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Passage Illustrated: A Domestic Idyll

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. [Stave Two, "The First of the Three Spirits," p. 66]

Commentary: What Scrooge Missed

Even though it is a scene from the recent past, Arthur Rackham named the picture Scrooge's Dream because it represents an alternate and idealized reality for crusty bachelor Scrooge who, instead of merely having a young married nephew with whom he disagrees, has young, exuberant, adoring children with whom to share such sentimental family occasions as Christmas. This "dream" of the good Victorian pater familias Scrooge witnesses in the company of The Spirit of Christmas Past ("The Second Visitor"). And the fortunate father is none other than the husband of Belle, formerly Ebenezer Scrooge's fiancee who parted from the young businessman and future capitalist over his obsession with accumulating wealth. The illustrator has made the jolly father of advanced middle age superficially resemble Scrooge, and has dressed the two boys specifically in the costumes such upper-middle-class boys would have worn in the period of the Regency. Although four of the children besiege the heavily-laden porter and enquire into his wicker-basket (one even picks his pocket!), the fifth, a little, blonde-haired child in a calico dress, hugs Belle's husband as he attempts to divest himself of his winter coat and patterned silk scarf. The transom window above the front door again suggests the period of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century of the type seen in the Cruikshank illustrations for Sketches by Boz. Here, we are in the warmth of the family, full of youthful vivacity and the spirit of the season — that same "flushed and boisterous group" who have encircled the beautiful Belle in the previous Rackham illustration in the children's playroom.

As Paul Davis notes in The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (1990), Rackham was one of a number of early twentieth-century illustrators (at least twenty-one between 1900 and 1915, including O. J. Stevenson, J. R. Neill, H. C. Appleton, A. I. Keller, S. B. Nichols, C. M. Boog, A. C. Michael, and most notably Harry Furniss, Charles Pears, and Charles E. Brock) who presented Belle's Christmas with her children as an extension of the text of the second stave, focussing on the modern giving of gifts rather than the familial consumption of turkey (or goose) and Christmas pudding. According to Davis,

Rackham devoted two of his twelve color illustrations to it, one showing Belle's children frolicking around her, the other depicting the arrival of the porter with the children's Christmas presents (fig. 47).

In its focus on present-giving, Belle's Christmas was also a more modern celebration than many others in the book. Dickens had not considered present-giving central to the Christmas festival. . . . . His celebration centered instead on the Christmas feast. [pp. 108-109]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1915.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.

_____. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 1990.

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Last modified 17 June 2019