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The Second of the Three Spirits: "A jolly Giant, glorious to see"
Charles Green
1892, 1912
15.4 x 10.8 cm (full-page) framed
Dickens's A Christmas Carol, The Pears' Centenary Edition of The Christmas Books, I, 72.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image by Philip V. Allingham. Commentary by Allingham and George P. Landow.
The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrifaction of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see, who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.
"Come in!" exclaimed the Ghost. "Come in, and know me better, man."
Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and though the Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like to meet them.
"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit. "Look upon me." ["Stave Three: The Second of The Three Spirits," 70-71: the original caption has been emphasized.]
This late-Victorian artist has attempted one of the best known scenes in English literature — so well realised in the 1843 edition illustrated by John Leech that few other nineteenth-century illustrators attempted it. Indeed, if George Cruikshank's Oliver's Asking for More (1837) is the perhaps best known and most widely recognised Victorian illustration, serving as a metonymy for the entire work, the hand-coloured steel-engraving by Leech is a close second. Indeed, the finely detailed Leech illustration appears in glorious colour on the cover of the Penguin Christmas Books, volume one, as the epitome of the spirit of these five seasonal novellas.
Leech, who takes a panoramic approach, depicts many details of the transformed room, all of which dwarf Scrooge: he includes, for example, the surging fire, a steaming cauldron of punch, the Spirit's throne of game, a second punch bowl, and torch held aloft. Instead, Green, like the American illustrator Sol Eytinge, Jr., moves in for the close-up, emphasizing the contrast between a small Scrooge in dressing-gown and nightcap and the expansive giant. However, whereas Leech fifty years earlier had made the context of the metaphysical meeting perfectly clear, Green detaches the figures from the setting, focussing instead upon the Spirit’s expansive chest in his fur-lined gown. With one significant background detail Green emphasizes not merely the culinary delights associated with this Spirit of Christmas but also the abundant greenery (left) that suggests physical and spiritual regeneration.
Among the six scenes that Green includes for the third stave, this is perhaps the most engaging as Green makes the wondrous scene at the opening of Stave Three a confrontation of opposites. In contrast, Eytinge provides a crowded yuletide scene, with a caricatural Christmas Present hemmed in by a huge barrel of oysters to one side and the fireplace on the other. Scrooge barely fits into Eytinge’s composition because the artist unwisely crammed far too many details from the text into the 12.8 by 9.5 cm black-and-white wood-engraving, so many in fact that the jovial ghost has to balance a steaming bowl of punch on his lap. Green’s composition, on the other hand, devotes about one-third of the picture space to an amazed and humbled Scrooge, who looks upon the laughing Giant with wonder and rapt attention rather than with the smile that has crept across the miser's visage in the Leech original. Green subordinates the kegs of oysters and fruit (right) and two specimens of poultry (down centre) to the three-dimensional figures, thereby creating an impression of openness. That Scrooge and the Spirit are in Scrooge's drawing-room is not immediately obvious since, unlike the Leech and Eytinge plates, it includes neither fireplace nor mantelpiece. Thus, Green has made up for the loss of Leech's charm and delicacy with a numinous sense of wonder and awe created by the light from the torch of amity that casts chiaroscuro over the faces and hands of the mortal and immortal characters.
Left: Leech's iconic treatment of Scrooge's third visitor, The Second of the Three Spirits (1843). Centre: Eytinge's engaging frontispiece which involves Scrooge's beholding all three Christmas Spirits at once: Scrooge's Christmas Visitors (1868). Right: Eytinge's less whimsical version of the Jolly Giant, Christmas Present (1868).
Above: The scene on the stage of The Adelphi on 17 February 1844 when the Spirit of Christmas Present revealed Ignorance and Want to Scrooge against a mountain backdrop, Scene from "The Christmas Carol," at The Adelphi Theatre, in the Illustrated London News.
Above: Furniss's thumbnail of Marley's Ghost, Scrooge, and the expansive Spirit of Christmas Present from the top register of Characters in the Story, the engraved title-page of the 1910 edition.
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878. Vol. XVII.
_____. 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. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. VIII.
_____. Christmas Books, illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London & Glasgow: Collins' Clear-Type Press, 1906.
_____. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.
_____. A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
_____. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being A Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. (1843). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978.
____. A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth. Illustrated by Charles Edmund Brock. London: J. M. Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1905, rpt. 1963.
_____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
_____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1915.
_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Created 12 August 2015
Last modified 23 May 2020