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"'Meg,' said Lilian, hesitating. . ."
Charles Green
c. 1912
15.5 x 11 cm vignetted
Dickens's The Chimes, The Pears' Centenary Edition, vol. 2 frontispiece.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Meg,"said Lilian, hesitating. "How often you raise your head from your work to look at me!"
"Are my looks so altered, that they frighten you?" asked Meg.
"Nay, dear! But you smile at that, yourself! Why not smile, when you look at me, Meg?"
"I do so. Do I not?" she answered: smiling on her.
"Now you do," said Lilian, "but not usually. When you think I'm busy, and don't see you, you look so anxious and so doubtful, that I hardly like to raise my eyes. There is little cause for smiling in this hard and toilsome life, but you were once so cheerful."
"Am I not now!" cried Meg, speaking in a tone of strange alarm, and rising to embrace her. "Do I make our weary life more weary to you, Lilian!" ["Third Quarter," pp. 94-95, 1912 edition]
Charles Green, one of the oringinal Household Edition illustrators for Chapman and Hall — his commission was new wood-engravings for The Old Curiosity Shop (1876), had undoubtedly studied the Fred Barnard illustrations for The Christmas Books, but probably did not see the work of Edwin Austen Abbey. The original series must have proven of little utility for Green in his attempt to represent visually the close relationship between the grownup Lilian Fern and Trotty Veck's seamstress dasughter, Meg; however, Barnard's study of the young women offered him a highly emotional model. He reacted to Barnard's melodrama and pathos with a picture of a less intense, but nevertheless close relationship in the modern, realistic manner permitted by lithography.
Left: John Leech's Richard and Margaret. Right: Fred Barnard's British Household Edition version of the same scene as Green's, "Never more, Meg; never more! Here! Here!".
Above: E. A. Abbey's 1876 wood-engraving of Alderman Cute, Filer, and Trotty meeting on the church steps, with Richard and Meg in the background, "What's the matter? What's the matter?" said the gentleman for whom the door was opened."
Dickens, Charles. The Chimes. Introduction by Clement Shorter. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Pears' Centenary Edition. London: A & F Pears, [?1912].
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, Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1844.
Dickens, Charles. 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.
Last modified 27 March 2015