The Formatting of the 1848 First Edition of “The Haunted Man” and Modern Texts Compared

Left: The original 1848 illustration dropped into the text, page 1, with a framed area of 12 cm by 7 cm; and, right: printed page 245 for Dickens's Christmas Books, Volume Two, in Penguin Edition (1971): the framed area is 13.5 cm by 7.5 cm on a page 18 by 11 cm (the original's page is somewhat smaller: 16 by 10.2 cm).

In "Text Dropped into the Woodcuts': Dickens' Christmas Books", Sarah Solberg notes that the editors of the New Oxford Illustrated Edition "perverted" the original Haunted Man’s juxtaposition of illustration and text. In other words, she argues, this single-volume 400-page edition has not effectively reproduced the original composite woodblock illustrations. The Oxford editor, Eleanor Farjeon, has neither added to nor subtracted from the original letterpress that appeared with these illustrations, and has only marginally increased page-size for the fully-reproduced page, so that, for example, on the page facing 373 in the Oxford edition, the wording for Leech's The Boy before the Fire (on 130 in the 1848 text) is identical ("flung his body . . . took from his"), and the image is marginally less sharp in the 1954 (rpt., 1987) edition, although the size of the image is identical: 8.5 cm by 5.9 cm, vignetted. Oxford markets its twenty-one volume series as "collectible" and "comprehensive." It may well be the latter, but quality of the reproduction of the images is markedly inferior to that of the two-volume Christmas Books in the Penguin series (1971).

Volume Two of the Penguin edition (1971, reprinted 1978) shows the relationship between text and image more effectively but is not as faithful to the original. For example, although Penguin II, 245, corresponds to page 1 of the 1848 text of The Haunted Man, the original's print is larger, the spacing between lines greater, and the amount of white-space more generous. Whereas the Penguin edition has 50 words (exclusive of the chapter heading) on this page, the Bradbury and Evans original contains 21 words, according greater prominence to its illustration.

Whereas the first edition of The Haunted Man over the fifteen plates that combine text and illustration (as "plates dropped into text") averages 35 words per page, the comparable figure in the Penguin edition, despite editor Michael Slater's obvious attempt to have the paperback emulate the first edition's formatting, is 105.67 for each of the twelve pages that contain plates and text — Slater has eliminated the text entirely for plates 2, 6, and 7. The Penguin edition seriously disrupt’s the first edition’s balance between letter-press and illustration and has even altered the original order of the plates, placing Plate 9 before 8. In the Penguin edition, the words that originally accompanied the plates appear eight times — in other words, for only half of the illustrations do we have the simultaneous presentation of pictorial and narrative moments. Although this overlap is not precise, it does occur in Plates 3, and 10 through 16. For a paperback, however, the Penguin edition offers high resolution copies of the original plates, and, in fact, has enlarged the scale slightly so that, for example, in the first edition page 34's Redlaw and the Phantom is 12 cm high by 7.6 m wide on a page 16.5 cm high by 9.1 cm wide, on page 265 (unnumbered) of Penguin the same illustration is 13.1 cm high by 8.2 cm wide on a page 18 cm high by 11 cm wide. Eleven of the Penguin pages with illustrations are unnumbered, and ten do not have a running head. In terms of clarity, however, the Penguin edition's running heads are an improvement, naming the chapter on the odd-numbered pages, whereas the 1848 edition gives "The Haunted Man" on the even-numbered pages and "And The Ghost's Bargain." the odd-numbered pages in block capitals.

Related Materials

Illustrations for The Haunted Man (1848-1912)

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. The Haunted Man; or, The Ghost's Bargain. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.

_____. The Haunted Man. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. (1848). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978. II, 235-362, 365-366.

Glancy, Ruth. "Dickens at Work on The Haunted Man." Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 65-85.

Guida, Fred. "A Christmas Carol" and Its Adaptations: Dickens's Story on Screen and Television. London & Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Parker, David. Dickens and Christmas. New York: AMS Press, 2005.

Patten, Robert. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.

Solberg, Sarah. "'Text Dropped into the Wooidcuts': Dickens's Christmas Books." Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 103-118.

Created 21 April 2020