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As I held out my hand to him, he caught up his stick (being infirm, he always walked about the house with a stick), and made a blow at me, and said, "You fool!"

"Uncle," I returned, "I didn't expect you to be so angry as this." Nor had I expected it, though he was a hard and angry old man.

"You didn't expect!" said he; "when did you ever expect? When did you ever calculate, or look forward, you contemptible dog?"

"These are hard words, uncle!"

"Hard words? Feathers, to pelt such an idiot as you with," said he. "Here! Betsy Snap! Look at him!"

Betsy Snap was a withered, hard-favoured, yellow old woman — our only domestic — always employed, at this time of the morning, in rubbing my uncle's legs. As my uncle adjured her to look at me, he put his lean grip on the crown of her head, she kneeling beside him, and turned her face towards me. An involuntary thought connecting them both with the Dissecting Room, as it must often have been in the surgeon's time, passed across my mind in the midst of my anxiety.

"Look at the snivelling milksop!" said my uncle. "Look at the baby! This is the gentleman who, people say, is nobody's enemy but his own. This is the gentleman who can't say no. This is the gentleman who was making such large profits in his business that he must needs take a partner, t'other day. This is the gentleman who is going to marry a wife without a penny, and who falls into the hands of Jezabels who are speculating on my death!" ["The Poor Relation's Story," 5-6]

Commentary

By this point in his career, Dickens, the "Conductor" of Household Words, had hit upon the labour-saving strategem of creating a frame which other staff writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, who in this case contributed "The Old Nurse's Story," and Wilkie Collins would help him fill. Wisely, omitting the pallid first-person narrator from the frame, Furniss chose to depict the strongest characters in the reverie, the narrator-protagonist Michael's miserly Uncle Chill and his unpleasant confederate, the sour servant Betsy Sna

Among the two dozen thumbnails representing characters from the various stories in the margins of the title-page of volume 16 are Uncle Chill and Betsy Snap in the very poses that Furniss subsequently uses for his full-page illustration in the volume. The miserly, hard-hearted uncle is readily identifiable by his stick and Betsy Snap by her skeletal head, but in the thumbnail grouping in the top left register is a respectably clad young man, rather taken aback by the other two figures. This is the narrator and protagonist, Michael, the "Poor Relation" of the story's title, whom Furniss has omitted from the full-scale illustration in order to focus on the villainous uncle. As in the text, the elderly servant is in the process of rubbing Uncle Chill's legs (presumably to relieve his rheumatism and improve his circulation) as the crotchety relative turns towards the source of light, left, and his young nephew, who has just entered the aptly-named "dissecting-room." Furniss makes both figures repulsive by transforming the aged, yellow-skinned servant-woman into a mere skull and by rendering the unpleasant uncle as an angular, single-toothed, snarling ogre. The illustrator heightens the black-hearted nature of the old man by employing chiaroscuro around and behind his dressing-gown and shining a light upon his head and leg, and upon the eerie visage of the servant.

Bibliography

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Stories. Il. Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 16.

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Stories. Il. Edward Dalziel, Harry French, F. A. Fraser, James Mahoney, Townley Green, and Charles Green. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens. Oxford, New York, and Toronto: Oxford U., 1956, rpt. 1989.

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Stories. Il. E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Stories from "Household Words" and "All the Year Round". Il. E. G. Dalziel. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877. Rpt., 1892.

Schlicke, Paul, ed. "Christmas Stories." The Oxford Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. , 1999. 100-01.

Thomas, Deborah A. Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

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