[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Harry Furniss —> Christmas Books —> Charles Dickens —> Next]
Trotty's Dream
Harry Furniss
1910
14.2 cm high x 9.3 cm wide, vignetted
Final illustration for The Chimes in Christmas Books, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing VIII, 152.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
To the music of the band, and, the bells, the marrow-bones and cleavers, all at once; and while the Chimes were yet in lusty operation out of doors; Trotty, making Meg and Richard, second couple, led off Mrs. Chickenstalker down the dance, and danced it in a step unknown before or since; founded on his own peculiar trot.
Had Trotty dreamed? Or, are his joys and sorrows, and the actors in them, but a dream; himself a dream; the teller of this tale a dreamer, waking but now? If it be so, O listener, dear to him in all his visions, try to bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them. So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you! So may each year be happier than the last, and not the meanest of our brethren or sisterhood debarred their rightful share, in what our Great Creator formed them to enjoy. ["Fourth Quarter," 157]
Furniss never deals as firmly with the grim realities of the Hungry Forties as the original illustrators and Fred Barnard, but here he offers an innovative "alternative" ending to Dickens's novella by implying that even the New Year's dance is part of Trotty's dream. Since he had in all likelihood studied R. W. Buss's watercolour study of 1870-75 Dickens's Dream, in which the fifty-eight-year-old author nods off at his desk at Gadshill surrounded by the creations of his imagination, it is not implausible to interpret this lithograph in light of Buss's watercolour. Furniss seems to allude to that incomplete work here. places Trotty in a dreamer's pose. Instead of characters and situations he has seen in his dream vision, however, Trotty here sees the various dancers: Richard and Meg (left), Jabez and the street musicians (above), Lilian, and even himself dancing with the neighbourhood groceress, Mrs. Chickenstalker. Trotty's outstretched hand even suggests that, like Dickens with Household Words and All the Year Round, Trotty is "conducting" the constituents of the dream from an easy chair.
Since Dickens indicates that Trotty has awkened from his nightmarish vision just in time to celebrate the marriage of his daughter and Richard on New Year's Day, Furniss has in essence re-written the story's conclusion to imply that even the New Year's dance is but a delusion, and that such happy endings for the working class are unlikely. His Trotty is a well-modelled, fully realised figure, with strict attention to every aspect of his porter's uniform, and his benevolence shines through his drowsy visage, so that Furniss's version of the humble messenger is far more satisfying than the cartoonish efforts of the original illustrators, even though there is a gentle wistfulness about him that contrasts sharply with Trotty's whole-hearted enjoyment of the community festival in Leech's final illustration, The New Year's Dance on the final page on the 1844 novella.
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 20 June 2013
Last modified 1 January 2020