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Richard and Margaret
John Leech
1844
Wood-block engraving by W. J. Linton
12.2 cm by 7.3 cm (4 ¾ by 2 ⅞ inches), framed.
Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Chimes: "The Third Quarter," 125.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Meg strained her eyes upon her work until it was too dark to see the threads; and when the night closed in, she lighted her feeble candle and worked on. Still her old father was invisible about her; [continued below].
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
looking down upon her; loving her — how dearly loving her! — and talking to her in a tender voice about the old times, and the Bells. Though he knew, poor Trotty, though he knew she could not hear him.
A great part of the evening had worn away, when a knock came at her door. She opened it. A man was on the threshold. A slouching, moody, drunken sloven, wasted by intemperance and vice, and with his matted hair and unshorn beard in wild disorder; but, with some traces on him, too, of having been a man of good proportion and good features in his youth.
He stopped until he had her leave to enter; and she, retiring a pace or two from the open door, silently and sorrowfully looked upon him. Trotty had his wish. He saw Richard.
"May I come in, Margaret?"
"Yes! Come in. Come in!"
It was well that Trotty knew him before he spoke; for with any doubt remaining on his mind, the harsh discordant voice would have persuaded him that it was not Richard but some other man. ["The Third Quarter," 126]
In an innovative strategy to fuse text and illustration, the artist here has us "read" the plate and text simultaneously. We readily detect an air of utter hopelessness about the scruffy-looking Richard in his posture, neglected beard, and careless hair style. Leech depicts Meg as middle-aged, careworn, and engaged in sheer drudgery, sewing by the light of a single candle in a scantily furnished garret, the ragged curtain (right) suggesting the seamstress's meagre income.
Robert L. Patten notes how this ultimate study of Richard and Margaret reflects Leech's initial portrait of the vigorous, young, optimistic blacksmith in the First Quarter, page 34: Alderman Cute and his Friends. Like Trotty earlier, here Richard wears a battered top hat, making him resemble "an elderly besotted nightwatchman" (145). His trajectory has been markedly downward since Trotty's death. And Margaret's enslavement to her needle may well owe something to poet Thomas Hood's social protest "The Song of the Shirt" published in Punch on 16 December 1843. Its initial draft did not entirely please the author:
Dickens saw it in proof when he got to London [from Genoa], and immediately got in touch with Leech to ask for "a slight alteration in one of your blocks (explainable in half a minute) which I want to tell you of" [Letters, IV: 233]. The larger image of the young Richard took up more space, so the letterpress it surrounds had to be reset on this and the verso page. Bedraggled, slumping, he approaches the open doorway seemingly propped up by a stout pole, and, with a finer linear shading on the top half, he, and Dickens's readers, ascend into Meg's poor, unfurnished attic, which shows that even in poverty she attempts to create a homely domestic space lit by a candle. [pp. 158-160]
The homely attic bespeaks an inclination towards middle-class tidiness, despite the tawdry curtain, in contrast to the ramshackle doorway that Richard is about to enter below. She may be an underpaid, economically depressed pieceworker, but the illustrator has given Meg a certain respectability in a room "so housewifely, domestic, even adequately lighted" (Patten, 160), a room which reflects the humble orderliness of the apartments she shared with her father in Trotty at home at the head of "The Second Quarter," p. 49. It even has its own modest domestic hearth (upper left).
Left: Furniss's version of the same confrontation, Margaret and Richard (1910). Centre: Fed Barnard's Household Edition version of Lilian's returning to Meg to ask her forgiveness, and die in her arms: "Never more, Meg; never more! Here! Here!" (1878). Right: Charles Green's scene involves Meg's standing aloof, judging Richard for the alcoholic he has become: Meg and Richard (1912).
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and his Original illustrators. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State U. P., 1980.
Dickens, Charles. The Chimes. Introduction by Clement Shorter. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Pears' Centenary Edition. London: A & F Pears, [?1912].
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_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. 22 vols. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878. Vol. XVIII.
_____. The Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910, VIII, 79-157.
_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876. Vol. V.
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Patten, Robert L. Chapter 7, "Ringing Out Change." Dickens, Death, and Christmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 127-168.
Created 20 February 2001 Last modified 20 May 2024