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The Boy before the Fire
John Leech; engravers, Smith and Cheltnam.
1848
8.9 by 6.5 cm (3 ⅜ by 2 ½ inches), vignetted.
Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain, "Chapter II. The Gift Diffused," 130.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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“Come!” he said. “Don’t you touch me! You’ve not brought me here to take my money away.”
Redlaw threw some more upon the ground. He flung his body on it immediately, as if to hide it from him, lest the sight of it should tempt him to reclaim it; and not until he saw him seated by his lamp, with his face hidden in his hands, began furtively to pick it up. When he had done so, he crept near the fire, and, sitting down in a great chair before it, took from his breast some broken scraps of food, and fell to munching, and to staring at the blaze, and now and then to glancing at his shillings, which he kept clenched up in a bunch, in one hand.
“And this,” said Redlaw, gazing on him with increased repugnance and fear, “is the only one companion I have left on earth!” ["Chapter II. The Gift Diffused," pp. 129-131]
In "The Christmas Books" (1969), John Butt describes the Boy as neither a type nor an abstraction like "Ignorance" in A Christmas Carol, but "a clearly recognizable slum child" (147). This child, for example, experiences various emotions: before, confronted by Redlaw, he was cringing in terror; here, he gives himself over to whole-hearted enjoyment of food, fire, and money. This is the sort of fire, a fire of blazing coals in a grate, that Scrooge initially forbids Bob Cratchit from building, but in conclusion exhorts him to construct with a newly-purchased coal-scuttle: in Stave One, Bob cannot "replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own" (Penguin I: 47). Coal is thus established in the Carol's printed text as an expensive luxury, but only in the pictorial text of The Haunted Man.
Leech's Boy, then, is no mere abstraction, but a waif whose utter reality is conveyed through his various emotions and his size relative to the chair. The artist has given him tumbling mounds of hair, trousers far too short for his legs, and bare feet to emphasize his poverty. The passage illustrated is immediately above the plate, but the artist has positioned the Boy sitting as near as possible to the fire, his feet approaching the fender. We have just read about an old man being reduced to an egocentric sensualist by Redlaw's dubious gift, desiring to be waited on and fed, and seeing no merit in the holly-berries because they are inedible. He is more savage than the urchin because humanizing memory does not soften him as the physical warmth does the Boy.
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 29 December 2004
Last modified 7 June 2024