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The Haunted Man
Charles Green
1895 & 1912
15.2x 10.9 cm, exclusive of frame
Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain — A Fancy for Christmas Time, The Pears' Centenary Edition, V, frontispiece.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
As he fell a musing in his chair alone, the healthy holly withered on the wall, and dropped — dead branches.
As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him, in that place where it had been gathering so darkly, it took, by slow degrees, — or out of it there came, by some unreal, unsubstantial process— not to be traced by any human sense, — an awful likeness of himself!
Ghastly and cold, colourless in its leaden face and hands, but with his features, and his bright eyes, and his grizzled hair, anddressed in the gloomy shadow of his dress, it came into his terrible appearance of existence, motionless, without a sound. As heleaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with itsappalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore.
This, then, was the Something that had passed and gone already. This was the dread companion of the haunted man! ["Chapter One: The Gift Bestowed," Pears edition, 42]
Clement Shorter, the Editor of the The Pears' Centenary Edition, has augmented the title in the "List of Illustrations" on page 15, The Haunted Man) with a direct quotation beneath the actual whole-page illustration: "As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, it leaned upon the chair-back, close above him" (adapted from page 42). Perhaps reacting to the elegant psychomachia wreath design of Sir John Tenniel that opens the 1848 edition, Green imparts a certain dreaminess to the chemistry professor who sits lost in a reverie before the fire. However, in Green's more realistic and less fanciful version of the fireside scene, no warring goblins surround the wistful, middle-aged university teacher; rather, Green highlights Redlaw's face by throwing the rest of the picture into deep shadow or chiaroscuro. Since readers of the 1912 volume might have been more inclined to interpret the tale as a psychological parable rather than a Christmas ghost story, Green's stripping away the metaphysical components of the original designs makes complete sense: this is a "post-Freudian" Haunted Man. And whereas Tenniel had shown the malevolent spirit bending over, as if whispering in the chemist's ear, Green has the Doppelganger duplicate exactly Redlaw's posture in the upper body; although the phantom is evidently standing behind Redlaw's arm-chair, the spirit's legs and feet dissolve into the darkness behind his chair.
Stripping the scene of most of the original's metaphysical dimensions, Green invests both the corporeal Professor Redlaw and his spirit double with a melancholic turn of the head, although he misses the sinister quality in the phantom that, for example, Harry Furniss retains in The Phantom (see below), a closeup of the careworn college instructor and his sardonic spiritual double. Green draws the eye down toward the pool of firelight at Redlaw's slippered feet, suggesting that the supernatural creature's origins lie in the gazer's memories and imagination. In his costume and physiognomy, Green's Redlaw is very much a Victorian, upper-middle-class, natural philosopher; however, his inactivity and his ruminative nature are uncharacteristic of this well-known type. There is nothing in this despondency to indicate the Green's detached academic is suffering from psychological or Manichaean conflict between the dualistic forces of good and evil in the lives of humanity evident in Tenniel's bijou frontispiece.
The two original illustrations of this moment in the 1848 edition of the novella — Tenniel's wreathed image of Redlaw and the Phantom in the Frontispiece (see below), and John Leech's first contribution, a full-page vignette on page 34 that presents the mysterious and sardonic Doppelganger scrutinizing his alter-ego in Redlaw's book-lined study — Redlaw and the Phantom (see below) — invest the double with supernatural force almost entirely lacking in the 1895 design by Green, not published until fourteen years after his death.
E. A. Abbey in the Harper and Brothers American Household Edition (1876) presents no such other-worldly visitation, but Fred Barnard in the Chapman and Hall Household Edition volume of 1878 does present Redlaw's second dramatic confrontation with the hovering, malignant spirit graphically in "Chapter 3: The Gift Reversed," "You speak to me of what is lying here," the Phantom interposed (see below). Whereas Tenniel's Redlaw merely possesses a receding hairline, Harry Furniss's exhibits an advancing baldness, thereby accentuating his forehead and imparting to him an intellectual aspect appropriate to Dickens's only intellectual character. In this respect, Green's somewhat elderly Redlaw is different in that, although white, his hair is abundant, curly, and long. The Green composition, like the Furniss illustration of just two years earlier, might be termed a "dark plate" in imitation of the engravings of Phiz in Bleak House since only the faces of Redlaw and the Phantom are lit. The melodramatic darkness of the 1848 illustrations is displaced in Furniss and Green by something less theatrical and more natural, perhaps even more psychological. In Green's composition, everything surrounding the figures is devoid of books and other academic properties, emphasizing Redlaw's alienation.
The image that most closely corresponds to Charles Green's naturalistic treatment is one that he likely never saw, the frontispiece for The Christmas Books in the New York "Household Edition" (1861-70) by Felix Octavius Carr Darley — As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire (see below).
Left: Tenniel's study of the melancholy Redlaw and his malignant double, looking into the fire, Frontispiece. Centre: Leech's book-lined frames the look-a-like profiles of the balding academic and his double Redlaw and the Phantom (1848). Right: Darley's highly atmospheric frontispiece, As he leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire (1861).
Left: In Barnard's Gothic treatment, the double appears to hover: "You speak to me of what is lying here," the Phantom interposed (1878). Right: Furniss's more realistic treatment of the same notion, The Phantom, possesses that later illustrator's characteristic sense of humour (1910).
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
_____. Christmas Books, illustrated by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
_____. 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. London: Educational Book, 1910.
_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
_____. The Haunted Man; or, The Ghost's Bargain. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.
_____. The Haunted Man. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. (1848). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978. II, 235-362, 365-366.
_____. The Haunted Man. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861. II, 155-300.
_____. The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. (1895). London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Created 21 June 2015
Last modified 28 March 2020