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Trotty Veck
John Leech
1844
Wood-block engraving by W. J. Linton
9.5 cm x 7.2 cm vignetted (3 ¾ inches high by 2 ¾ inches wide)
Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Chimes: First Quarter, page 9.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Wet weather was the worst; the cold, damp, clammy wet, that wrapped him up like a moist great-coat—the only kind of great-coat Toby owned, or could have added to his comfort by dispensing with. Wet days, when the rain came slowly, thickly, obstinately down; when the street’s throat, like his own, was choked with mist; when smoking umbrellas passed and re-passed, spinning round and round like so many teetotums, as they knocked against each other on the crowded footway, throwing off a little whirlpool of uncomfortable sprinklings; when gutters brawled and waterspouts were full and noisy; when the wet from the projecting stones and ledges of the church fell drip, drip, drip, on Toby, making the wisp of straw on which he stood mere mud in no time; those were the days that tried him. Then, indeed, you might see Toby looking anxiously out from his shelter in an angle of the church wall — such a meagre shelter that in summer time it never cast a shadow thicker than a good-sized walking stick upon the sunny pavement — with a disconsolate and lengthened face. But coming out, a minute afterwards, to warm himself by exercise, and trotting up and down some dozen times, he would brighten even then, and go back more brightly to his niche. ["The First Quarter," pp. 8-10]
Trotty (Toby) Veck, the London messenger, is the central figure of all narrative-pictorial sequences of The Chimes. As both Meg's father and the one who takes in Will Fern and his niece, Lilian, Trotty is the touchstone who connects all the other characters in the novella. Although he is neither a miser nor a misanthrope like Ebenezer Scrooge in the first Christmas Book, A Christmas Carol, Trotty has adopted the misguided notion from the press that the labouring poor are "born bad," a phrase that he has picked up from reading conservative newspapers.
The epiphany he experiences as a result of his dream-vision is that the poor are as worthy of a place in this world as their social superiors, and that these affluent and powerful beings such as Alderman Cute may actually possess less sympathy and less fundamental decency than the proletariat. In the original scarlet-and-gold volume the team of artists, led by caricaturist John Leech, show characterisations of the humble ticket porter that are more or less consistent with Dickens's description, if not with Leecxh's original, cartoon-like conception. The comparable illustration to Green's fourth is Leech's Trotty Veck, although the little, elderly man wearing a ticket-porter's apron appears in a total of nine of the 1844 book's thirteen wood-engravings.
Robert L. Patten notes the details in the present illustration that contrast the protagonist of the 1844 Christmas Book with that of its predecessor: "Outdoors this time, rather than indoors. New Year's, rather than Christmas. A por man, instead of a rich one. A man whose legs and feet, rather than hands, figure his character: "trotting" along rather like a horse. . . . . Even Trotty's home resembles a stable, having a clean hayloft above" (132).
Left: Charles Green's character study of the shivering ticket porter rendered with photographic realism, Toby Veck, otherwise "Trotty" (Pears' Centenary Edition, circa 1912). Centre: John Leech's version of Trotty dancing at his daughter's wedding, The New Year's Dance (1844). Right: Kyd's watercolour postcard Trotty Veck for Raphael Tuck. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Above: Fred Barnard's 1878 wood-engraving of Trotty and Meg on the steps of the Old Church, "'No,' said Toby after another sniff. 'It's — It's mellower than Polonies.'" [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
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.
_____. 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 18 May 2024