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Uncaptioned engraved title-page: The Carrier's Return
L. Rossi after Charles Green
1912
Lithograph
11.4 cm high x 11 cm wide, vignetted, exclusive of text at bottom of page
Engraved title-page for Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, The Pears' Centenary Edition, III, facing frontispiece.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
But, of this, there is no doubt: that, the kettle and the Cricket, at one and the same moment, and by some power of amalgamation best known to themselves, sent, each, his fireside song of comfort streaming into a ray of the candle that shone out through the window, and a long way down the lane. And this light, bursting on a certain person who, on the instant, approached towards it through the gloom, expressed the whole thing to him, literally in a twinkling, and cried, "Welcome home, old fellow! Welcome home, my boy"
This end attained, the kettle, being dead beat, boiled over, and was taken off the fire. Mrs. Peerybingle then went running to the door, where, what with the wheels of a cart, the tramp of a horse, the voice of a man, the tearing in and out of an excited dog, and the surprising and mysterious appearance of a baby, there was soon the very What’s-his-name to pay. ["Chirp the First," Pears Centenary Edition, 19-20]
The large-scale title-page vignette anticipates the imminent arrival home of the novella's protagonist, the Dorsetshire carrier John Peerybingle. It thus covers the same topic as three of the opening illustrations in the 1845 edition: Daniel Maclise's Frontispiece (in which John has already seated himself by the hearth); Richard Doyle's Chirp the First (see below) in which the van passes the village fingerpost (above) and John smokes his pipe by the fire (below); and Clarkson Stanfield's The Carrier's cart (see below), depicting of the covered wagon turning off the main road (above) and Dot opening the door for the barking Boxer (below). Rossi, then, not only synthesizes these moments, but omits Dot and shows John walking towards home — and the reader — through pitch darkness. Rossi appears to have taken as his model (in order to provide continuity within the five-volume series) Green's engraved title for The Chimes and The Battle of Life, rather than the ornate but much smaller vignette design of A Christmas Carol or The Haunted Man (see above).
Charles Green, a member of the Royal Institute of Watercolourists, had died in 1898 with the Pears commission for a new five-volume set of Dickens's Christmas Books incomplete. Consequently, to complete the five-volume project Luigi Rossi appears to have adopted a style of illustration markedly similar to that of the veteran Household Edition illustrator. However, with the exception of the large-scale title-page vignette, Rossi produced only two types of illustration: ten, generally full-page, framed scenes like the frontispiece, and a dozen, much smaller thumbnail vignettes. Unlike Green, Rossi makes few visual allusions to the originak illustrations by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Edward Landseer, and Daniel Maclise for the original edition, published at the beginning of the December, book-buying season in 1845. Since Dickens could not rely on a single illustrator to meet his tight publication deadline that autumn, he had resorted to the expedient of contracting five. The publishers faced no such exigency in the case of the five-volume Pears' Centenary Edition, but appointed a relatively unknown illustrator to fill the deceased Green's shoes.
Green had already prepared the programs of illustration for the other Christmas Books some years before: Volume 1, A Christmas Carol (1892: twenty-seven lithographs); Volume 4, The Battle of Life (1893: twenty-nine lithographs); Volume 2, The Chimes (1894: thirty lithographs); and Volume 5, The Haunted Man (1895: thirty lithographs). Presumably, as this was to be a "Centenary" project, A & F Pears was in no rush to get these books into print. However, Green's death in 1898 necessitated the hiring of another illustrator.
Left: Doyle's interpretation of the carrier's homecoming in Chirp the First (1845). Centre: Stanfield's reiteration of John's homecoming, The Carrier's Cart (1845). Right: Barnard's description of the welcome that John receives on his own domestic hearth, the carrier's fireside (1878).
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edwin Landseer. Engraved by George Dalziel, Edward Dalziel, T. Williams, J. Thompson, R. Graves, and Joseph Swain. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846 [December 1845].
_____. The Cricket on the Hearth. Illustrated by L. Rossi. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Created 26 March 2020
Last modified 10 April 2020