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Milly and the Student
Frank Stone; engravers, Martin and Corbould.
1848
7.8 cm by 7.5 cm (3 inches by 3 inches), vignetted.
Stone's second illustration for Dickens's The Haunted Man, "Chapter II, The Gift Diffused," page 96.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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She put her little basket on the table, and went up to the back of the couch, as if to take the extended hand—but it was not there. A little surprised, in her quiet way, she leaned over to look at his face, and gently touched him on the brow.
“Are you quite as well to-night? Your head is not so cool as in the afternoon.”
“Tut!” said the student, petulantly, “very little ails me.”
A little more surprise, but no reproach, was expressed in her face, as she withdrew to the other side of the table, and took a small packet of needlework from her basket. But she laid it down again, on second thoughts, and going noiselessly about the room, set everything exactly in its place, and in the neatest order; even to the cushions on the couch, which she touched with so light a hand, that he hardly seemed to know it, as he lay looking at the fire. When all this was done, and she had swept the hearth, she sat down, in her modest little bonnet, to her work, and was quietly busy on it directly. ["Chapter II. The Gift Diffused," pp. 95-96]
In his contributions to the visual program, Stone focuses on the figures, their states of mind, and the foreground, and avoids any suggestion as to background, creating an almost flat picture. The sacred atmosphere of Milly and the Student has affinities with the paintings of the German Nazarenes in that they share close attention to detail, a rejection of aerial perspective, a self-conscious religiosity in the unnatural stillness of the scene, and an avoidance of shadow in order to show everything clearly. Stone's first plate, depicting Milly and the Student and her brood, lacks focus because it attempts to take in the whole scene. Stone's second production is more effective because it is a close-up that utilizes symbolic poses that convey both the characters' roles and feelings. Elegantly simple, the design (anticipating the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites, reminiscent of early Renaissance art, has foreshortened the daybed (as Giotto has done with the Virgin Mary's bed in his narrative-pictorial sequence of the life of Christ in the Arena Chapel, Padua) to frame the despondent student, Mr. "Denham" and emphasize his discomfort. The text and plate precisely coincide, since Milly is in the act of adjusting the student's pillow in both. We note that the student is grasping a locket which hangs on a chain about his neck, a detail not mentioned in the text but undoubtedly intended by the artist to suggest the source of the student's abstraction and melancholy. He does not look away, towards the fire as in the text, but within. He does not seem to notice that his pillow is being adjusted, and appears neither uncivil nor ungrateful, as in the line at the top of the page. The young man's body language does, however, communicate Edmund's pensiveness: "you have often been thinking of late" (97).
Since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded at about the time that The Haunted Man was published, it would be a mistake to regard Stone's "Milly" illustrations as consciously Pre-Raphaelite in style. Stone, already forty-eight at the time, was a self-taught artist, whereas the Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rosetti (born 1828) and William Holman Hunt (born 1827) were younger, and were associated with the Royal Academy schools, against the teachings of which they reacted. Although Frank Stone (born in 1812) is not classified as a member of The PRB, the painting and illustrations of his son, Marcus (born in 1840), certainly exhibit PRB features, including a spirituality and high seriousness utterly lacking in earlier styles of book illustration. See also The Term "Pre-Raphaelite" as Applied to Frank Stone's "Milly" Plates in Dickens's "The Haunted Man" (1848).
Butt, John. "Dickens's Christmas Books." Pope, Dickens and Others: Essays and Addresses Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1969, pp. 127-148.
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.
Patten, Robert L. Chapter 10, "Bargain Haunters." Dickens, Death, and Christmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 234-275. [Review]
Solberg, Sarah. "'Text Dropped into the Woodcuts': Dickens's Christmas Books." Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 103-118.
Created 19 October 2004
Last updated 7 June 2024