The Lighthouse
Clarkson Stanfield
1848
Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Haunted Man, 7.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> The Haunted Man —> Charles Dickens —> Clarkson Stanfield —> Next]
The Lighthouse
Clarkson Stanfield
1848
Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Haunted Man, 7.
[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.]
When travellers by land were bitter cold, and looked wearily on gloomy landscapes, rustling and shuddering in the blast. When mariners at sea, outlying upon icy yards, were tossed and swung above the howling ocean dreadfully. When lighthouses, on rocks and headlands, showed solitary and watchful; and benighted sea-birds breasted on against their ponderous lanterns, and fell dead. When little readers of story-books, by the firelight, trembled to think of Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the Robbers’ Cave, or had some small misgivings that the fierce little old woman, with the crutch, who used to start out of the box in the merchant Abudah’s bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon the stairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey up to bed. [Chapter I, "The Gift Bestowed," 6-8]
Stanfield's first appearance in this text is admirably suited to his own personal history (a sailor in the British merchant navy and then the Royal Navy) and abilities as a painter of seascapes. On the bowsprit of a sailing vessel, left, four sailors (two of them quite young) struggle to reef in the jibsheet. Beneath them, in the surf, is an anchor. On a rock darkling rising from the breakers an owl-like lighthouse stands, the small gulls indicating both its size and its distance from the ship (which we must imagine, for only the bowsprit and its five supporting stays are visible). The perilous scene is not allegorical but a visual realisation of a passage at the bottom the (left) facing page intended to contrast the snug comfort of the college interior with the rigours that some must face to earn their living at this time of the year on a "howling ocean." Perhaps Stanfield's point is that, as opposed to these sailors who brave the deep for merchants or in service of their nation, Redlaw has enjoyed a comparatively tranquil existence, despite a mysterious trauma in the past that has embittered him.
Dickens, Charles. 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.
Glancy, Ruth. "Dickens at Work on The Haunted Man." Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986): 65-85.
Guida, Fred. "A Christmas Carol" and Its Adaptations: Dickens's Story on Screen and Television. London & Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.
Created 29 December 2004
Last modified 28 March 2020