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The Haunted Man and the Woman on the Stairs
Charles Green
1895
11.8 x 7.6 cm, exclusive of frame
Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time, The Pears' Centenary Edition, V, 103.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"There was a woman sitting on the stairs, either asleep or forlorn, whose head was bent down on her hands and knees. As it was not easy to pass without treading on her, and as she was perfectly regardless of his near approach, he stopped, and touched her on the shoulder. Looking up, she showed him quite a young face, but one whose bloom and promise were all swept away, as if the haggard winter should unnaturally kill the spring.
With little or no show of concern on his account, she moved nearer to the wall to leave him a wider passage.
"What are you?" said Redlaw, pausing, with his hand upon the broken stair-rail.
"What do you think I am?" she answered, showing him her face again.
He looked upon the ruined Temple of God, so lately made, so soon disfigured; and something, which was not compassion — for the springs in which a true compassion for such miseries has its rise, were dried up in his breast — but which was nearer to it, for the moment, than any feeling that had lately struggled into the darkening, but not yet wholly darkened, night of his mind — mingled a touch of softness with his next words. [Chapter Two: "The Gift Diffused," 102-4]
Left: Leech's realistic but also allegorical protest the evils of the factory system, Ignorance and Want (1843). Right: Furniss's realisation of the university professor's encounter with a young prostitute, Spring Killed by Haggard Winter (1910).
The caption immediately below the illustration points directly towards the moment realised: "She moved nearer to the wall. 'What are you?' said Redlaw, pausing" (103, adapted from the bottom of 102). The bare caption does not reveal, however, that Redlaw and his guide have passed through some of London's meanest streets, and that therefore, in all likelihood, although Dickens avoids the word, she is a prostitute. As a species of social realism, the illustration obliquely tackles its subject, as does Harry Furniss's Spring Killed by Haggard Winter. These night scenes complement John Leech's visual social critique of the evils of the factory system in the personifications of urban blight, the ragged boy and girl, symbolically labelled "Ignorance" and "Want." For a caricaturist, Leech offers a highly realistic delineation of these figures, allegorical and yet convincing in their suffering, in Ignorance and Want (1843). Green's scene, like Furniss's, realises an unusual aspect of the story, one which all the nineteenth-century illustrators of the book have avoided: the East-end slum from which the urchin comes, where, moreover, dissolute gambler George Swidger now lies dying.
Left: Leech's realistic study of the street boy enjoying a roaring coal-fire in Redlaw's study, The Boy before the Fire (1848). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s study of the waif and the university professor: Redlaw and The Boy (1867). Right: Leech's treatment of the same scene: Redlaw and The Boy (1848).
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!".
The original illustrators of the 1848 edition and the Household Edition (1876, 1878) illustrators did not shy away from depicting the poverty-stricken proletariat's representative, the cowering, ragged child of The Boy before the Fire (above). But neither of the Household Editions' renditions of the street boy includes his sordid origins, the East End slum from which he has come. In "Chapter 2: The Gift Diffused," Fred Barnard realises this lean, atavistic denizen of the London slums in "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!" (above). Harry Furniss, in the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), presents an image that is both conventional (presenting an allegorical figure realistically) and daring, because Furniss has elected to depict a marginal figure who rarely appears in Victorian book illustrations, a truly " Fallen Woman" sleeping in a stairwell, a type whom Dickens was shortly to explore more fully in the characters of Martha and Little Em'ly in David Copperfield (1849-50). Although Green's interpretation of the scene is less dramatic, it is far more realistic in its depiction of the young woman, wearing a shawl and bonnet against the elements. Green's woman of the streets has been "sleeping rough," out in the elements in winter, exactly as Hallie Rubenhold describes Jack the Ripper's victims, who had taken refuge for the night in alleys, areas, stairwells, courts, and alcoves in The Five: The Untold Stories of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (2019) rather than go to a union workhouse. Younger than the Ripper's typical prey (except for Mary Jane, aged 25), this working-class woman is neither brazen, nor wanton, nor inebriated, just cold and afraid when the gentlemanly Redlaw accosts her.
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Cohen, Jane Rabb. "The Illustrators of the Christmas Books, John Leech." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1981. 141-151.
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.
Rubenhold, Hallie. The Five: The Untold Stories of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.
Created 4 September 2015
Last modified 9 April 2020