[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Clarkson Stanfield —> The Haunted Man —> Charles Dickens —> Next]
The Christmas Dinner in the Great Hall
Clarkson Stanfield
1848
11.8cm high by 7.4 cm wide (4 ⅜ by 2 ⅞ inches), partially framed.
Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain — A Fancy for Christmas Time, The 1848 Edition, 188 (tailpiece).
[Click on this and the following images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
That as they were assembled in the old Hall, by no other light than that of a great fire (having dined early), the shadows once more stole out of their hiding-places, and danced about the room, showing the children marvellous shapes and faces on the walls, and gradually changing what was real and familiar there, to what was wild and magical. But that there was one thing in the Hall, to which the eyes of Redlaw, and of Milly and her husband, and of the old man, and of the student, and his bride that was to be, were often turned, which the shadows did not obscure or change. Deepened in its gravity by the fire-light, and gazing from the darkness of the panelled wall like life, the sedate face in the portrait, with the beard and ruff, looked down at them from under its verdant wreath of holly, as they looked up at it; and, clear and plain below, as if a voice had uttered them, were the words.
Lord Keep, my Memory Green. [Chapter III, "The Gift Reversed," 187-88]
In the last plate of The Haunted Man, which appears on the novella's final page (188), Stanfield has emphasized the dimensions of the Elizabethan "Great Hall" at the expense of "The Christmas Party." Architectural elements — gigantic Gothic beams and an elegant stained glass window in the rear, overwhelm the diners, a number of whom are obscured or have their backs to the viewer.
Fred Guida's blowup of the final plate (see below) corrects the dwarfing of the characters by the architectural setting, and permits the viewer to observe compositional details obscured in the much smaller original vignette, occupying perhaps two-thirds of the page. (Guida's reproduction is 21.5 cm by 13.2 cm, almost twice the size of the original.) The largest child playing in the foreground is presumably Johnny Tetterby. The well-dressed diner facing away from us on the left (one is tempted to say "stage right," for the whole composition seems so much like one of Stanfield's theatrical sets) may be Professor Redlaw; Stanfield may have deliberately turned the figure so that we cannot see his face and thereby lose the visual continuity established by Leech and Tenniel. Presumably the woman to the right is Milly, in which case the man seated in front of her is her husband, William, and the old man beside her Philip Swidger, her father-in-law. The table's centrepiece appears to be a multi-layered cake rather than the roast "beef" which Dickens specifically mentions.
Appropriately, given the prominence of the pictorial element throughout the book, Stanfield has incorporated the story's final words, "Lord, keep my memory green," in the woodblock engraving, thereby synthesizing visual and textual narratives at the final moment of the story. In "Dickens at Work on The Haunted Man," Ruth Glancy notes that Dickens revised this section of the manuscript in proof to accommodate this synthesis: "for the sake of the illustration Dickens removed a reference to the scroll beneath the picture as being in Latin, which, the manuscript said, translates as "Lord! keep my memory green!" As an illustration of the scroll appears on the final page of the book Dickens perhaps felt it would be easier for Stanfield if it were "old English letters" rather than Latin (HM, 326)" (Dickens Studies Annual 15: 77). The translation makes the thematic motto more accessible to the average mid-century, middle-class reader, albeit one who can afford the outlay of five shillings for a very small book. Since Dickens has arranged that the majority of plates be integrated into the letter-press, he concludes by once again compelling the reader to engage with the text and illustration simultaneously, as in twelve of the previous fifteen plates (and all the illustrations after no. 7, Redlaw and the Boy).
However, the final plate creates not only a synthesis but a serious divergence between text and illustration: the Swidgers present are a mere handful compared to the legions of Swidgers, who "were so numerous that they might join hands and make a ring round England" (351), "by dozens and scores" (352), to say nothing of the Tetterby clan. The jollity of Scrooge's Christmas prize-turkey, punch, and polkas has boiled down to "beef" (which Stanfield indicates is something like a multi-layered cake with white icing!), around which perhaps sixteen somber "party-goers" chat, rather than dance as at the close of The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year out and a New Year in (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth, A Fairy tale of Home (1845).
