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"Father," said the Blind Girl, drawing close to his side, and stealing one arm round his neck, "tell me something about May. She is very fair?"
Felix O. C. Darley
1861
Photogravure
9.9 x 8.5 cm vignetted
Dickens's Christmas Stories, Household Edition, (1861), vol. 1 frontispiece.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Father," said the Blind Girl, drawing close to his side, and stealing one arm round his neck, "tell me something about May. She is very fair?" [Christmas Stories, Vol. 1, pp. 273-74]
It is not unlikely that Darley had the benefit of seeing the work of the consortium of illustrators whom Dickens commissioned to create the narrative-pictorial sequence for the third Christmas Book, which veers away from the social realism of The Chimes (1844) and amplifies the good cheer represented by the Cratchits. Stripping away the fanciful and fantastic touches of Doyle and Leech to study "situated characters," Darley has rendered the toy-maker and his blind daughter more realistically than John Leech and Richard Doyle, whose Chirp the Second contains fairytale elements and figures that are far less modelled than Darley's. Moreover, whereas Doyle's Caleb studies a puppet of his own making, Darley's Caleb looks out of the frame, towards the viewer, as if inviting the reader to examine his shop and products. He welcomes the reader, too, to the experience of the first three Christmas Books in the little volume, which contains only the first half of The Cricket on the Hearth.
Although the original and subsequent illustrators of The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) have depicted the blind toy-maker, Bertha Plummer, and her father, Caleb, in their workshop, Darley alone focuses on Bertha's envy of May Fielding in that she is shortly to become Mrs. Tackleton. To suggest her blindness, Darley has given Bertha a visor. Other illustrators have instead focused on Caleb's transforming their hovel into a model cottage — and himself into a dashing figure in a new blue coat — in fact, burlap sackcloth with "glass" and "fragile" stamped upon it and evident in all illustrations of this scene.
Left: John Leech's "Caleb at Work" (1845); centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s "Caleb Plummer and Bertha" (1867); right: E. A. Abbey's "Halloo! Halloo!" said Caleb. "I shall be vain, presently" (1876). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Left: Fred Barnard's Caleb, Bertha, and Tackleton (1878). Right: Harry Furniss's Caleb Plummer — The Toy Maker (1910). [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley. Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861. Vol. 1, 227-300; vol. 2, 7-45.
Dickens, Charles. The Christmas Books. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
Dickens, Charles. The Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 8.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Edwin Landseer, and Clarson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, [dated 1846].
Last modified 23 March 2016