[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Charles Green —> The Battle of Life —> Charles Dickens —> Next]

Passage Illustrated

"Oh, Marion, Marion! Oh, my sister! Oh, my heart's dear love! Oh, joy and happiness unutterable, so to meet again!"

It was no dream, no phantom conjured up by hope and fear, but Marion, sweet Marion! So beautiful, so happy, so unalloyed by care and trial, so elevated and exalted in her loveliness, that as the setting sun shone brightly on her upturned face, she might have been a spirit visiting the earth upon some healing mission. ["Part the Third," Pears edition, 133]

Commentary

A direct quotation beneath the actual whole-page illustration augments the short title on page 14 (Marion's Return to her Home and Grace): "So beautiful, so happy, so unalloyed by care and trial, so elevated and exalted in her loveliness" (132, immediately below the lithograph in fine print, but also occurring in the text on the facing page). Thus, the reader encounters Dickens's description of Marion twice over the course of pages 132-33.

With the tender reunion in the orchard we have come full circle from the opening scene there almost a decade earlier, when the sisters danced as carefree adolescents among the fruit trees on Marion's birthday, coincidentally the day of Alfred's leaving for his medical studies abroad. In the five-and-a-half years since Marion vanished, neither sister appears to have changed much, even in point of fashion, as they appear here much as they did in Departure of Alfred on page 51, at the end of "Part The First." In the 1846 edition of the novella, the team of illustrators realizes the tearful reunion of Grace and Marion twice: in the headpiece for the final chapter, Richard Doyle's Part the Third (see below), and in Daniel Maclise's The Sisters (see below).

In the original illustration of the reunion, the sisters cling to one another indoors, in the parlour, by the sacred hearth of the Jeddler family. In Green's illustration, Grace, "Clinging to her sister, who had dropped upon a seat" (133) occupies a position on the garden bench which more closely corresponds to Dickens's description. However, the artist has retained the apple tree, suggestive of knowledge as well as of the time of the year, rather than placing the bench closer to the porch which communicates with the kitchen. One has a sense of Alfred as a committed father playing with his daughter outside the open window as the sisters, embracing, are lost in a world of their own in the Maclise illustration, which effectively closes out the 1846 sequence of thirteen illustrations. The Green illustration, however, lacks that contrast of the outer and inner worlds.

Nevertheless, the elegant penultimate illustration in Green's narrative-pictorial sequence assures the reader that the story has moved towards a sentimental happy ending in which Grace apparently forgives her supplicating sister, taking her to her breast as Marion, seeking forgiveness, kneels before the sister for whom she has, in fact, sacrificed her home and her fiancé. Much has changed. Instead of the statuesque sisters communing in the twilight of Marion's birthday amidst a perfect stillness and serenity, above which Cupid (to whom Alfred points) draws his bow to signify the power of love, Green gives us a somewhat stilted scene of the return of the Prodigal Daughter. Since Marion has little for which to apologise and has committed no moral lapse to disgrace her sister and father, the scene seems somewhat artificial. Marion, in the final analysis, is hardly equivalent to Em'ly Peggotty in David Copperfield who has succumbed to the allure of the dashing Steerforth and the prospect of foreign travels. No scarlet woman, Marion has merely been living quietly with her Aunt Martha; she is, as she declares, still Grace's "maiden sister" (137).

Relevant Illustrations from the 1846​ and 1910 editions

Left: Doyle's interpretation of the tearful reunion of the sisters, Part the Third. Centre: Maclise's tender moment closing the story of the everyday battles of life, The Sisters. Right: Furniss's portrait of the long-lost sister, Marion (1910).

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 (1912)
• The Chimes (31 plates) Vol. II
• L. Rossi's The Cricket on the Hearth (22 plates) Vol. III
• The Haunted Man (31 plates) Vol. V

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, 1910.

_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.

---

Victorian
Web

Illustration

Charles
Green

The Battle
of Life

Next

Created 3 June 2015

Last modified 26 March 2020