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Nell picked wild roses and made them into nosegays, while her Grandfather sat near-by
Clara M. Burd
1929
Chromolithograph
16.6 cm by 11.5 cm (6 ½ by 4 ½ inches) framed
Elizabeth Lodor Merchant's Dickens' Stories About Children, "Little Nell," p. 21 (See page 9.).
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned images and text by Philip V. Allingham.
And now they had come to the time when they must beg their bread. Soon after sunrise the morning after they reached the town, she stole out, and, rambling into some fields at a short distance, plucked a few wild roses and such humble flowers, purposing to make them into nosegays and offer them to the ladies in carriages when the company arrived. Her thoughts were not idle while she was thus employed. When she returned and was seated beside the old man, tying her flowers together, while the two men lay dozing in a corner, she plucked him by the sleeve, and, slightly glancing toward them, said in a low voice:
"Grandfather, don't look at those I talk of, and don't seem as if I spoke of anything but what I am about. What was it you told me before we left the old house — that if they knew what we were going to do, they would say that you are mad, and part us?"
The old man turned to her with an aspect of wild terror, but she checked him by a look. Bidding him hold some flowers while she tied them up, and so bringing her lips closer to his ear, she said:
"I know that was what you told me. You needn't speak, dear. I recollect it very well. [Chapter 1, "Little Nell," 9]
Burd is, of course, not responding to Dickens’s original texts, but to a retelling of the stories concerning Dickens’s child and juvenile characters for a child audience. Even so, Burd is selective, for example, leaving out the sleeping figures of the Punch and Judy men, Codlin and Short, here to focus on Nell and Grandfather Trent at the roadside, rather than in the village churchyard. What is most striking about this twentieth-century illustration for a child readership is Burd's use of vivid colour in solid panels suggestive of her stained-glass designs.
Left: Sol Eytinge’s Frontispiece for the 1867 Diamond Edition. Right:
Darley, Felix Octavius Carr. Character Sketches from Dickens. Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1888.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1865. 3 vols.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Household Edition. 22 vols. Illustrated by Charles Green. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Vol. 12.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. (1841). Illustrated by Hablot Knight Brown, George Cattermole, Daniel Maclise, and Samuel Williams. London: Penguin, 2000.
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 5.
Merchant, Elizabeth Lodor. Dickens's Stories About Children. Illustrated by Clara M. Burd. London and New York: John C. Winston. Encyclopedia Americana, 1929.
Created 27 May 2025