's illustrations closely resemble those of Leech's miser. However, Eytinge gives greater prominence to bottles sitting atop a barrel of oysters and the bodies of various animals heaped up at the spirit's feet, and is more consistent with Dickens's text in his depiction of the "glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's horn" (Stave 3), and the holly wreath head-covering, from which Leech omitted the "shining icicles."

Despite the larger size of Eytinge's "Christmas Present" compared to Leech's "Scrooge's Third Visitor," the overall effect is cluttered in that the artist has crammed too much into the scene because the scale of the figures is much greater and there is little foreground; moreover, Eytinge's Scrooge is not shown in full, his back obscured by the door to his bedroom. Consequently, despite Eytinge's greater three-dimensional realism, the more open composition of Leech's illustration more accurately conveys Scrooge's sense of the miraculous transformation of his chilly sitting-room into a hall of abundance and consumption, an impression undoubtedly assisted by hand-tinting, by the coiling flame and smoke of the spirit's torch, by the cloud of steam rising from the punch bowl (right), and by the vigorous fire in the erstwhile "dull petrification of a hearth." Thus, Leech, although not as faithful to Dickens's letterpress as his successor, more effectively conveys the wonder and luxuriance of the textual scene in Stave Three, "The Second of the Spirits."

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.

Hearne, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: Avenel, 1989.

---

Victorian
Web

Illus-
tration

Charles
Dickens

Christmas
Carol

Sol
Eytinge

Next

Last modified 28 August 2011