A Story by the Fireside

Arthur Boyd Houghton

1865

Wood engraving by the Dalziel Brothers

7 x 5½ inches

Illustration for Home Thoughts and Home Scenes, plate 11.

One of Houghton’s unsettling representations of home life, replacing the security of the fireside with a scene illuminated by a weird chiaroscuro. The emotional tenor is one of fear and anxiety – the very reverse of what one might expect to find in a representation of childhood, and markedly different from most other contemporary treatments.

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Scanned image and text by Simon Cooke

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