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"Lucie and her Father under the Plane-tree"
Harry Furniss
1910
13.6 cm high x 8.3 cm wide, vignetted
Eighteenth illustration for A Tale of Two Cities in A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy, The Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing XIII, 176.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"See!" said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon. "I have looked at her from my prison-window, when I could not bear her light. I have looked at her when it has been such torture to me to think of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so dull and lethargic, that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines with which I could intersect them." He added in his inward and pondering manner, as he looked at the moon, "It was twenty either way, I remember, and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in."
The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time, deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over. [Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Seventeen, "One Night," 177: the picture's original caption has been emphasized]
This illustration corresponds to Phiz's original conception of the idyllic garden scene only insofar as it features Doctor Manette and his daughter prior to her marriage to Charles Darnay. The moment as Furniss conceives of it is far more intimate because he has deliberately eliminated the other figures present in Phiz's December 1859 steel-engraving Under the Plane Tree (see below), and has moved father and daughter into an embrace as the father points dramatically upward to the moon, recalling how he contemplated it nightly in his Bastille cell. In the original monthly sequence of illustrations, readers did not see a illustration of the memorable scene in the garden when it occurred in the text for October; rather, readers had to wait until the "wind-up," December issue to see in the frontispiece, Under the Plane Tree, an analeptic realisation of this emotionally charged moment which in the Phiz engraving serves to underscore the depth of Sydney Carton's feelings for Lucie as the illustration occurs within the context of the final instalment, and therefore in terms of his noble sacrifice to preserve her husband's life.
The sixteenth weekly instalment in Harper's, issued on the 20th of August 1859, features John McLenan's somewhat stilted characterization of Lucie and her father answering the door in the headnote vignette Chapter XVII. One Night for Book Two, Chapter Seventeen. However, he more than makes up for this weakly executed contextualising scene by the scene of Lucie and her father alone on the garden bench later that evening, "See!" said the Doctor of Beauvais. (see below) in the same instalment. This treatment rather than Phiz's offers a pointed contrast for Furniss's far more emotionally satisfying realisation, even though Furniss may never has seen this American periodical illustration, and therefore was not responding to it in Lucie and her Father under the Plane-tree. Whereas Furniss conceives of the Doctor of Beauvais as an animated and engaged natural philosopher, somewhat pedantically showing his daughter (her face obscured by his left arm) the night sky, the American illustrator admirably conveys Lucie's love for her long-lost parent as she leans in and holds his right hand.
In contrast to Doctor Manette's sober business suit in the small-scale MacLenan wood-engraving inside the letterpress, Furniss's Doctor Manette in the full-page study wears a lighter jacket and (as befits his age) a skull-cap; furthermore, although he points upward emphatically, he looks into Lucie's adoring face, as the leaves of the plane tree engulf the upper half of the illustration, underscoring the Edenic quality of the moment. This natural quality (evoked by the profuse leaves of the tree that are echoed in the profusion of blonde hair on Doctor Manette's shoulder) had unfortunately escaped the American illustrator, whose generalized night-time backdrop smacks more of the early nineteenth-century theatre (with a glaring spotlight on the Doctor and the tree-trunk behind him) than of Northrup Frye's "Green World," the restorative, alternative environment to the civilised legal and structured social environment of the city in Shakespeare's plays, a concept which the Canadian critic articulated in 1957 in The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton; Princeton University Press).
In Furniss's highly impressionist and sensuous rendering of the scene, the twentieth-century reader must have felt him- or herself almost a voyeur in being privileged to witness and overhear this highly confessional moment, for this is the first time that the father has reflected upon his imprisonment in his daughter's hearing. The intense emotion of the Furniss scene is in stark contrast to far less emotional depictions of the former Bastille prisoner: the monumental first meeting of father and daughter as realised by Sol Eytinge, Junior, in the Diamond Edition, and Fred Barnard's more prosaic realisation of another confessional moment, between the Doctor and Jarvis Lorry, in which the former Bastille prisoner must speak of himself in the third person after recovering from a fit of nine days' duration in which he has lost his reconstructed identity and reverted to being the shoe-mender. Although the MacLenan illustration captures something of Doctor Manette's moonlit reverie — which, as Andrew Sanders notes, echoes the philosophical note of Charles Lamb's "Dream Children" in Essays of Elia (1823) — the passionate embrace of the daughter in Furniss's engraving speaks volumes about Lucie's mixed feelings on the eve of her marriage. It is no mere accident of composition that Furniss has made Lucie — beautiful, adoring, and somewhat vulnerable — the physical and emotional centre of the picture, whereas previous illustrators have emphasized the centrality of her father. Both are moved by powerful and conflicting emotions, but Furniss has determined that the reader should appreciate Lucie's dilemma.
Left: John McLenan's 20 August 1859 illustration of Doctor Manette and his daughter in the garden of their home in Soho, "'See!' said the Doctor of Beauvais". Right: "Under the Plane-tree" by Hablot Knight Browne in the final monthly double number (December 1859).
Left: Sol Eytinge, Junior's Diamond Edition illustration of Lucie's first meeting with her father, assumed long dead, in "Doctor Manette and His Daughter" (1867). Right: Fred Barnard's Household Edition illustration depicting Doctor Manette, "Still the doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on the ground" (1874). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
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__________. A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London: Collins, 1905.
__________. A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes, and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 13.
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Created 5 December 2013
Last modified 11 January 2020