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After dinner Caleb sang the song about the Sparkling Bowl
Fred Barnard
1878
13.9 cm high by 10.6 cm wide, or 5 ½ by 4 ¼ inches (p. 116).
Final Illustration for Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, Chirp the Third from the Christmas Books, p. 116.
Engraved by one of the Dalziels, and signed "FB" [i. e., Fred Barnard] in lower left corner.
[Click on images to enlarge them.]
Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham.
I wouldn't have missed Dot, doing the honours in her wedding-gown, my benison on her bright face! for any money. No! nor the good Carrier, so jovial and so ruddy, at the bottom of the table. Nor the brown, fresh sailor-fellow, and his handsome wife. Nor any one among them. To have missed the dinner would have been to miss as jolly and as stout a meal as man need eat; and to have missed the overflowing cups in which they drank The Wedding-Day, would have been the greatest miss of all.
After dinner, Caleb sang the song about the Sparkling Bowl. As I'm a living man, hoping to keep so, for a year or two, he sang it through.
And, by-the-bye, a most unlooked-for incident occurred, just as he finished the last verse.
There was a tap at the door; and a man came staggering in, without saying with your leave, or by your leave, with something heavy on his head. Setting this down in the middle of the table, symmetrically in the centre of the nuts and apples, he said:
"Mr. Tackleton's compliments, and as he hasn't got no use for the cake himself, p'raps you'll eat it?"
And with those words, he walked off.
There was some surprise among the company, as you may imagine. ["Chirp the Third," British Household Edition, p. 115]
The British Household Edition ends — at least, visually — on a more sombre note than the dance scene in the 1845 novella. Whereas the characters of all conditions and degrees come to together in The Dance, Barnard has Caleb sing his out-of-character "bacchanalian" song once again at the conclusion of the celebratory dinner that honours the wedding of May Fielding and the long-lost sailor, Edward Plummer. Barnard makes the performance a melancholy affair.
This final illustration for the 1845 Christmas Book suggests that, in the Dance of Life that ends the novella, the long-suffering toy-maker Caleb Plummer is decidedly the odd man out — contradicting John Leech's fanciful pairing of the dancing Caleb with the awkward nurse, Tilly Slowboy, in his own concluding illustration. The portrait of the melancholy widower and devoted single-parent, sittingging what ought to be a jolly seasonal catch, is a decidedly "off" way to end the novella — other nineteenth-century illustrators have tended to focus on the dance in which all of the characters, including the sarcastic Tackleton, pair off.
Although Barnard's program for the 1878 British Household Edition is effective as a series of character studies, in it the "Dickens of Illustrators" of the 1870s sometimes fails to match the spirit of the original illustrations of The Christmas Books; such an instance is this somewhat melancholy study of the toymaker Caleb Plummer, ironically singing a traditional drinking song at the wedding dinner of May and his long-lost sailor son, Edward. In the original 1845 edition of The Cricket on the Hearth, the final John Leech woodcut, integrated into the letterpress, complements the reader's and the narrator's joyful reception of the providential closure far better than Barnard's closeup of Caleb and his daughter, After dinner, Caleb sang the song about the Sparkling Bowl.
The Leech cartoon of the dance (on the penultimate page in the original publication) utilizes the structural principle of balance, as is suggested most forcibly by the dog Boxer dancing with the unnamed cat (right). As in the text, Tilly (centre) dances with Caleb, a diminutive Dot with a large-headed John (in linen smock frock, as is appropriate to his rural occupation and social status), and (in the background) Mrs. Fielding is dancing with a figure that must be Tackleton (his only appearance in the 1845 edition). Presumably, the elderly woman dancing just behind Dot is her mother, and (not paired off) the harpist, Bertha, appears to the right, the size of her figure suggesting neither her importance to the multiple plots nor a realistic perspective. May and Edward, who initiated the dance, are surprisingly absent — perhaps Leech was reluctant to caricature the romantic leads, who are, after all, relatively pallid characters.
The composition is crowded enough, as it is, the upper register full of toys and seasonal greenery. The presence of fairies (an aspect of the story largely neglected by Barnard, except in the title-page vignette for the volume) above the dancers reinforces the fanciful nature of the story. The two worlds of the novella — the mortal and the fairy dimensions — are not merely represented in Leech's final illustration; they are presented as balanced and complementary. At another level, full of toys and diminutive beings, the upper register is fancy, the lower register reality. In this "Dance," the two worlds are aligned. The fairies' absence from Barnard's few illustrations for the novella reduces the imaginative appeal and even the charm of the story, which suffers from the later artist's realistic approach. The difference in the treatments of the 1845 and 1878 illustrators is evident in these concluding plates, highly animated and humorous in the case of Leech, realistic portraiture devoid of even melancholy sentiment in the case of Barnard. The final illustration in the American Household Edition of 1876 does not even allude to the happy ending, let alone the fairy world; rather, E. A. Abbey focuses on the figure of Tackleton as a tempter whose counsel John Peerybingle rejects in the supposed "adultery" plot.
As Michael Slater notes in his introduction to the Penguin edition, in his review of the book for 23 December 1845 in The Morning Chronicle, novelist, artist, and critic William Makepeace Thackeray had compared it to seasonal candies ("bonbons"), but the Household Edition's final illustration creates no such impression of "French plums and sweetness" as Thackeray suggested it should. The Mirror of Literature for 27 December 1845 justly compared the novella to that other Victorian seasonal favourite, the pantomime, and the sublime comedy of Joseph Grimaldi; unfortunately, Barnard's final picture, involving a sad-faced Caleb and a resigned Bertha, engenders no such joy, and reflects no such conventions of miraculous, yuletide transformation.
Three illustrations from the closing of the novella: Left: John Leech's scene of the community at festival, The Dance (1845). Centre: E. A. Abbey's melodramatic "'Listen to me!' he said. 'And take care that you hear me right'." (1876). Right: E. A. Brock's uncaptioned tailpiece, Caleb and Tilly dancing. (1905) [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Harry Furniss's depiction of Tackleton's arrival after the revelation of the lost bridegroom, Tackleton's Wedding Day! (1910). [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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Created 31 July 2016
Last updated 27 December 2025