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The Founder's Portrait
Charles Green
1912
7.3 x 5.8 cm, exclusive of frame
Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time, The Pears' Centenary Edition, V, 160.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
All this, the Chemist, sitting with the student and his bride that was to be, Philip, and the rest, saw.
Some people have said since, that he only thought what has been herein set down; others, that he read it in the fire, one winter night about the twilight time; others, that the Ghost was but the representation of his gloomy thoughts, and Milly the embodiment of his better wisdom. I say nothing.
— Except this. That as they were assembled in the old Hall, by no other light than that of a great fire (having dined early), the shadows once more stole out of their hiding-places, and danced about the room, showing the children marvellous shapes and faces on the walls, and gradually changing what was real and familiar there, to what was wild and magical. But that there was one thing in the Hall, to which the eyes of Redlaw, and of Milly and her husband, and of the old man, and of the student, and his bride that was to be, were often turned, which the shadows did not obscure or change. Deepened in its gravity by the fire-light, and gazing from the darkness of the panelled wall like life, the sedate face in the portrait, with the beard and ruff, looked down at them from under its verdant wreath of holly, as they looked up at it; and, clear and plain below, as if a voice had uttered them, were the words,
Lord, Keep My Memory Green. ["Stave Three: The Gift Reversed," V, 159-160]
Green concludes his extensive narrative-pictorial sequence with a nod to both the sixteen-plate 1848 sequence and the seven-plate series in the 1876 Household Edition. The title as given in both the index and in Gothic letters under the lithograph itself, "Lord, Keep My Memory Green," is ambiguous because through both the text and the illustrations it has acquired nuances that it did not possess at the opening of the story. Doubtless the founder of the old college, a wealthy and enlightened Elizabethan aristocrat, meant that he wished future generations to remember him for his charity. However, the strange experiences of Redlaw, the Swidgers, and the Tetterbys imply that retaining a vivid sense of one's past, both the melancholy and cheerful events of a life, is vital to retaining one's sense of humanity: one cannot forgive what one cannot remember. The bare caption (The Founder's Portrait here, as in Fred Barnard's 1878 woodblock engraving that closes the sequence in the British Household Edition, Lord, Keep My Memory Green! (see below). The changes that Dickens rings upon the devout wish for a "green" memory are consistent with his transforming the fairy-tale subgenre of the Christmas story into an adult psychological exploration of the limits of scientific knowledge in an era dogged by massive social problems that mere knowledge by itself cannot resolve. We must, implies Dickens, remember our own suffering in order to identify ourselves in common humanity with the indigent and dislocated masses, represented by the nameless "Waif" here, and by Ignorance and Want in the first Christmas Book, A Christmas Carolin 1843.
Milly restores the good feeling in her family and reunites Redlaw with Mr. Longford, who many years before had wronged Redlaw by jilting his sister [depicted in the flashback illustration immediately prior to this] and stealing his fiancée. Now a penitent, Longford has returned to seek Redlaw's forgiveness and that of Edmund, the son that he abandoned. Edmund is also reunited with his fiancée, reminding Redlaw of his own love many years before. In the end all are brought together in the old College hall, where they celebrate dinner beneath the portrait of the college founder. [Davis 176]
As David Parker notes, “his entreaty closes the book . . . , and sustains the heartfelt calm of its ending, by containing layer upon layer of meaning beneath a surface of folksy piety” (269). Parker also points out that the motto has, in fact, at least two meanings, for the Renaissance "benefactor" undoubtedly wished to be remembered by succeeding generations for his endowment; however, for so many characters in the book, not the least Philip Swidger and Professor Redlaw, the aphorism would suggest, "Do not let me forget." Perhaps this theme might be expressed by the motto of the Canadian Province of Quebec, with respect to its history as France's North American bastion: "Je me souviens." ["I retain my sense of my lineage, traditions, and memories."]
The story, we are reminded, is about keeping the faculty of memory itself "green," in order to preserve an outlook upon the world and its inhabitants, healthy morally and spiritually.
Ambiguity and association make the prayer that ends The Haunted Man rich in meaning, despite superficial simplicity. One further meaning, more overt at the end of Dickens's next text about Christmas, is perhaps hinted at here. On Christmas Day, Christians decorate their homes with holly to evoke one memory above all others. For such readers, the inscription beneath the portrait is, not least, a reminder of the incarnation of Christ, whose example in spires Redlaw's redemption. [Parker 260-61]
The portrait, like its caption, is alluded to both at the beginning of the novella and at the conclusion; in fact, the Gothic letters of the subtitle on the Bradbury and Evans title-page, "A Fancy for Christmas-Time," may constitute our first clue to the meaning of the other phrase set in Gothic type at the very conclusion. The first allusion to the portrait and its homiletic caption appears early on in "The Gift Bestowed." Charles Green and Fred Barnard, who rejected the original 1848 concluding illustration, dispense with the characters entirely and instead focus on the presiding genius of the seasonal celebration, the figure from three centuries before who is remembered and, as it were, recalled to life every December 25th by the seasonal greenery surrounding him. His portrait is "kept green" (seasonally decorated, and therefore honoured) and his presence in the feast acknowledged.
