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Passage Illustrated

A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant's, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man's. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy, — ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.

Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow.

"I'll bite," he said, "if you hit me!" ["Chapter One: The Gift Bestowed," 346: the picture's original caption has been emphasized]

Commentary

In this illustration whose scale is imperceptably larger than most in volume eight of the Charles Dickens Library Edition, Furniss has created a striking effect by filling the area with bold, black lines that emphasize the vertical. Although the street urchin is better clothed and far more animated in Furniss's principal source, Leech's Redlaw and the Boy in the 1848 Bradbury and Evans edition.

The two original illustrations of the street boy in the 1848 edition of the novella — Leech's vignetted image of the well-dressed middle-class academic and the cowering, ragged child in the Redlaw and the Boy and Leech's study of the atavistic creature in The Boy before the Fire — both recall the more allegorical and static child, shivering in the cold with his sister in Leech's 1843 indictment of capitalism and the factory system, Ignorance and Want. But neither of Leech's renditions of the street-boy who wanders into the old college and is looked after by Milly Swidger possesses the baroque energy of the figures created by Fred Barnard for the Household Edition and Furniss for the Charles Dickens Library Edition some thirty-two years later. In "Chapter 3: The Gift Reversed," Barnard realises this lean, snarling survivor of London's mean 1840s streets, but his boy is no victim; rather, with Cockney pluck he is prepared to defend himself against a respectably clad Professor Redlaw in "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!" (see below).

As human in appearance as Leech's street urchin and far less animalistic than Eytinge's, Furniss's boy is still a victim. The late Victorian illustrator conveys through his posture and expression the boy's belief that he is about to be attacked by a dark-clad monster with long, straggling, black hair and darkened face who has just entered from the deeper darkness to the right. The only source of light, a lamp (as in the text) rather than the fitful candle of Leech's illustration, sheds a lurid glow (at the end of the sharp diagonal of the curtain and Redlaw's supporting arm) upon the child, caught in a Bernini-like moment of surprise and self-defence, as he protects himself from the impending blow. Whereas in Leech's version the context — Redlaw's study, to the side of the lecture theatre (which lies beyond the partially open curtain) — the artist has clearly established by the wainscotting and the pair of folio volumes on the chair (centre), Furniss only vaguely indicates the setting through the bookshelf above the boy. Furniss transforms the benign, melancholy intellectual into a hulking monster, a species of Stevenson's Mr. Hyde, to reveal the boy's perspective, and imply the horrible consequences of the dubious "gift" that Redlaw now carries with him. In a series of six illustrations that contains three "dark" plates in the manner of Phiz in Bleak House, this is the darkest and most menacing.

Related Materials and Details

• The Christmas Books of Charles Dickens
• Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s single illustration for The Battle of Life (1867)
• Felix O. C. Darley's frontispiece for the second volume of Christmas Stories, a character study of the brooding protagonist and his double, As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire (1861)
• A. E. Abbey's Household Edition illustrations for The Christmas Books (1876)
• Fred Barnard's Household Edition illustrations for The Christmas Books (1878)

Pertinent Illustrations in Earlier Editions: 1848, 1867, and 1878

Left: Leech's Redlaw and the Boy; centre, Leech's The Boy before the Fire (1848). Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Redlaw and the Boy (1867).

Barnard's "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!" (1878).

Bibliography

Cohen, Jane Rabb. "John Leech." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio U. , 1980, 141-51.

Dickens, Charles. 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.

__________. The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. Illustrated by John Leech, John Tenniel, Frank Stone, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.

Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture Book. Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910.

Thomas, Deborah A. Chapter 4, "The Chord of the Christmas Season." Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 62-93.

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Created 29 July 2013

Last modified 4 January 2020