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Bertha comforts Caleb
Harold Copping
1924
Line drawing
5 ¼ inches high by 3 ¾ inches wide (13.6 x 9.8 cm), vignetted
Fifth illustration for "The Blind Toy-Maker" from Children's Stories from Dickens, p. 76.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"I see, I understand," said Bertha, "and now I am looking at you, at my kind, loving compassionate father, tell me what is he like?"
"An old man, my child, thin, bent, grey-haired, worn-out with hard work and sorrow, a weak, foolish, deceitful old man."
The blind girl threw herself on her knees before him, and took his grey head in her arms. "It is my sight, it is my sight restored," she cried. "I have been blind, but now I see, I have never till now truly seen my father. Father, there is not a grey hair on your head that shall be forgotten in my prayers and thanks to Heaven."
"My Bertha!" sobbed Caleb, "and the brisk smart father in the blue coat — he's gone, my child."
"Dearest father, no, he's not gone, nothing is gone, everything I loved and believed in is here in this worn, old father of mine, and more — oh, so much more, too! I have been happy and contented, but I shall be happier and more contented still, now that I know what you are. I am not blind, father, any longer." ["The Blind Toy-Maker," Character Sketches from Dickens, pp. 75-76]
Until this moment Caleb has kept Bertha in ignorance of their true circumstances, and has maintained the fiction that he is an elegantly dressed, prosperous widower, and that their callous, sarcastic employer, the toymaker Tackleton, is kind, witty, and generous. He is inadvertently responsible, then, for Bertha's frustrated love for the toy-merchant. Thus, Mary Angela Dickens does not end the story of the blind toymaker and her father as Charles Dickens in The Cricket on the Hearth, the Christmas Book for 1845, had done, with a neighbourhood country dance to celebrate the marriage of Edward Plummer, the long-lost sailor, to May Fielding, upon whom Tackleton has had designs. Rather, Mary Angela Dickens concludes with this sentimental scene in which Caleb and Bertha both acquire a new understanding of each other, and of their true circumstances. Copping's emotional scene offers us not merely a renewed father-daughter bond, but depicts a role reversal: a grownup Bertha is the motherly comforter and Caleb the sorrowful child. And throughout "The Blind Toy-Maker" Mary Angela Dickens makes the father-and-daughter relationship and not the marriage of John and Dot Peerybingle the focal point of her re-telling of The Cricket for children.
Three illustrations of the conclusion of the novella: Left: John Leech's The Dance ("Chirp the Third," 1845). Right: Harry Furniss's Tackleton's Wedding Day (1910). Fred Barnard's Household Edition final plate for the novella, After dinner Caleb sang the song about the Sparkling Bowl (1878).
Two later illustrations of Bertha Plummer, the toy-maker. Left: Luigi Rossi's frontispiece, There was a dance in the evening . . . Bertha's harp as there (1912). CEntre: C. E. Brock's Untitled Tailpiece (Caleb, dancing with Tilly, 1905). Right: Rossi's An Especially Festive Gathering (1912).
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise. London: Chapman & Hall, 1845.
Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893.
Dickens, Mary Angela [Charles Dickens' grand-daughter]. Dickens' Dream Children. London, Paris New, York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd., 1924.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
Created 28 September 2023