Frontispiece: Scrooge's Christmas Visitors
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
12.3 high x 9.3 cm (5 by 3 ⅝ inches), vignetted.
First Illustration for Dickens's A Christmas Carol in Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas in the Ticknor and Fields (Boston), 1869 [December 1868] edition.
[Click on the image to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use the image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned it and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit. "Look upon me!"
Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust. [Stave Three, "The Second of the three Spirits," pp. 58-59]
Whereas Dickens's original Christmas Carol illustrator, John Leech, did not attempt the challenging and contradictory figure of "The First of the Three Spirits," the child/old man with white hair and skin of "the tenderest bloom," Eytinge realizes this strange figure effectively in three separate, full-page plates — the frontispiece, Scrooge's Christmas Visitors, The Spirit of Christmas Past (36), and A Retrospect (50), as well as in the vignette at the head of Stave 2, The Vision of Ali Baba (34), in which, in anticipation of Bob Cratchit's carrying Tiny Tim in the vignette Tiny Tim's Ride (56) — incidentally the first artistic rendering of that scene in the streets of Camden Town — Scrooge is actually holding the diminutive spirit in his left arm. Eytinge has realized the problematic figure by making the head of a lesser rather than greater scale than an adult's relative to the body, but, otherwise, as the text stipulates, it retains "a child's proportions," the spirit's long arms, its "dress trimmed with summer flowers," and the jet of light springing from its head. The only property of the spirit that Leech realized in Scrooge extinguishes the First of the Three Spirits, "a great extinguisher for a cap," Eytinge employs in three of his four representations to maintain narrative-pictorial continuity.
The first of these occurs in the Frontispiece, which is the only Eytinge illustration that is an imaginative synthesis rather than a realisation of an actual moment in Dickens's text. Scrooge looks up in wonder untainted by fear at the "Jolly Giant" of Christmas Present, apparently ignoring the ominous implications of the spectre clad in a black shroud. In fact, none of them appears to Scrooge when he is in bed, but all three, Past, Present, and Future, do indeed "contend" within him after their monitory visitations, and just as the Spirits "can do anything they like" (Stave 5) in one night, including defying temporal boundaries, so the visual artist (implies Eytinge) can disregard the limitations imposed by the author. The plate prepares the reader for those key moments of confrontation in the seasonal novella, but which undoubtedly even in December 1868 must have rehearsed for many American readers their earlier experiences with that culturally iconic transAtlantic text over the past two decades. Thus, Eytinge offers simultaneously a foreshadowing, a flashback, a recollection, and reification of readings and Christmases past.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and his Original Illustrators. Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1980.
Davis, Paul. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven: Yale U. P., 1990.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books, illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Vol. X.
_____. Christmas Books, illustrated by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878. Vol. XVII.
_____. Christmas Books, illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London & Glasgow: Collins' Clear-Type Press, 1906.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. VIII.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. VIII.
_____. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.
_____. A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876. Vol. III.
Hearne, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: Avenel, 1989.
Tyrell, T. W. "The 'Marley' Knocker." The Dickensian 20.76 (October 1924): pp. 202-03.
Last modified 23 December 2010
Last modified 3 January 2026
