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The title-page vignette
Fred Barnard
1878
vignette 8.0 cm x 6.2 cm. on a page measuring 24.3 cm x 18.5 cm.
The Cricket on the Hearth
Second Illustration for the Household Edition of Dickens's Christmas Books.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Fred Barnard did not have a broad visual tradition upon which to draw for his short program of six plates for The Cricket on the Hearth, so that his decision to include the domestic fairy ("Home") in so prominent a position as the frontispiece for the entire anthology may have been the result instead of the work's extensive theatrical history. In production after production, the Fairy (Home) and her diaphanous minions appeared in a spectacular pantomime transformation. Barnard would also have been familiar with the original 1845 illustrations by noted painter Edwin Landseer, and popular book illustrators John Leech, Richard Doyle (two of his three engravings feature fairies prominently — see below), Daniel Maclise (his ornate frontispiece and title-page vignette — see below — both accentuate fairy presences), and Clarkson Stanfield.
Through the prominence of the presiding fairy on the engraved title-page Barnard alerts readers to the appearance of this highly popular Christmastide novella in the slender Household Edition volume. Barnard's cricket (looking rather like a grasshopper) appears simultaneously in the title-page vignette with the fairy spirit who waves a magic wand that perhaps signifies her powers of transformation. Here, Barnard alludes to no specific "moment," but rather to the domestic spirit that presides over John Peerybingle's home, and which spectacularly appears in the theatrical-pictorial tradition of pantomime as the hearth opens upon a fairy world in the "Third Chirp." Peerybingle's trying to decide how best to address what he mistakenly believes is his wife's infidelity with a handsome youth (in fact, her long-lost school friend, Edward Plummer, son of the old toymaker, Caleb) precedes this stunning transformation scene:
He reversed the gun to beat the stock up the door; he already held it lifted in the air; some indistinct design was in his thoughts of calling out to him to fly, for God's sake, by the window —
When, suddenly, the struggling fire illumined the whole chimney with a glow of light; and the Cricket on the Hearth began to Chirp!
No sound he could have heard, no human voice, not even hers, could so have moved and softened him. The artless words in which she had told him of her love for this same Cricket, were once more freshly spoken; her trembling, earnest manner at the moment, was again before him; her pleasant voice — O what a voice it was, for making household music at the fireside of an honest man! — thrilled through and through his better nature, and awoke it into life and action.
He recoiled from the door, like a man walking in his sleep, awakened from a frightful dream; and put the gun aside. Clasping his hands before his face, he then sat down again beside the fire, and found relief in tears.
The Cricket on the Hearth came out into the room, and stood in Fairy shape before him. ["Third Chirp"; Household Edition, 103-104]
At this point in the innumerable dramatic adaptations of the Christmas Book (notably Dion Boucicault's Dot, first staged at New York City's Winter Garden Theatre in 1859, but brought to England in 1862), the fireplace in the carrier's cottage would have opened on a fairy extravaganza:
And while the Carrier, with his head upon his hands, continued to sit meditating in his chair, the Presence stood beside him, suggesting his reflections by its power, and presenting them before him, as in a glass or picture. It was not a solitary Presence. From the hearthstone, from the chimney, from the clock, the pipe, the kettle, and the cradle; from the floor, the walls, the ceiling, and the stairs; from the cart without, and the cupboard within, and the household implements; from every thing and every place with which she had ever been familiar, and with which she had ever entwined one recollection of herself in her unhappy husband's mind; Fairies came trooping forth. Not to stand beside him as the Cricket did, but to busy and bestir themselves. To do all honour to her image. To pull him by the skirts, and point to it when it appeared. To cluster round it, and embrace it, and strew flowers for it to tread on. To try to crown its fair head with their tiny hands. To show that they were fond of it and loved it; and that there was not one ugly, wicked or accusatory creature to claim knowledge of it — none but their playful and approving selves. ["Third Chirp"; Household Edition, 105]
Left: Maclise's elegant frontispiece featuring Dickens's "Holy Family" attended by supernatural defenders of the domestic hearth, John and Dot Peerbingle before the Fire (1845). Centre: Maclise's depiction of the fairies on the ornamental title-page, The Dutch Clock (1845). Right: Doyle's contrasting the solid figure in the foreground, the anguished husband, with John's idealised image of his wife and the unseen presences agitated by his mistrust of Dot and the jeopardy in which his jealousy places the domestic menage (1845).
Above: C. E. Brock's realistic interpretation in a simple line-drawing may have drawn inspiration from Barnard: Headpiece for 'Chirp the Third': John by the hearth with the Fairy (1905).
As a symbol of Perrybingle's frustration with the whole question of his young wife's putative adultery, Barnard in his frontispiece for the anthology has included a broken pipe, in the smoke from which cricket and fairy appear in this Dalziel engraving. Perhaps the finest example of an illustration that attempts tio capture the fairy extravaganza is Luigi Rossi's lithograph John Peerybingle and the Household Spirits (1912):
Rossi treats the fairy scenes as theatrical spectacle, focussing on the effects afford by the invisible presences in John Peerybingle and the Household Spirits (1912).
Bolton, H. Philip. "The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)." Dickens Dramatized. London & Boston: Mansell & G. K. Hall, 1987. 273-95.
Boucicault, Dion. Dot. A Drama in Three Acts. 10 April 1862. Add. MS. 53013 (E). Licensed 11/04/1859. The Lord Chamberlain's Manuscript Collection, The British Library, London.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.
Cook, James. Bibliography of the Writings of Dickens. London: Frank Kerslake, 1879. As given in the Publishers' Circular The English Catalogue of Books.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
_____. The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Daniel Maclise, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edwin Landseer. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1845.
_____. The Cricket on the Hearth in The Christmas Books. Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971. Rpt., 1978. II: 1-120.
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.
Parker, David. "Christmas Books and Stories, 1844 to 1854." Christmas and Charles Dickens. New York: AMS Press, 2005. 221-282.
Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. University of California at Santa Cruz.: The Dickens Project, 1991. Rpt. from Oxford U. p., 1978.
Slater, Michael. "Introduction" to The Cricket on the Hearth." Dickens's Christmas Books. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971. Rpt., 1978. II: 9-12.
Solberg, Sarah A. "'Text Dropped into the Woodcuts': Dickens' Christmas Books." Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 103-118.
Thomas, Deborah A. Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Created 26 June 2012
Last modified 12 May 2020
