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Margaret and her Child
Richard Doyle
1844
Wood engraving
12.2 cm by 7.3 cm (4 ¾ by 2 ⅞ inches), framed.
Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Chimes: "Fourth Quarter," page 135.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
‘O!’ said Trotty. "Please to play up there. Will you have the goodness!"
Some new remembrance of the ghostly figures in the Bells; some faint impression of the ringing of the Chimes; some giddy [continued below].
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
consciousness of having seen the swarm of phantoms reproduced and reproduced until the recollection of them lost itself in the confusion of their numbers; some hurried knowledge, how conveyed to him he knew not, that more years had passed; and Trotty, with the Spirit of the child attending him, stood looking on at mortal company. [136]
Putting its tiny hand up to her neck, and holding it there, within her dress, next to her distracted heart, she set its sleeping face against her: closely, steadily, against her: and sped onward to the River.
To the rolling River, swift and dim, where Winter Night sat brooding like the last dark thoughts of many who had sought a refuge there before her. Where scattered lights upon the banks gleamed sullen, red, and dull, as torches that were burning there, to show the way to Death. Where no abode of living people cast its shadow, on the deep, impenetrable, melancholy shade.
To the River! To that portal of Eternity, her desperate footsteps tended with the swiftness of its rapid waters running to the sea. He tried to touch her as she passed him, going down to its dark level: but, the wild distempered form, the fierce and terrible love, the desperation that had left all human check or hold behind, swept by him like the wind.
He followed her. She paused a moment on the brink, before the dreadful plunge. [pp. 164-165]
The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In (1844) shows the precise scene when Meg, having been turned out of her lodgings for the landlord, Tugby, determines to throw herself and her infant into the Thames, there being no future for either of them in a world dominated by the Cash Nexus. The 1844 illustration of Meg on the brink of the river serves as Richard Doyle's headpiece for "The Fourth Quarter," complete with anguished spirits above and around her in the air. The realistic revision of 1912 lacks the metaphysical dimension of the ghostly Trotty and the goblins of the Chimes as impotent observers of the unfolding tragedy. Richard Doyle melodramatically shows Margaret kneeling on the bank of the Thames holding "her" child (not Lilian's, as Will Fern suggests), and ready to commit suicide. Dickens reprised the theme of the suicide of the Fallen Woman six years later in David Copperfield, Chapter XLVII, "Martha."
Left: Fed Barnard's Household Edition version of Martha's suicide averted, "Oh, the river!" she cried passionately. "Oh, the river!" (David Copperfield, 1872). Right: Charles Green's scene involves Meg's standing on the steps beside the river in the snow, ready to commit a desperate final act, Meg at the River's Brink (1912).
Above: Phiz's steel engraving of Martha's contemplating suicide by throwing herself into the Thames at Westminster, The River (David Copperfield, August 1850).
Dickens, Charles. The Chimes. Introduction by Clement Shorter. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Pears' Centenary Edition. London: A & F Pears, [?1912].
_____. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1844 [Printed title-page dated "1845."].
_____. 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.
Created 20 February 2001 Last modified 20 October 2023