Harry Furniss's eighteen-volume edition of the complete works of Dickens, The Charles Dickens Library (London: Educational Book Company, 1910), contains some five hundred special plates (part of the total of twelve hundred photogravure illustrations) and two volumes of commentary. Volume 17, by editor J. A. Hammerton, is entitled The Dickens Picture Book: A Record of the Dickens Illustrators.
The eighth volume is entitled Christmas Books, but in fact also contains a collection of his journalistic essays from Dickens's weekly journals All the Year Round from the 1860s, The Uncommercial Traveller, and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices from the weekly Household Words, published in four parts in October, 1857. The final volume of the 1910 Charles Dickens Library Edition is The Dickens Companion: A Book of Anecdote and Reference. Whereas the muti-volumed Household Edition, issued in tandem by Chapman and Hall in London and Harper and Brothers in New York throughout the 1870s, involved some sixteen American and British illustrators working in the new, realistic mode of the Sixties and providing more than a thousand composite woodblock engravings for the thirty-eight volumes (twenty-two in the British edition, but just sixteen in the American), Harry Furniss singlehandedly produced five hundred full-page lithographs from pen-and-ink drawings — a prolific output and singular achievement for but one artist.
Right: Furniss's vignette of Meggy Veck's bringing her father his dinner on the church steps in The Chimes, "The First Quarter."
For all thirty of the illustrations for the Christmas Books illustrations in volume VIII, the series editor, J. A. Hammerton, has included both succinct captions (given in full below) and extended quotations to demonstrate the textual moment realised in each; moreover, each quotation refers to a specific page number, thereby enabling the reader to find the exact passage illustrated. Although each page is 12.2 by 18.4 cm (4.75 by 7.25 inches) and the caption below each in upper-case, and below that occurs a multi-line quotation in upper and lower case, each plate is effectively 14.3 cm by 9.2 cm (5.5 inches by 3.25 inches), the vertically-mounted illustrations usually being framed, and the horizontally-mounted illustrations being both framed (if lithographs) and vignetted (if wood-engravings).
Aside from the title-page vignettes in Characters in the Story, of the thirty full-page illustrations, eight are devoted to A Christmas Carol, five to The Chimes, six to The Cricket on the Hearth, five to The Battle of Life, and six to The Haunted Man. Of the eight Carol plates, only two are highly derivative: Marley's Ghost and The Last of the Spirits are clearly based on the John Leech originals of 1843. Furniss's contribution to the iconographic traditions of the Carol is the multiple-thumbnail lithographs Scrooge Objects to Christmas, Scrooge's Solitary Dinner, and Phantoms in the Street. Indeed, only in Furniss's illustrations for the next Christmas Book, The Chimes, do we find conventional line drawings involving just a few characters. The proportion of illustrations per novella, then, is approximately that of Fred Barnard's series of illustrations for the British Household Edition of The Christmas Books, which distributes its twenty-nine illustrations as follows: six to A Christmas Carol, five to The Chimes, six (including the title-page vignette) to The Cricket on the Hearth, five to The Battle of Life, and seven to The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain.
A Christmas Carol
- The Fezziwigs' Ball, Frontispiece (for Stave Two: "The First of the Three Spirits")
- Characters in the Stories
All five Christmas Books Title-page vignettes - Scrooge objects to Christmas, Stave One, "Marley's Ghost," 3
- Scrooge's Solitary Dinner
A Christmas Carol Stave One, "Marley's Ghost," 8 - The Ghostly Knocker, Stave One, "Marley's Ghost," 16
- Marley's Ghost, Stave One, "Marley's Ghost," 24
- Phantoms in the Street, Stave One, "Marley's Ghost," 33
- The First of the Three Spirits, Stave Two, "The First of the Three Spirits," 40
- The Last of the Spirits, Stave Four, "The Last of the Spirits," 64
The Chimes
- Trotty Veck's Dinner, "The First Quarter," 79
- Trotty Before Sir Joseph, "The Second Quarter," 97
- Trotty in the Belfry, "The Third Quarter," 128
- Margaret and Richard, "The Third Quarter," 144
- Trotty's Dream, "The Fourth Quarter," 152
The Cricket on the Hearth
- Tilly Slowboy, "Chirp the First," 161
- The Shadow of the Hearth, "Chirp the First," 176
- Caleb's Daughter, The Doll's Dressmaker, "Chirp the Second," 184
- Caleb Plummer — The Toy Maker, "Chirp the Second," 192
- The Vacant Stool, "Chirp the Third," 216
- Tackleton's Wedding-Day! "Chirp the Fourth," 225
The Battle of Life
- Alfred's Farewell, "Part the First," 256
- Michael Warden leaving his lawyers, "Part the Second," 272
- Clemency and Britain, "Part the Second," 281
- For Alfred's Sake, "Part the Second," 289
- Marion, "Part the Third," 320
The Haunted Man
- The Phantom, Chapter I: "The Gift Bestowed," 325
- "I'll bite you if you hit me!", Chapter I: "The Gift Bestowed," 344
- The Tetterby's Temper, Chapter II: "The Gift Diffused," 325
- Milly, Chapter II: "The Gift Diffused," 368
- Spring Killed by Haggard Winter, Chapter II: "The Gift Diffused," 384
- The Tetterbys' Baby, Chapter III: "The Gift Reversed," 392
The Uncommercial Traveller
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
Related Material: The Christmas Books (1843 to 1878)
- John Leech (8 plates from the Chapman and Hall edition of A Christmas Carol, 1843)
- John Leech et al. (13 plates from the Bradbury and Evans edition of The Chimes, 1844)
- John Leech et al. (14 plates from the Bradbury and Evans edition of The Cricket on the Hearth, 1845)
- John Leech et al. (13 plates from the Bradbury and Evans edition of The Battle of Life, 1846)
- John Leech et al. (17 plates from the Bradbury and Evans edition of The Haunted Man, 1848)
- Sol Eytinge, Jr. (35 plates from the Ticknor and Fields edition of 1868)
- E. A. Abbey (9 plates from the Harper & Bros. Household Edition of 1876)
- Fred Barnard (29 plates from the Chapman and Hall Household Edition of 1878)
Scanned images 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 person who scanned them and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
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 Battle of Life. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
_______. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1844.
_______. The Chimes. Introduction by Clement Shorter. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Pears' Centenary Edition. London: A & F Pears, [?1912].
_______. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878. Vol. XVII.
_______. Christmas Books. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Co., 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. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
_______. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. 19 vols. New York: Harper & Bros., 1876. Vol. III.
_______. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edward Landseer. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1845.
_______. The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas-Time. Illustrated by John Leech, John Tenniel, Frank Stone, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.
Hearne, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: Avenel, 1989.
Kitton, Frederic G. Dickens and His Illustrators. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004.
Parker, David. "Christmas Books and Stories, 1844 to 1854." Christmas and Charles Dickens. New York: AMS Press, 2005. Pp. 221-282.
Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. University of California at Santa Cruz.: The Dickens Project, 1991. rpt. from Oxford U. p., 1978.
Slater, Michael, ed. "Introductions." Dickens's Christmas Books. 2 vols. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971. Rpt., 1978.
Solberg, Sarah A. "'Text Dropped into the Woodcuts': Dickens' Christmas Books." Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 103-118.
Thomas, Deborah A. Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Tyrell, T. W. "The 'Marley' Knocker." The Dickensian 20.76 (October 1924), pp. 202-203.
Created 10 August 2013
Last updated 21 October 2026