Marion
Harry Furniss
1910
13.3 cm high x 9.3 cm wide, framed
Dickens's Christmas Books, Charles Dickens Library Edition, facing VIII, 320.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Passage Complemented
Grace was left alone.
She knew not what she dreaded, or what hoped; but remained there, motionless, looking at the porch by which they had disappeared.
Ah! what was that, emerging from its shadow; standing on its threshold! That figure, with its white garments rustling in the evening air; its head laid down upon her father's breast, and pressed against it to his loving heart! O God! was it a vision that came bursting from the old man's arms, and with a cry, and with a waving of its hands, and with a wild precipitation of itself upon her in its boundless love, sank down in her embrace!
"Oh, Marion, Marion! Oh, my sister! Oh, my heart's dear love! Oh, joy and happiness unutterable, so to meet again!" ["Part the Third," 314]
Commentary
Furniss's editor, J. A. Hammerton, has included no text as an extended caption beneath the portrait of Marion Jeddler, the elder sister who disappears for six years in order to permit her younger sister, Grace, to develop a relationship with her former fiancé, Alfred Heathfield. The return of Marion, who has been living obscurely with her Aunt Martha, constitutes the climax of the "love story" mentioned in the subtitle, but perhaps the disclosure would make too long a passage to be quoted under the picture. Furniss presents the picture as a portrait rather than the realisation of a textual moment.
The original illustration of this moment — Daniel Maclise's The Sisters" (see below) — concludes the novella, fused with "Forget and forgive!" (174) and facing the "Time" epilogue, in which Michael Warden at last marries Marion — the romantic denouément suggested by the Watteauesque scene of Cupid's pulling back his bowstring on the screen behind the embracing sisters. Neither of the Household Edition illustrators had dealt with this textual moment, so that Furniss probably returned to the original sequence for inspiration. However, Furniss's angelic blonde, her hair haloing her head, does not particularly resemble Maclise's portrait at the conclusion of the novella, the dancing, blonde beauty in Maclise's Frontispiece, or the elegantly attired adolescent of Richard Doyle's Part the First.
Perhaps Barnard and Abbey deemed the Maclise illustration too sentimental; in any event, the Household Edition versions of the novella end with Warden's return at the Nutmeg Grater Inn, a dynamic and comic scene in which Clemency struggles to reveal the stranger's name to her oblivious husband, publican Benjamin Britain. Barnard did, however, depict the sisters and their father in a much earlier textual moment in "Bye-the-bye," and he looked into the pretty face, still close to his, "I suppose it's your birthday". The Maclise study of the devoted sisters, both in love with Alfred Heathfield, recalls the two sisters with whom the novelist was in love — Catherine and Mary Hogarth. Since he had read John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens, Furniss would have been aware of the novelist's deep attachment to Mary Hogarth, who died some nine years before Dickens wrote the fourth Christmas Book, on 7 May 1837. Connected perhaps with the sublime image that Dickens saw at Niagara Falls and in Genoa, Furniss's Marion" ossesses a certain spirituality, transcending mere Victorian sentimentality.
Related Materials and Details
- The Christmas Books of Charles Dickens
- Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s single illustration for The Battle of Life (1867)
- Felix O. C. Darley's character study Mine Host of "The Nutmeg Grater" (1888)
- A. E. Abbey's Household Edition illustrations for The Christmas Books (1876)
- Fred Barnard's Household Edition illustrations for The Christmas Books (1878)
The Concluding Illustrations in Earlier Editions (1846, 1876, 1878)
Left: Maclise's "The Sisters"; right, Barnard's Guessed half aloud "milk and water," "monthly warning," "mice and walnuts" — and couldn't approach her meaning (1878).
Above: Abbey's A gentleman attired in mourning, and cloaked and booted like a rider on horseback, who stood at the bar-door (1876).
Bibliography
Cohen, Jane Rabb. "John Leech." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio U. , 1980, 141-51.
Dickens, Charles. The Battle of Life. A Love Story. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846.
__________. 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.
Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture Book. Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910.
Patten, Robert L.