As David Parker points out, Dickens probably had a specific set of London buildings — and probably two different sets of Renaissance buildings — in mind for the novella's principal setting, and therefore a specific "founder":
The college is evidently a conflation of the Charterhouse and Gresham College. Originally a Carthusian priory, the Charterhouse, in Clerkenwell, was refounded in 1611 by Thomas Sutton, as a school, and as a refuge for decayed bachelors or widowers. Damaged by bombing in 1941, its buildings in the early nineteenth century included a fifteenth century gatehouse, courts, and cloisters [suggested in Stanfield's The Exterior of the Old College], and a splendid sixteenth-century great hall, used by the brethren for dining. Gresham College was established in the City of London in 1579, by the will of Sir Thomas Gresham, for the delivery of public lectures on divinity, astronomy, music, geometry, physic, law, and rhetoric. [322]
It is perfectly reasonable to conjecture, then, as to whether Barnard and Green had an actual seventeenth-century portrait (perhaps of Thomas Sutton or Sir Thomas Gresham) in mind, or whether the late nineteenth-century illustrators have, as it were, synthesised a number of Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits, as Dickens and Stanfield in the 1848 novella had combined London institutions Charterhouse and Gresham College into the "old College." In fact, the luxurious, forking beard of the gentleman in Barnard's idealised portrait is highly reminiscent of Gresham's own in maturity, and the costume that Barnard has given his figure resembles both that in "Portrait of Thomas Sutton" (prominently featuring a starched ruff of the sort mentioned by Dickens and evident in the Green version) at Charterhouse, and that in the "Portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-79) from Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth after the portrait by Antonio Mor, published in 1825. Compare, for example, the portrait of Gresham in the National Portrait Gallery, London, Sir Thomas Gresham by an Anglo-Netherlandish artist circa 1565, a three-quarter-length portrait of a distinguished nobleman in his mid-forties. Like Barnard, Green, academically trained and a Londoner, might have seen both the National Portrait Gallery painting of Sutton (1532-1611) and this and other portraits of Gresham, and would have made the connection to "The Old College" of Dickens's final Christmas Book. Moreover, The London Illustrated News published a study of Gresham together with his portrait in 1866, commemorating his founding of the Royal Exchange, modelled on the Antwerp bourse, in 1565. However, other Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits such as that of Sir Thomas Walsingham (1532-90), Queen Elizabeth I's secretary and spy-master, may well have served as Green's model, the prominent ruff in his final lithograph occurring in the Walsingham portrait but not in the Barnard wood-engraving. One sees in Green's version neither the forked beard, nor the fur-lined cloak, nor the staff of office prominent in the Barnard version, and the whip held by Barnard's founder has become (appropriately) a book in Green's. Positioned in a rondel, the gentleman in the Green portrait is less gloomy than the figure in the portrait of Sutton and sports a more prominent ruff or furbelow. It may well be that Green had seen the portrait of Sutton in the Great Hall of Sutton's Hospital (established by King James the First in 1618), where the founder has a monumental tomb.
Left: Clarkson Stanfield's tranquil realisation of the final scene, The Christmas Dinner in the Great Hall. Right: Fred Barnard's interpretation of the final moment of the story, the portrait of the college's founder, "Lord, keep my Memory Green!" (1878).
Green appears not to have attended much to the original series of illustrations as his Redlaw and young Longford do not much resemble these characters as drawn by Frank Stone, John Leech, and John Tenniel — or perhaps he was striving for a consistency that the original team of illustrators with very different individual styles failed to deliver. Here, Green pays homage to the previous re-inventor of Dickens illustrated, Barnard, dubbed "The Dickens of Illustrators" by his own age. The final illustration in the Green series takes only the motto from the Stanfield illustration of the muted Christmas celebration, The Christmas Dinner in the Great Hall, and utilizes the image of the founder's portrait produced by Barnard, suggesting continuity between the past and the present, "Lord, keep my Memory Green!", drawn to much larger scale than Green's illustration and surrounded by far more holly. The prayer of the seventeenth-century aristocrat strikes a new chord in Redlaw's heart — and in the hearts of Victorian readers, well aware of the sufferings of the Hungry Forties.
Since the embedded motto on the scroll beneath the oil portrait is barely readable in Green's illustration, the editor has thought fit to place the words in Gothic letters immediately above the picture, whereas Fred Barnard was able to integrate text and illustration as Clarkson Stanfield had done. By installing wainscotting beneath the portrait, Green reminds the reader of the portrait's location, in the Great Hall where students customarily take their meals. The "higher form" of the fairy-tale for which Dickens was reaching throughout The Christmas Books is well exemplified by the motto and Dickens's Christian effusion upon it, moving from Milly's representing Redlaw's "better wisdom," the wisdom of the heart, to "the memory of Christ upon the cross, and of all the good who perished in His cause" (156). Thus, through the operation of the motto as emphasized by the final page's illustration and Gothic lettering, the "silly" (light, inconsequential) tale has become a Christian allegory.
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. 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. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861. Vol. 2, 155-300.
____. 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. Vol. 2, p. 235-362, 365-366.
____. The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Created 14 September 2015
Last modified 22 March 2020