Fred Walker's Illustration for "The Schoolboy's Story" (published in 1853)

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Illustration for "The Schoolboy's Story"

"Christmas Stories" from Household Words

Frederick Walker

Engraved by the Dalziels

Composite woodblock

Frontispiece, volume I, Library Edition of Dickens's Works.

1860s, rpt. 1911

13.4 cm high by 9 cm wide (5 ¼ inches high by 3 ½ inches wide), framed

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Illustrated: Taunting the Bookworm during the Summer Break

In the Midsummer holidays, some of our fellows who lived within walking distance, used to come back and climb the trees outside the playground wall, on purpose to look at Old Cheeseman reading there by himself. He was always mild as tea — and that'spretty mild, I should hope! — so when they whistled to him, he looked up and nodded. . . . ["The Schoolboy's Story," 58]

Comment

"The Schoolboy's Story," the first of Dickens's tales in Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire, originally appeared in the Christmas 1853 number of Household Words. What is distinctive here is Dickens's assumption of a racy schoolboy diction as a rival describes old Cheeseman's rise from class social isolate and bookworm to Second Latin Master and eventually status as the heir to a significant estate.

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Stories from "Household Words" and "All The Year Round". Centenary Edition. 36 vols. London: Chapman & Hall; New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911.

The two volumes containing the Christmas stories do not indicate where they fall in the 36-volume sequence. The "Bibliographical Note" on the verso of the title-page makes reference to the Charles Dickens Edition of 1871, although this text has been augmented by five stories from "Reprinted Pieces" and two others, "What Christmas Is As We Grow Older" and "The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices," "which were not always included in the collected works of the novelist."

Created 20 September 2005
Last updated 13 February 2025