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Passage Illustrated

The tempers of the little Tetterbys had sadly changed with a few hours. Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby themselves were not more altered than their offspring. Usually they were an unselfish, good-natured, yielding little race, sharing short commons when it happened (which was pretty often) contentedly and even generously, and taking a great deal of enjoyment out of a very little meat. But they were fighting now, not only for the soap and water, but even for the breakfast which was yet in perspective. The hand of every little Tetterby was against the other little Tetterbys; and even Johnny's hand — the patient, much-enduring, and devoted Johnny — rose against the baby! Yes, Mrs. Tetterby, going to the door by mere accident, saw him viciously pick out a weak place in the suit of armour where a slap would tell, and slap that blessed child. [Chapter Three: "The Gift Reversed," 392: the picture's original caption has been emphasized]

Commentary

Although previous illustrators have depicted Johnny, the baby-minder, being chastised by his parents for neglecting his charge, only Furniss actually depicts Johnny's receiving physical abuse, an action uncharacteristic for his mother and father, who are now under the malignant influence of the dreadful "gift" that Redlaw bears with him into the Tetterby household when he visits the sick student, Denham.

Whereas the original novella concludes with the muted but seasonal amity of Clarkson Stanfield's The Christmas Party in the Great Dinner Hall, the picture occupying all but two lines of the final page (188), and Fred Barnard chose to conclude with the sentiment "Lord, keep my Memory Green!" to emphasise the importance of maintaining a sense of the past societally as well as individually with the portrait of the Elizabethan nobleman in the Great Hall as the final image on the final page of the Household Edition anthology (page 200), Harry Furniss ends his sequence for The Haunted Man on a note of discord. In Leech's Johnny and Moloch the worst that can be said of Mr. Tetterby is that he is too preoccupied with putting up the shutters of his shop to pay any attention to Johnny, whose glum expression as he struggles with the large infant prepares us for Johnny's asserting several pages later that he would rather run off and become a soldier: "There an't no babies in the army" (148). In contrast, Furniss has chosen a slightly later moment to realise than that chosen by Leech; here, Mrs. Tetterby grabs Johnny as he slaps Sally and subsequently "repaid him the assault with usury thereto" (392), so that the physical abuse which begins in the illustration continues in the parlour in the text. From inside the darkened newsvendor's shop, Mr. Tetterby, holding the shutters (right), looks disapprovingly upon the combatants, but does not intervene. Furniss makes Johnny's raising his open hand to his sister a repetition of his mother's raised arm and clenched fist, implying a cycle of domestic violence as the victim becomes the victimizer.

Such a choice of subject for the final illustration in The Christmas Books component of the volume may imply that Furniss did not accept the somewhat muted closure that Dickens provided to this multi-stranded tale of infectious depression and contagious sociopathy. In its brutality and violence it would seem to be a radical departure from the series' goal of fostering of fellow feeling at the Christmas season, but it is quite consistent with the theme of the beneficial effects of memory and sentiment on the moral life of the individual and the community as a whole, obvious in the case of the moral rehabiltation of miser Ebenezer Scrooge, but also pertinent in the redemptive tales of Trotty Veck, John Peerybingle, Dr. Anthony Jeddler, and Professor Redlaw, "who finally accepts the mixed blessings of memory" (Cohen 181). In the social realism of the domestic abuse scene involving Johnny Tetterby and his parents Furniss may also be preparing the reader for the sometimes unsavoury scenes of daily life in The Uncommercial Traveller that follow in this volume.

Pertinent Illustrations in Earlier Editions: 1848, 1876, and 1878

Left: Clarkson Stanfield's "The Christmas Party in the Great Dinner Hall"; centre, John Leech's "Johnny and Moloch" (1848); right: E. A. Abbey's "You bad boy!" said Mr. Tetterby" (1878).

Above: Abbey's American Household Edition cut "You bad boy!" said Mr. Tetterby (1876).

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.

Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1978.

Sutherland, John. "Athenaeum." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. , 1989, 32.

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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