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Trotty Veck's Dinner
Harry Furniss
1910
13.1 cm high x 9 cm wide, vignetted
First illustration for The Chimes, A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In in The Christmas Books, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing VIII, 79.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Toby took the shortest possible sniff at the edge of the basket, and cried out in a rapture:
"Why, it's hot!"
"It's burning hot!" cried Meg. "Ha, ha, ha! It's scalding hot!"
"Ha, ha, ha!" roared Toby, with a sort of kick. "It's scalding hot."
"But what is it, father?" said Meg. "Come. You haven't guessed what it is. And you must guess what it is. I can't think of taking it out, till you guess what it is. Don't be in such a hurry! Wait a minute! A little bit more of the cover. Now guess!"
Meg was in a perfect fright lest he should guess right too soon; shrinking away, as she held the basket towards him; curling up her pretty shoulders; stopping herear with her hand, as if by so doing she could keep the right word out of Toby's lips;and laughing softly the whole time.
Meanwhile Toby, putting a hand on each knee, bent down his nose to the basket, and took a long inspiration at the lid; the grin upon his withered face expanding in the process, as if he were inhaling laughing gas. [First Quarter, 87]
The illustration introduces the working-class protagonist and his comely daughter Margaret (Meggy), who has just delivered her father's lunch to his station at the church porch where, as a ticket-porter, he awaits commissions. In the midst of turning over in his mind the anti-working-class propaganda of the Tory-oriented London papers such as the Times, which he reads second- and third-hand, Trotty enjoys a lunch-time visit from his beautiful adolescent daughter, Meg, who is engaged to a local blacksmith, Richard. The Furniss sketch (almost a cartoon) reflects the various representations of the widower and his daughter that preceded The Charles Dickens Library Edition. Furniss, however, does not make Trotty diminutive, and he conceives of Meg as an angular beauty with long eyelashes, shapely legs, and dainty features, rather than a poor girl bundled up in a working class shawl like So Eytinge, Jr.'s figure (reminiscent of New England factory girls) in Trotty Veck and Meg in the Diamond Edition volume of The Christmas Books (1867) or even E. A. Abbey's rendition of Trotty Veck, his daughter, and her fiancé (see below) in the American Household Edition (1876).
This india-ink and wash drawing transformed into a lithograph does not betray much influence of earlier illustrations, namely those by John Leech and his collaborators in 1844 or those of the illustrators of the 1870s Household Edition (Abbey and Fred Barnard). Beneath Furniss's succinct title, a brief quotation occurs, as if pointing the reader to a highly moment some five seven pages later, perhaps eliminating the necessity for providing background details such as the sidewalk and church-door: “Toby, putting a hand on each knee, bent down his nose to the basket, and took a long inspiration at the lid; the grin upon his withered face expanding in the process, as if he were inhaling laughing gas” ( 87).
Since Furniss was intimately familiar with Barnard's work for the British Household Edition of Charles Dickens's Works of the 1870s, he may well have remembered "No," said Toby after another sniff. "It's — It's mellower than Polonies" (see below), the half-page wood-engraving that appears at the head of the First Quarter and points the reader to the same moment as Furniss's. Barnard's more carefully modelled and more three-dimensional figures, shown in closeup, are more realistic than the stylized figures in Furniss's illustration — and Barnard emphasizes Meggy's fairness of face rather than attractiveness of form. There is, moreover, nothing in either Barnard's or Furniss's handling to suggest either the fantastic dimension of the Tower of the Chimes which Richard Doyle captures in Trotty Veck among the Bells nor the realistic dimension of urban poverty in which the widower and his daughter live. Both later illustrators, however, capture more effectively than those of the 1844 edition the closeness and playfulness of the father-daughter relationshi
However, Furniss's chief source of images for The Chimes remains those by Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and particularly John Leech, whose Trotty Veck is far more a gross caricature and far less a realistic portrait than Fred Barnard's. In contrast to these earlier interpretations, Furniss's is decontextualised, that is, it offers no architectural or geographic marker. Needless to say, although Furniss accurately depicts the effect of the wind on the father and daughter's clothing, in giving Meggy a short skirt, he allows the reader a view of her shapely legs that a more realistic, working-class garments of the 1840s would certainly not.
Reading and responding to the text and images in Furniss's volume of The Christmas Books (1910) are, however, very different experiences from those which Dickens's original readers experienced in the little scarlet-and-gold volume of 1844. In that first edition one reads the illustrations of Trotty and his daughter by proleptically (i. e., in anticipation), as in The Dinner on the Steps (see below) by Richard Doyle on 1, some seventeen pages before one encounters that same moment in the letterpress, and analeptically (i. e., after the fact or simultaneously with the print text), as in the case of Leech's Trotty Veck ( 9, the picture imbedded in the passage which describes the ticket-porter) and Alderman Cute and His Friends ( 34, again imbedded in the textual passage realised). So complicated and mutually informative a reading of print and illustration cannot occur in Furniss's volume because the picture by some eight pages, and because no other image assists the reader in construing what amounts to an anticipatory frontispiece. The reader of Christmastime 1844 would have situated the dinner on the steps as occurring underneath the Gothic spire of a City church whose walls appear in the two succeeding illustrations. Furniss's reader of 1910, in contrast, would have encountered the images of Trotty and Meggy well in advance of their appearance in the text, and Furniss offers no clue visually as to where the metting occurs as he provides no contextual backdro However, making clear in the illustrations that Trotty is the central character, Furniss reiterates his image in three of the following four images, whereas Meggy appears only once again (her skirt being rather longer in Margaret and Richard (facing 144).
Left: Richard Doyle's elegant thumbnail The Dinner on the Steps (1844). Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Trotty Veck and Meg (1867).
Left: E. A. Abbey's "'What's the matter? What's the matter?' said the gentleman for whom the door was opened'" (1876). Right: Fred Barnard's "'No," said Toby after another sniff. "It's — It's mellower than Polonies'" (1878).
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio U. , 1980.
Dickens, Charles. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Daniel Maclise, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1844 [dated 1845].
__________. The Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910, VIII, 79-157.
__________. The Christmas Books. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
__________. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
__________. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Solberg, Sarah A. "'Text Dropped into the Woodcuts': Dickens' Christmas Books." Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 103-18.
Thomas, Deborah A. Chapter 4, "The Chord of the Christmas Season." Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982, 62-93.
Welsh, Alexander. "Time and the City in The Chimes." Dickensian 73, 1 (January 1977): 8-17.
Created 19 June 2013
Last modified 1 January 2020