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Uncaptioned Title-page Vignette: Redlaw enters the Old College
Charles Green
1895 & 1912
6.6 x 8.4 cm, framed
Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time, The Pears' Centenary Edition, V, title-page.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The Uncaptioned title-page vignette by Charles Green is not among the illustrations given in the "List of Illustrations" (15-16). Thus, the number of illustrations in this 1912 Centenary Edition of The Christmas Books edited by Clement Shorter is thirty-one rather than thirty. Green in this series of small-scale and large-scale illustrations is probably responding to and even absorbing both the original wood-engravings of the 1848 design team, led by John Leech and the 1878 British Household Edition engravings by Fred Barnard. However, in their seriousness and realism rarely do these lithographs intersect with the 1910 pen-and-ink drawings of Harry Furniss in the Charles Dickens Library Edition's anthology of Christmas Books.
The ornamental title-page contains both a dark plate of a cloaked Professor Redlaw entering the Old College, dogged by his malignant shadow, and the ivy motif surrounding the vignette, suggestive of the motto beneath the founder's portrait: "Lord, Keep My Memory Green" (160), which the 1848 first edition featured on its scarlet cover (see below). Aside from providing a visual analogue for the importance of memory in human lives, the title-page establishes the seasonal setting by foregrounding the snowy London street, and prepares the reader for Redlaw's double in the vignette. That Redlaw cloaks himself against the weather renders him an enigmatic figure reminiscent to 1912 readers of the 1886 stalker of London's East End, Robert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde in the psychological novella about a respectable physician and his evil alter-ego.
Left: Clarkson Stanfield's atmospheric study of the Jerusalem Buildings, The Old College, presumably in London. Right: Furniss's more realistic treatment of the "haunted" academic, The Phantom, possesses that later illustrator's characteristic sense of humour.
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
_____. Christmas Books, illustrated by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
_____. Christmas Books, illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London & Glasgow: Collins' Clear-Type Press, 1906.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910.
_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
_____. The Haunted Man; or, The Ghost's Bargain. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.
_____. The Haunted Man. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. (1848). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978. II, 235-362, 365-366.
_____. The Haunted Man. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861. II, 155-300.
_____. The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. (1895). London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Created 21 June 2015
Last modified 29 March 2020