"Will Fern's Cottage" by Clarkson Stanfield from Dickens's "The Chimes"

[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Clarkson Stanfield—> Dickens's "The Chimes"—> Next]

Will Fern's Cottage

Clarkson Stanfield

1844

Wood engraving

Full-page illustration for Dickens's The Chimes: Third Quarter, page 120.

When a party of aristocrats approach the Dorset peasant's cottage in search of the picturesque, the owner of the building, radical Will Fern, emphasizes the economic and political realities underlying the aesthetic concept of the picturesque:

Gentlefolks, I've lived many a year in this place. You may see the cottage from the sunk fence over yonder. I've seen the ladies draw it in their books, a hundred times. It looks well in a picter, I've heerd say; but there an't weather in picters, and maybe 'tis fitter for that, than for a place to live in. Well! I lived there. How hard — how bitter hard, I lived there, I won't say. Any day in the year, and every day, you can judge for your own selves. [Third Quarter, page 119 — prior to the illustration]

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Commentary and Description

Will Fern's diatribe about the insensitivity of the "gentlefolks" who make his cottage the object of their sketching expeditions occurs within the context of Lady Bowley's birthday party. Thus, Stanfield's wood-engraving does not realise a moment within the narrative; moreover, although entitled "Will Fern's Cottage," the significant figure is not the hapless peasant sitting in front of his cottage, but the liveried servant holding the parasol for the genteel sketcher, left in the foreground. The shifting of emphasis establishes the perspective of the cottage that Fern feels is unrealistic because it us based on a panorama rather than a close up study of the sufferings of the Dorset labourer who resides in the quaint building.

In Clarkson Stanfield's elegant landscape realisation of Fern's cottage, the sketching party has set up its equipment with a good vista of the building, and a liveried servant holds a large parasol to guard the "gentlefolks" from the heat of the Dorset sun, ironically the source of this wheat-producing region's fertility. The disconsolate owner, the Dorset peasant Will Fern himself, sits on a log before his home, completing the Constable-esque scene. In fact, Fern has crashed Lady Bowley's birthday celebration to reveal the painful truth that provide the basis of the Romantic idyl of the rustic cottage: what aristocratic sketching parties see at a distance is very different from his lived experience of the peasant's miserable existence. Anticipating Ruskin's political attack on this kind of picturesqueness in Modern Painters IV, Dickens, then, is using the rhetorical Fern as a device to work against Stanfield's elegant landscape sketch; the writer shifts our attention away from a clipped and orderly English landscape towards the workers who sustain the land. Taken against the illustration, Fern's voice is antiphonal, striking a note of social realism and Chartist protest against his social superiors' reconfiguring his life as some sort of Wordsworthian or Rouseauean idyl. He refuses to let the aristocrats regard him as merely a quaint figure in a picture of country life:

"Now, gentlemen," said Will Fern, holding out his hands, and flushing for an instant in his haggard face, ‘see how your laws are made to trap and hunt us when we're brought to this. I tries to live elsewhere. And I'm a vagabond. To jail with him! I comes back here. I goes a-nutting in your woods, and breaks — who don't? — a limber branch or two. To jail with him! One of your keepers sees me in the broad day, near my own patch of garden, with a gun. To jail with him! I has a nat'ral angry word with that man, when I'm free again. To jail with him! I cuts a stick. To jail with him! I eats a rotten apple or a turnip. To jail with him! It's twenty mile away; and coming back I begs a trifle on the road. To jail with him! At last, the constable, the keeper — anybody — finds me anywhere, a-doing anything. To jail with him, for he's a vagrant, and a jail-bird known; and jail's the only home he's got." [Third Quarter, pages 122-23, immediately after the wood-engraving dropped into the text.

So much for the validity of the construct of the Noble Savage and the inherent virtue of those who live close to Nature, away from the moral corruption of European cities. In short, in the midst of the Hungry Forties, the Liberal writer permits an actual peasant deride the notion of a Romantic landscape and the sublime in nature, as seen in panoramic treatments of woods, valleys, mountains — an even seashores, for his friend the naval veteran Clarkson Stanfied was a noted Victorian painter of Romantic seascapes. Fern's suffering, seen closeup at Lady Bowley's banquet, must give her guests a very different interpretation of the life of the Dorset cottager from that derived from painterly renditions of English cottages. The plight of nineteenth-century agricultural workers was rather the opposite of bucolic ideal of Constable's landscapes such as The Hay Wain (1821). Seen at a distance in an oil painting that emphasizes the beauty of the English landscape, the cottager would seem to the uninitiated to lead a harmonious and tranquil existence amidst an idealised version of English rural scenes. Seen close up as Fern is seen by Lady Bowley's aristocratic dinner guests, the peasant is a bitter social malcontent who feels himself exploited by amateur artists such as those in Stanfield's drawing. Will Fern's radical, anti-landowner sentiments accord well with a denizen of the region known for governmental transportation of the agricultural union-organizers who became the Tollpuddle Martyrs in 1834. Their attempts. Although trade and agricultural unionization seems relatively benign to us today, as their seditious behaviour was nothing more than asking members to swear a secret oath as members of the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers. In his introduction to the two-volume Christmas Books, Michael Slater notes that Dorset had been much in the news in the early 1840s as a consequence of outbreaks of rick-burning in that county.

Reference

Dickens, Charles. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In. Il. John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Charkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 16 December 1844.

Dickens, Charles. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In. Il. John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Charkson Stanfield. The Christmas Books, Ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Vol. One. Pp. 137-255.

Last modified 13 July 2014