[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> John Leech —> Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth —> Next]
John and Dot
John Leech; engraved by Swain
1845
Wood engraving
9.5 cm high x 7.2 cm wide (3 ¾ by 2 ¾ inches), vignetted
Three-quarter-page illustration with integrated text for Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, "Chirp the First," 51.
Passage enclosed: And as he soberly and thoughtfully puffed at his old pipe; and as the Dutch clock ticked; and as the red fire gleamed; and as the Cricket chirped; that . . . . [51]
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. ]
She always would sit on that little stool. I think she must have had a kind of notion that it was a coaxing, wheedling little stool.
She was, out and out, the very best filler of a pipe, I should say, in the four quarters of the globe. To see her put that chubby little finger in the bowl, and then blow down the pipe to clear the tube, and, when she had done so, affect to think that there was really something in the tube, and blow a dozen times, and hold it to her eye like a telescope, with a most provoking twist in her capital little face, as she looked down it, was quite a brilliant thing. As to the tobacco, she was perfect mistress of the subject; and her lighting of the pipe, with a wisp of paper, when the Carrier had it in his mouth — going so very near his nose, and yet not scorching it — was Art, high Art.
And the Cricket and the Kettle, turning up again, acknowledged it! The bright fire, blazing up again, acknowledged it! The little Mower on the clock, in his unheeded work, acknowledged it! The Carrier, in his smoothing forehead and expanding face, acknowledged it, the readiest of all.
And as he soberly and thoughtfully puffed at his old pipe, and as the Dutch clock ticked, and as the red fire gleamed, and as the Cricket chirped, that Genius of his Hearth and Home (for such the Cricket was) came out, in fairy shape, into the room, and summoned many forms of Home about him. ["Chirp the First," pp. 50-52]
The supernatural presences emanating from the kettle add a further dimension to the realistic depictions of the carrier's wife and their Dorset cottage. The plate must be read analeptically, for the carrier himself, fresh from his travels, has yet to enter in the narrative pictorial sequence (outside the elegant Frontispiece by Daniel Maclise, and the domestic idyll of Chirp the First by Richard Doyle ), although John arrives home on page 12. The reader, of course, simply consults the text to rectify these visual disruptions in the temporal sequence. However, this Leech illustration presents a further, greater difficulty: visual continuity. How does one reconcile and integrate the competing images of the carrier? In Maclise's painterly, Pre-Raphaelite frontispiece we meet a clean-shaven, elegantly coiffed, philosophical smoker surrounded by domestic fairies, but in Doyle's Chirp the First a slender, convivial, bearded, well-dressed rural bourgeois, and now Leech's introspective, balding Shakespeare. Doubtless the illustrators worked both rapidly and independently, unaware of how the others were interpreting the focal character and his hearthside ease. Leech even replaces the faithful Boxer with a cat sleeping before the fender.
Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edward Landseer. Engraved by George Dalziel, Edward Dalziel, T. Williams, Thompson, Graves, and Swain. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846 [December 1845].
Patten, Robert L. Chapter 8, "Chirping." Dickens, Death, and Christmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 169-199. [Review]
Created 20 February 2001
Last modified 28 May 2024