The Old dinted Corselet
Charles Green
1912
8 x 5 cm, vignetted
Dickens's The Battle of Life, The Pears' Centenary Edition, IV, 19.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Passage Illustrated
The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal, but it was hard to say what use they had ever served, and those who found them wondered and disputed. An old dinted corselet, and a helmet, had been hanging in the church so long, that the same weak half-blind old man who tried in vain to make them out above the whitewashed arch, had marvelled at them as a baby. If the host slain upon the field, could have been for a moment reanimated in the forms in which they fell, each upon the spot that was the bed of his untimely death, gashed and ghastly soldiers would have stared in, hundreds deep, at household door and window; and would have risen on the hearths of quiet homes; and would have been the garnered store of barns and granaries; and would have started up between the cradled infant and its nurse; and would have floated with the stream, and whirled round on the mill, and crowded the orchard, and burdened the meadow, and piled the rickyard high with dying men. So altered was the battle-ground, where thousands upon thousands had been killed in the great fight. ["Part the First," 19, 1912 edition]
Commentary
The 1846 edition’s illustrations, Part the First and War, show that the battle in question occurred during the seventeenth-century Civil War. Green's fourth illustration, The Old dinted Corselet, which depicts armor of that period, does the same, reminding the living that the dead surround them. This illustration, like those of the 1846 edition, clearly contradicts Green’s own title-page and its knights in late medieval armor.
In the Household Edition of 1878 Fred Barnard does not merely establish through his first illustration, The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal . . . (see below) that the conflict was one in which the combatants wore full armour, he describes the sense of wonder that grips the villagers when periodically an artefact from that battle is turned up by a plough; in other words, Barnard graphs the relationship between the past conflict and the tranquil present. In the original 1846 narrative-pictorial sequence, Clarkson Stanfield underscores this difference through two highly effective landscape scenes, War (see below) and its complement, Peace (see below). However, the elegant title-page (see below) by Daniel Maclise in the 1846 edition, putting the battle in a psychological context with angelic or Blakeian adversaries, nevertheless has at its centre a mediaeval warrior with a broadsword in one hand and a spear surmounted by a banner in the other — and butterfly wings, perhaps in realisation of "The painted butterfly took blood into the air upon the edges of its wings."
One wonders why the village hung the dinted helmet and body-armour on the wall of the church. It is a metonymy, as the text makes clear: it might represent the death of not just one soldier, but the hundreds of deaths that day, the meaning of which the living can barely apprehend. Dickens mentions none of the issues involved in the conflict, let alone who won and who lost. The village clearly derives its identity from that battle, but, ironically, the villagers seem to know very little about it, other than that, the hidden past, the buried relics of that combat, occasionally come to light. This theme of a hidden past only bcomes apparent when Michael Warden and the missing sister reappear in the final part of the story, exploding the widely-held belief that Marion eloped with Michael Warden and that the pair have been living on the Continent.
Relevant Illustrations from the 1846 and 1878 Editions
Left: Daniel Maclise's engraved title-page, showing a psychomachia in progress: The Battle of Life: A Love Story (1846). Centre: Marine-painter Stanfield's description of the landscape near the village immediately after the 17th c. slaughter, War. Right: Stanfield's description of the same field, a century later, under cultivation, Peace (1846).
Above: Barnard's wood-engraving of the villagers' reaction to thediscovery of another relic of the battle, The ploughshare still turned up from time to time some rusty bits of metal . . . (1878).
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. The Battle of Life: A Love Story. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Daniel Maclise, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846.
_____. The Battle of Life: A Love Story. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Daniel Maclise, and Clarkson Stanfield. (1846). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978.
_____. The Battle of Life. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. 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 Co., 1910.
_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Created 6 May 2015
Last modified 16 March 2020