[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Harry Furniss —> Christmas Books —> Charles Dickens —> Next]
Trotty in the Belfry
Harry Furniss
1910
13.7 cm high x 9 cm wide, framed
Third illustration for The Chimes, A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In in The Christmas Books, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing VIII, 128.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
He saw the tower, whither his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells. He saw them leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells without a pause. He saw them, round him on the ground; above him, in the air; clambering from him, by the ropes below; looking down upon him, from the massive iron-girded beams; peeping in upon him, through the chinks and loopholes in the walls; spreading away and away from him in enlarging circles, as the water ripples give way to a huge stone that suddenly comes plashing in among them. He saw them, of all aspects and all shapes. He saw them ugly, handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed. He saw them young, he saw them old, he saw them kind, he saw them cruel, he saw them merry, he saw them grim; he saw them dance, and heard them sing; he saw them tear their hair, and heard them howl. He saw the air thick with them. He saw them come and go, incessantly. He saw them riding downward, soaring upward, sailing off afar, perching near at hand, all restless and all violently active. Stone, and brick, and slate, and tile, became transparent to him as to them. [Third Quarter, 120-21]
Unlike the illustrations of the original, 1844 novella, Furniss's do not exhibit the problems of continuity, particularly in terms of the figure of Trotty Veck, who appears so different in the plates by Richard Doyle and John Leech, but is in every respect identical throughout Furniss's four presentations of him. This vigorous composition Trotty in the Belfry in the "Third Quarter" realises the central moment in the story, when the cynical protagonist encounters the world of the supernatural in the belfry of St. Dunstan's Church, London.
Whereas the original novella introduces the Goblins of the Bells in Daniel Maclise's oversized frontispiece, The Tower of the Chimes, and in his ornamental title-page The Spirit of the Chimes as the story's supernatural machinery even before the story proper begins, Furniss has had to wait until his third illustration to usher in the playful spirits who effect Trotty's social reclamation. They offer him an intensely dismal vision of the future and heighten his sympathy for his own class in the age-old Manichaean struggle between the forces of evil and the forces of good in ordinary human lives. Because he has recognised their thematic function, Furniss has abandoned his caricatural mode (evident in Trotty before Sir Joseph) to treat his bizarre subjects with a mixture of high drama and weird fantasy; he realises the spirits themselves in a style more reminiscent of Doyle's Trotty Veck among the Bells (see below) than Maclise's highly complex frontispiece and ornamental title-page. Barnard offered Furniss no model for the scene perhaps because, as a realist and social-commentator, Barnard felt the wiser course was to avoid describing Dickens's playful and sinister goblins entirely in his illustrations for the Chapman and Hall Household Edition. If he went looking for visual precedents in 1910, Furniss had to return to the original novella for inspiration, just as Abbey had done for his American Household Edition illustration What Trotty Saw in the Belfry" (see below). It is unlikely that Forniss was able to consult the American copyright regime text produced by Harper and Brothers in 1876, and had therefore probably not seen Abbey's interpretation of this weird scene.
Furniss's illustrations, controlled by a single artistic vision (if not executed in a single, coherent style), present the supernatural mechanism of the goblins of the Chimes just this once. In the 1844 novella, Richard Doyle in the same scene had to bear in mind Maclise's initial pieces as he attempted to juxtapose the real world of The Hungry Forties and the metaphysical world,
with its clouds of elfin creatures emerging from the bells. In the upper portions of his three remaining illustrations, he wrought variations on this theme, thereby supplying continuity to his various designs as well as consistent supernatural relief to the three scenes of despair he was asked to depict: the Vecks with the beleaguered Will Fern and his motherless daughter [sic — Dickens describes Lilian as Will's neice] (II, 109); Trotty overwhelmed by his vision among the bells (III, 134); and Margaret with her child at the river's edge (IV, 158). The contrast between the highly sketched elves higher up on the plate and the firmly demarcated humans below visually established the separate realms of fantasy and reality between which The Chimes moved. [Cohen, 153]
There is no such oscillation between the two worlds of the story in later editions, although Furniss does repeat the dream-vision theme in Trotty's Dream, which incorporates elements from Leech's New Year's Dance rather than from Maclise's interpretations of the book's supernatural dimension. The lithograph corresponds to the situation in the extended caption, with one exception: “Bewildered by the host of shifting and extraordinary figures, as well as by the uproar of the Bells, which all this while were ringing, Trotty turned his white face here and there, in mute and stunned astonishment” (The Chimes, 213). The passage has pointedly omitted the line about Trotty's bracing himself ("clung to a wooden pillar for support") because Furniss does not show Trotty doing so. The accompanying extended caption was presumably, then, added by J. A. Hammerton, Furniss's editor, rather than by the illustrator himself. These extended captions constantly remind the reader of the intimate connection between Dickens's text and Furniss's visual program, but they do not fuse the two contradictory aspects of the story as the 1844 novella's illustrations do: "As the text becomes part of the picture" (Solberg, 114) and the words of Dickens become "so integral a part of the design that to do without them would automatically upset the balance" (Solberg, 114).
As opposed to Doyle's upper register/lower register dichotomy for the supernatural and real worlds, in Trotty in the Belfry Furniss uses the contrast of light and dark to separate the two opposing spheres, with Trotty's more sharply delineated, black-coated figure suggesting reality and the brilliant light that pours from the bell immediately above him suggesting the metaphysical dimension; the two dimensions coalesce humorously in Trotty battered top-hat (lower left), which is a subject of investigation for a curious pair of cartoon goblins. In respect of their large eyes, distorted bodies, and grotesque visages, Furniss's playful spirits seem to be directly descended from Doyle's figures, as opposed to the nude female (left of centre), whom Furniss apparently borrowed from Maclise's elegant contributions.
Upper left: Daniel Maclise's "The Tower of the Chimes" (1844); centre: Richard Doyle's "Trotty Veck among the Bells" (1844); right: E. A. Abbey's "'What Trotty Saw in the Belfry" (1876).
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio U. , 1980.
Dickens, Charles. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Daniel Maclise, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1844 [dated 1845].
__________. The Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910, VIII, 79-157.
__________. The Christmas Books. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
__________. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
__________. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Solberg, Sarah A. "'Text Dropped into the Woodcuts': Dickens' Christmas Books." Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 103-18.
Thomas, Deborah A. Chapter 4, "The Chord of the Christmas Season." Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 62-93.
Welsh, Alexander. "Time and the City in The Chimes." Dickensian 73, 1 (January 1977): 8-17.
Created 19 June 2013
Last modified 1 January 2020