Caleb at Work
John Leech; engraver, George Dalziel
1845
10.4 high by 7.2 cm wide (4 ½ by 2 ⅝ inches), vignetted
Dickens's The Cricket on he Hearth, "Chirp the Second," 61.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Passage Illustrated: The Poor Widower and His Blind Daughter
Caleb and his daughter were at work together in their usual working-room, which served them for their ordinary living-room as well; and a strange place it was. There were houses in it, finished and unfinished, for Dolls of all stations in life. Suburban tenements for Dolls of moderate means; kitchens and single apartments for Dolls of the lower classes; capital town residences for Dolls of high estate. Some of these establishments were already furnished according to estimate, with a view to the convenience of Dolls of limited income; others could be fitted on the most expensive scale, at a moment's notice, from whole shelves of chairs and tables, sofas, bedsteads, and upholstery. The nobility and gentry, and public in general, for whose accommodation these tenements were designed, lay, here and there, in baskets, staring straight up at the ceiling; but, in denoting their degrees in society, and confining them to their respective stations (which experience shows to be lamentably difficult in real life), the makers of these Dolls had far improved on Nature, who is often froward and perverse; for, they, not resting on such arbitrary marks as satin, cotton-print, and bits of rag, had superadded striking personal differences which allowed of no mistake. Thus, the Doll-lady of distinction had wax limbs of perfect symmetry; but only she and her compeers. The next grade in the social scale being made of leather, and the next of coarse linen stuff. As to the common-people, they had just so many matches out of tinder-boxes, for their arms and legs, and there they were — established in their sphere at once, beyond the possibility of getting out of it. ["Chirp the Second," pp. 57-58]
Commentary: Laborious Piece Work, or "Cottage Industry"
Although Vladimir Lenin may have found the dramatisation of Dickens's Cricket on the Hearth utterly maudlin, most Victorian audiences and readers relished its wholesome sentimentality. Here, since the careworn toymaker maintains the illusion for his blind daughter, Bertha, that he is happy, prosperous, and well-dressed, the illustrators, Richard Doyle and John Leech, have made sure that readers see Caleb as he really is, not as he presents himself to Bertha. And here, unlike Leech's initial illustration of them, Chirp the Second, no stuffed and painted animals and toy soldiers swirl upwards from the toymaker's imagination. In the midst of the Hungry Forties, the novella foregrounds the simple pleasures and humble lives of the rural working class, even as it castigates the capitalist-toymaker, Tackleton, as the heartless exploiter of the Plummers' labours.
Indeed, as Dickens remarks in the passage surrounding the eighth illustration,
The care imprinted in the lines of Caleb's face, and his absorbed and dreamy manner, which would have sat / well on some alchemist or abstruse student, were at first sight an odd contrasty to his occupation, and the trivialities about him. [61]
Gone are the fancy and joy of Doyle's Chirp the Second. The generally more caricatural illustrator, Leech, "depicts an older and more worn toymaker, working on one side of a table, 'painting and glazing the four-pair front of a desirable family mansion'" (Patten, 181) about the reality of which the Plummers' can only dream. "Bertha, without a cap covering her hair which is drawn up in a bun behind, sits at the other side dressed with an apron and leans in toward a doll lying on the table" (Patten, 181). It is instructive to view the seventh and eighth plates side by side for two very different versions of the diligent widower, the continuity being provided by the shoddy topcoat bearing the label "Glass," the labouring Bertha, the sundry dolls' houses and children's toys, particularly the rocking-horse, lower left here, a small, awkward contraption in contrast to the bigger versions (the actuality, lower right, and the grand, original, imaginative conception, centre) in Doyle's airy rendition of the toymakers' workroom. As a means of mobility and possible escape from this drudgery the horse in each case serves as a countersign to the drudgery which produced it — but only the favoured children of the affluent classes can mount these horses and ride off into the worlds of archaic chivalry and the Arabian Nights.
Relevant illustrations from the 1845 and Later Editions
Left: Richard Doyle's whimsical rendition of the Plummers' hearthside labours of Chirp the Second (1845), which introduces these secondary characters after the opening scenes at the Peerybingles' cottage. Centre: Luigi Rossi's realisation of the toymakers' workroom without Caleb and Bertha, Caleb Plummer's Working Room (1912). Right: Fred Barnard's realisation of Caleb and Bertha Plummer in their cottage parlour-cum-workroom, Caleb, Bertha, and Tackleton (1878).
E. A. Abbey's study of Bertha and her father at work on a dolls' house, "Halloo! Halloo! said Caleb. "I shall be vain presently!" (1876).
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edwin Landseer. Engraved by George Dalziel, Edward Dalziel, T. Williams, J. Thompson, R. Graves, and Joseph 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 updated 29 May 2024