"The Waif" by Charles Green. 1895. 8.0 x 9.2 cm, exclusive of frame. Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time, Pears Centenary Edition (1912), in which the plates often have captions that are different from the short titles given at the beginning of the volume in the "List of Illustrations" (15-16). For example, the series editor, Clement Shorter, has used a direct quotation that illustrates the savage nature of Green's street boy supine before Redlaw's fire, "Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!" (98, quoted from the very top of the same page in the text).
The Context of the Illustration
Right: Harry Furniss's impressionistic study of the confrontation of Redlaw and the boy, "I'll bite if you hit me" (1910), amounting to a dark plate.
The creature lay in such a fiery heat, that, as the Chemist stooped to rouse him, it scorched his head. So soon as he was touched, the boy, not half awake, clutching his rags together with the instinct of flight upon him, half rolled and half ran into a distant corner of the room, where, heaped upon the ground, he struck his foot out to defend himself. . . .
"You let me go," returned the boy, suddenly twisting out of his grasp. "I'm not a going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!"
He was down before it, and ready, with his savage little hand, to pluck the burning coals out. ["Chapter Two: The Gift Diffused," Pears Centenary Edition, 97-8]
Commentary
Charles Green's boy directly off the means streets of 1840s London looks better clothed and less atavistic than the waifs drawn by other illustrators. Despite his clothing, he wears no shoes, and seems more realistic than the Waif of Furniss's 1910 pen-and-ink drawing "I'll bite if you hit me", and rather less cartoonish than John Leech's ragged figure enjoying sheer heat, The Boy before the Fire. As believable and somewhat more dynamic is Fred Barnard's vigorous, shaggy-haired street boy in rags, "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!". Through a combination of agression and strategy, Barnard's youth has survived the mean streets of London's East End as the living embodiment of Charles Darwin's "Survival of the Fittest." Green's version of this character almost snarls at the man who has interrupted his comfort.
Above: Barnard's melodramatic engraving of Redlaw's encountering the boy in front of the fireplace, "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!".
Although Barnard and E. A. Abbey, the seventies illustrators of the British and American Household Editions of The Christmas Books, offered fresh ideas and realisations that their predecessors had not, Green still responds for the most part to the 1848 illustrations. Here Green’s 1895 drawing, which appeared in the 1912 Pears Centenary Edition, most likely takes inspiration from Leech's character study of the street-smart, ill-clad urchin, The Boy before the Fire.
Leech's The Boy before the Fire.
Whereas Leech's boy sits on a cushioned chair, eating and enjoying the warmth, Green's reaches towards the fire as he casts a baleful look at us — thus, Green places the viewer in Redlaw's position, and focusses on the boy's fire-lit face which contrasts the shadows behind him as he is caught in contrapposto rather than (as in Leech's wood-engraving) sitting on a chair. Leech’s Boy of the Hungry Forties is no mere abstraction. He has created a starving child whose condition he conveys through the snarling urchin's various emotions and his size relative to the chair. However, unlike Green's, Leech's ravenous child lacks both the photographic realism and the smouldering intensity of gaze in the 1912 lithograph. Leech's Boy seems fascinated, almost hypnotized by the fire into whose flames he stares, but the character whom the later illustrators have envisaged asserts himself against anybody who threatens to come between him and the source of his comfort. Green's boy before the fire represents a more Darwinian interpretation than the Leech original, and subsequently interpreted by Barnard and Furniss. In the 1878, 1910, and 1912 illustrations, the Boy has stationed himself by Redlaw's fire; dark and menacing in these edition, he looks out at the reader from a page printed after the publication of the ground-breaking scientific work, Darwin's Origin of Species, published eleven years after Dickens's novella, but over fifty years before the Pears edition.
Illustrations for the Other Volumes of the Pears' Centenary Christmas Books of Charles Dickens (1912)
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
- A Christmas Carol (28 plates) Vol. I (1892)
- The Chimes (31 plates) Vol. II (1894)
- L. Rossi's The Cricket on the Hearth (22 plates) Vol. III (1912)
- The Battle of Life (28 plates) Vol. IV (1893)
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. 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, and 365-366.
_____. 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.
_____. 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. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861. II, 155-300.
Created 3 September 2015
Last modified 9 April 2020