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Caleb Plummer's Working Room
L. Rossi after Charles Green
1912
Lithograph
8.5 cm high x 7.7 cm wide, exclusive of frame
Tailpiece for "Chirp the First" in Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, The Pears' Centenary Edition, III, 56.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
There were various other samples of his handicraft, besides Dolls, in Caleb Plummer’s room. There were Noah’s Arks, in which the Birds and Beasts were an uncommonly tight fit, I assure you; though they could be crammed in, anyhow, at the roof, and rattled and shaken into the smallest compass. By a bold poetical licence, most of these Noah’s Arks had knockers on the doors; inconsistent appendages, perhaps, as suggestive of morning callers and a Postman, yet a pleasant finish to the outside of the building. There were scores of melancholy little carts, which, when the wheels went round, performed most doleful music. Many small fiddles, drums, and other instruments of torture; no end of cannon, shields, swords, spears, and guns. There were little tumblers in red breeches, incessantly swarming up high obstacles of red-tape, and coming down, head first, on the other side; and there were innumerable old gentlemen of respectable, not to say venerable, appearance, insanely flying over horizontal pegs, inserted, for the purpose, in their own street doors. There were beasts of all sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed, from the spotted barrel on four pegs, with a small tippet for a mane, to the thoroughbred rocker on his highest mettle. ["Chirp the Second," 55-56]
Rossi has provided an image for this part of the Plummers' parlour far more consistent with Dickens's description of the toymakers' hovel. With a far less imposing fireplace and minus the stately grandfather clock seen in the previous view of the parlour, Caleb Plummer's Home, Caleb and his artisan daughter have definitely shattered their work-life balance. Their home is also their workplace — a pre-Industrial Revolution "cottage industry." Their chief work space, the table, has grown larger, and has become rectangular, and Rossi now reveals Caleb's "topcoat" (made out of burlap sacking, centre) and an extensive array of toys.
The short title from the "List of Illustrations" (11-12), Caleb and Bertha's workroom, here becomes "There were various other samples of his handicraft besides Dolls in Caleb Plummer’s room." (56). Subtly, to create an impression of drudgery, Rossi has lowered the ceiling and diminished the size of the cottagers' fireplacewhich no longer boasts a roaring coal-fire.
Left: Richard Doyle's whimsical rendition of the Plummers' hearthside labours of Chirp the Second (1845), which introduces these secondary characters after the opening scenes at the Peerybingles' cottage. Centre: John Leech's caricatural realisation of the toymakers in their workroom, Caleb at Work (1845). Right: Fred Barnard's realisation of Caleb and Bertha Plummer in their cottage parlour-cum-workroom, Caleb, Bertha, and Tackleton (1878).
E. A. Abbey's study of Bertha and her father at work on a dolls' house, "Halloo! Halloo! said Caleb. "I shall be vain presently!" (1876).
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 18 April 2020
Last modified 23 May 2020