"The New Year's Dance" by John Leech from Dickens's "The Chimes" (1844)

[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> John Leech —> Dickens's The Chimes]

The New Year's Dance

John Leech

1844

Wood-block engraving by W. J. Linton

Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Chimes: Fourth Quarter, p. 174.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

‘O!’ said Trotty. "Please to play up there. Will you have the goodness!"

To the music of the band, and, the bells, the marrow-bones and cleavers, all at once; and while the Chimes were yet in lusty operation out of doors; Trotty, making Meg and Richard, second couple, led off Mrs. Chickenstalker down the dance, and danced it in a step unknown before or since; founded on his own peculiar trot.

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Commentary: The Community Celebrates the Marriage of Meg and Richard

Neither The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In (1844) nor either of the Household Edition volumes from Chapman and Hall (illustrated by Fred Barnard) and Harper and Brothers (illustrated by E. A. Abbey) has an illustration of just Trotty and Mrs. Chickenstalker dancing. The groceresss would seem to be a sort of honorary "Mother of the Bride" in Leech's finalé, as the original volume features her prominently in this full-page wood-engraving dropped into the letterpress of the thirteenth and final scene, involving the musicians (rear) and Meg and Richard, as well as numerous other "country" dancers in a delightful rustic carnival.

As Rober L. Patten points out, this tailpiece seems to recall the opening illustration of A Christmas Caro twelve months earlier, Mr. Fezziwig's Ball.

As we know from his daughter Mamie, Dickens was not an especially good dancer. But he loved Sir Roger de Coverley and other old line dances, where energy and erotics are leased in time-honored behaviors, couples are partnered and exchange places in line until it is reassembled as at the beginning, and the joyous energies of music and motion and attraction combine, with, in this case, the addition of that peculiar step which characterizes Trotty Veck. Thus are the pent-up emotions, the characterizations of the ruling class about the working population, the false benediction of old times, and the frightful futures of starvation, homelessness, and suicide, put back into the box of a story that ends happily: the carnivalesque is recontained. {164-165]

Leech's Parthian shot is the direct glance of the knowing child, Lilian Fern, at the viewer as she cavorts while holding the hand of the portly Mrs. Chickenstalker, who, the juxtaposition implies, is about to become the second Mrs. Veck, at least if one may judge by the approving look which the prosperous provisioner directs at her animated dancing partner. Perhaps Lilian, wise beyond her years, is inviting us to consider alternate, less jolly scenarios for the working-class cast.

Illustrations from the Pears' Centenary Edition (1912) and the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910)

Left: Charles Green's The Dance on the Eve of Meg's Wedding Day (1912?). Right: Harry Furniss's study of Trotty'sseeing his daughter, her fiancé, Lilian, and Mrs. Chickenstalker happily dancing in his dream, from which he appears to be awakening, Trotty's Dream, the culminating illustration in Furniss's 1910 series.

Related Materials and Details

The Christmas Books of Charles Dickens
Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s single illustration for The Chimes (1867)
A. E. Abbey's Household Edition illustrations for The Christmas Books (1876)
Fred Barnard's Household Edition illustrations for The Christmas Books (1878)
Harry Furniss's illustrations for Dickens's The Chimes (1910)
Charles Green's illustrations for Dickens's The Chimes (1912)

Bibliography

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.

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