Little Nell and Her Grandfather
Fred Barnard
1884
6 ⅞ inches high by 5 ¼ inches wide (17 cm high by 13.2 cm wide), vignetted.
In a pleasant field, an old man and his little guide (if guide she were who knew not whither they were bound) sat down to rest. — Old Curiosity Shop. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Passage Illustrated: Utterly Removed from Their Familiar Urban Environment
At length these streets becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and dwindled away, until there were only small garden patches bordering the road, with many a summer house innocent of paint and built of old timber or some fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage-stalks that grew about it, and grottoed at the seams with toad-stools and tight-sticking snails. To these succeeded pert cottages, two and two with plots of ground in front, laid out in angular beds with stiff box borders and narrow paths between, where footstep never strayed to make the gravel rough. Then came the public-house, freshly painted in green and white, with tea-gardens and a bowling green, spurning its old neighbour with the horse-trough where the waggons stopped; then, fields; and then, some houses, one by one, of goodly size with lawns, some even with a lodge where dwelt a porter and his wife. Then came a turnpike; then fields again with trees and hay-stacks; then, a hill, and on the top of that, the traveller might stop, and — looking back at old Saint Paul’s looming through the smoke, its cross peeping above the cloud (if the day were clear), and glittering in the sun; and casting his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew until he traced it down to the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar whose station lay for the present nearly at his feet — might feel at last that he was clear of London.
Near such a spot as this, and in a pleasant field, the old man and his little guide (if guide she were, who knew not whither they were bound) sat down to rest. She had had the precaution to furnish her basket with some slices of bread and meat, and here they made their frugal breakfast. — Chapter XV, Household Edition, pp. 57-58.
Commentary: A Retreat to the Green World
In this late study of the fugitives, who are not running away from London so much as escaping the malignant designs of Daniel Quilp, Barnard has curiously minimized the visual theme of looking back on the metropolis. In the other versions that Barnard might have consulted, Nell and Grandfather Trent, sitting under a tree in a field, look back on a village surmounted by a London skyline prominently featuring the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. We see them only in profile at at a distance, so that we cannot easily judge their facial expressions or attitudes. Barnard has organized his composition very differently so that we may intuit something of what each is thinking as he moves in for a closeup. If the dome of St. Paul's is still on the skyline (right), it is much diminished, complementing the interpretation that Nell at least is looking forward. In contrast, her grandfather seems lost in gloomy thoughts. Another change, equally subtle, is that the pair are much closer physically, as Nell takes Grandfather Trent's arm, as if to comfort him as they have retreated to this green world, evidenced by the leafy under-growth to the left and the leaves of the tree above them. All of these details suggest that Barnard is reacting to Phiz's original illustration for Chapter Fifteen, A Rest by the Way; or, Little Nel and Her Grandfather Looking back on London in Master Humphrey's Clock, issued six years before Barnard's birth. He would have seen no comparable illustration in the 1876 Household Edition by Charles Green, and, owing to copyright restrictions, would not have been aware of Darley's elegant New York photogravure The Fugitives, the 1861 frontispiece for the second volume of the James G. Gregory edition.
Similar Illustrations of Nell and Her Grandfather (1840, 1867, and 1910)
Left: Sol Eytinge’s Frontispiece for the 1867 Diamond Edition. Centre: In
the original weekly serial, Hablot Knight Browne contributed an atmospheric rendering of
the same scene:
Related Resources Including Other Illustrated Editions
- The Old Curiosity Shop Illustrated: A Team Effort by "The Clock Works" (1841)
- Cattermole's Illustrations of The Old Curiosity Shop.
- Frontispieces to the three-volume edition of Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley in the James G. Gregory (New York) Household Edition (1861-71)
- The Old Curiosity Shop by Sol Eytinge, Jr., in the Boston Diamond Edition (1867)
- The Old Curiosity Shop by Thomas Worth in the American Household Edition (1874)
- The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Green in the British Household Edition (1876)
- The Old Curiosity Shop by W. H. C. Groome in the Collins' Clear-Type Press Edition (1900)
- The Old Curiosity Shop by Harry Furniss in the British Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910)
- J. Clayton Clarke ("Kyd") (13 lithographs from watercolours)
- Harold Copping (2 plates selected)
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop in Master Humphrey's Clock. Illustrated by Phiz, George Cattermole, Samuel Williams, and Daniel Maclise. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1841.
________. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. XII.
A Series of Character Sketches from Dickens, from the Original Drawings by Frederick Barnard, Being Facsimiles of Original Drawings by Fred. Barnard. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1884.
A Series of Character Sketches from Dickens, from the Original Drawings by Frederick Barnard, Being Facsimiles of Original Drawings by Fred. Barnard. Series 2: Tony and Sam Weller; Caleb Plummer and His Blind Daughter, Bertha; Little Nell and Her Grandfather; Rogue Riderhood; Dan'l Peggotty; and Seth Pecksniff. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1884.
Created 11 February 2025