Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim
Fred Barnard
1870s
photogravure
Frontispiece, Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
This scene, although not realised in the original Chapman and Hall edition of 1843, has given rise to illustrations by Sol Eytinge, Jr. (1869), Fred Barnard (1878 and 1885), and Harold Copping (1924), the last of these being the most widely reproduced. But only Barnard's 1885 character study captures the precise moment of Dickens's text; the other three illustrations allude to an earlier, unnarrated moment in which father and son sail through the snowy streets of Camden Town on Christmas morning, after attending church; notably the female members of the family did not join them, so that Dickens established in the text a special intimacy between Bob and Tim that may reflect his own childhood relationship with his convivial (albeit, debt-ridden) father in Chatham [continued below].
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham
Passage illustrated
"No, no! There's father coming," cried the two young Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. "Hide, Martha, hide!"
So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father, with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him; and his thread-bare clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame! ["Stave Three: The Second of the Three Spirits," Household Edition, p. 20]
Commentary continued
John Dickens (a clerk in the naval pay office) perhaps being the original here for the poorly paid but ever-cheerful clerk in Scrooge's counting house. Although the second Spirit, Christmas Present, have not observed Bob and his son coming home, they are presumed to be in the Cratchits' parlour when father and son enter, so that only the 1885 illustration strictly coincides with Dickens's text.
In studying the wood engraving entitled He had been Tim's blood-horse all the way from church..." that Barnard executed as the first illustration for the 1878 Household Edition of The Christmas Books, one could regard the 1885 photogravure study for the third series of Characters from Dickens as a variant of the original 1878 study. However, Barnard has reconceived the context in which Tim appears on his father's shoulder, coming home from church on Christmas morning: instead on a street scene (which also forms the basis for Harold Copping's later colour lithograph), Barnard shows the pair arriving at the Cratchit home in Camden Town — evidently not a semi-detached house, but an apartment, since the open doorway reveals a hallway and staircase behind the figures. The implied viewer, too, has changed from a passerby in the 1878 wood engraving to the waiting Cratchit family and Bob's invisible employer in the 1885 photogravure.
If, as David Parker and Paul Davis have suggested, the Cratchits are a nineteenth-century adaptation of the Holy family, it is noteworthy that, in both Barnard illustrations, Mrs. Cratchit is absent: apparently Barnard values and through his selection of scene and subject compels the viewer to value the father-son relationship, to discount the role of the mother, and to regard the core of the Victorian family as the relationship between a beautiful male child and a doting, vigorous, caring male parent.
The two illustrations — of 1878 and 1885 — present essentially the same happy pair: unable to afford a great coat, Bob wears the same comforter and clothing, and a well-bundled Tim carries an identical crutch. Perhaps because he has been rollicking in the snow with the local boys, in the 1885 illustration Bob has rolled-up trouser-cuffs. But the context of the pair has dramatically changed, so that the scant collection of books on the shelf (right) and the seasonal greenery above the door establish the time of year explicitly, as opposed to the general impression of cold weather that the four comforters in the 1878 wood engraving create. Whereas the 1878 is specifically urban, the 1885 scene might be laid anywhere. What the two scenes share is the evident joy on faces of Bob and his son, despite their lower-middle-class poverty and the boy's handicap.
Harold Copping's 1924 colour lithograph "Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim" probably owes more to the Household Edition's frontispiece than to the 1885 character study, with several young women apparently admiring the boy, even as an adolescent in cloth cap (prefiguring what the lower-middle-class child will become, if he survives his affliction), oblivious to their passing by, shovels the sidewalk outside the area railing. The salient difference is the rich material of Tim's apparel in the later illustration which seems inappropriate to his father's modest income. None of these illustrations shares any kinship with the first such composition, Sol Eytinge's Tiny Tim's Ride", which, although set in the London streets like Copping's and Barnard's 1878 wood engraving, has no genial spectators to greet the father and son on Christmas morning.
Note: The copy of the volume from which this image was scanned is in the collection of the Main Library of The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B. C. I am inclined to believe that this photogravure comes from the frontispiece of the Dana Estes (New York) reprint of The Christmas Books, rather than from The Dickens Souvenir Book in the UBC Library because the latter contains only wood engravings derived from the Household Edition.
References
Barnard, Fred. "Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim." Photogravure. Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction, and the Drama. Vol 4. New York: Selmar, 1892.
Barnard, Fred. "Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim." A Series of Character Sketches from Dickens. London & New York : Cassell, 1885.
Davis, Paul. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Il. Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Stories. Il. E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Dickens, Charles. The Dickens Souvenir Book. Il. Fred Barnard, James Mahoney, Harry French, et al. London: Chapman and Hall, 1912.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Il. Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Il. John Leech. Charles Dickens: The Christmas Books. Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971. Rpt., 1978. Vol. 1: 32-134.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1869.
Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book. London: Educational Book, 1912.
Kitton, Frederic G. Dickens and His Illustrators. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University.
Parker, David. Christmas and Charles Dickens. New York: AMS Press, 2005.
Slater, Michael. "Introduction" to A Christmas Carol." Dickens's Christmas Books. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971. Rpt., 1978. Vol. 1: 33-36.
Thomas, Deborah A. Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Last modified 10 August 2012