The warmth and geniality of the final scene in the old college are a sharp contrast to the dark, icey, and forbidding exterior view of this bastion of male learning in Exterior of the Old College, Plate 11 (105). In this final space, the past and present as well as the public and private converge. The Gothic beams support the roof and thereby emphasize the importance of the abiding presence of the past and through memory of its contribution to the individual's and the group's sense of identity. How can we know ourselves unless we retain awareness of our origins? The triple-paned stained-glass window complements the biblical language into which the reclaimed and resurrected Redlaw lapses under the influence of the Mary-like Milly, whose unconditional love is so well communicated in Milly and the Children (Plate 15, 159). Although she is "the embodiment of his better wisdom" (187), her presence in the great Dinner Hall is not immediately obvious. Like the protagonist himself, she has been absorbed into the figures so that the room with its occupants as depicted by Stanfield is an emblem of society as a whole. Here in an ornate and beautiful space which tradition has bequeathed and a benevolent aristocracy (exemplified by the bearded Elizabethan gentleman in the portrait above the diners) has financed, the working-class Swidgers and lower-middle-class Tetterbys join with the upper-middle-class professional in communal celebration of Christmas. Here, too, the mundane — the teething infant, the rough-housing children, the great fire, and panneled walls — and the "marvellous" coincide: "shapes and faces on the walls, . . . gradually changing what was real and familiar there, to what was wild and magical" (187). In other words, the child-like faculty of imagination transforms the real into the wonderful. The public and performative space is animated by the presence of young children, elders, the affianced couple, the mentor of young men who are metaphorically his children (Redlaw) and the epitome of domestic, feminine goodness who is a mother to the children of others (Milly).
Redlaw has removed himself from the isolation of his study, and abandoned his academic alienation for the common space of the great Dinner Hall, where people of all conditions and degrees and both genders meet on an equality to share a meal and after-dinner conversation. The "sedate" face from the past, staring benignly down upon the diners, has displaced the sardonic visage of Redlaw's doppelganger, and a cheery communal fireplace of the Illustrated Page to Chapter I (1) and of The Christmas Party in the Great Dinner Hall (188) has replaced the barren, cheerless hearth of the chemist's study in the frontispiece and the sixth illustration (34). Redlaw must return to his study as Scrooge to his countinghouse, but he will no longer bear into that confined space the burden of melancholy and the atmosphere of gloom that had hitherto invested it.
The only spirits we are ever to credit fully in the Christmas Books in general and The Haunted Man in particular are those of familial conviviality, charity, forgiveness, and compassion for our fellow man: in short, the Christmas Spirit. Sadly, in part owing to Stanfield's deficiencies and in part to a growing want of something in Dickens's own life, the bonhomie that attends the close of each of the other Christmas Books seems lacking here. We have passed from the obvious allegory of A Christmas Carol and The Chimes to something more subtle. Dickens would construct collaborative framed-tales for Household Words and its successor, All the Year Round, offering that special Christmas blend that he was certain suited the popular if not the critical taste. However, perhaps in part owing to the influence of Wilkie Collins, in these seasonal somethings for the 1850s and 1860s realism would predominate over allegory. Another impetus towards realism that Dickens received was delivered to him by his periodical critics, who resented the religious tone and pious sentimentalizing in which he indulges at the close of The Haunted Man.
Although Dickens had originally assigned the closing illustration to John Leech, fearing that Leech, undoubtedly very busy with the Christmas illustrations for the large-scale London magazine of humour, Punch, suggested that this final plate be assigned instead to Clarkson Stanfield. Several later illustrators, notably Fred Barnard in the 1878 Household Edition and Charles Green in the 1912 Centenary Edition, have also employed the portrait of the founder as the story's tailpiece.
Left: Barnard's individual portrait of the Founder of the College, "Lord, keep my Memory Green!" (1878). Centre: Fred Guida's reproduction of Stanfield's elegant architectural study of the Great Dining Hall of the Old College, The Christmas Dinner in the Great Hall (1848), courtesy of the Dickens House Museum. Right: Green's version establishes the wainscotted setting of the portrait in the dining-hall: The Founder's Portrait: 'Lord, Keep My Memory Green' (1895).
Allingham, Philip V. "The Illustrations in Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain: Public and Private Spheres and Spaces."Dickens Studies Annual 36 (2005), 75-123.
Dickens, Charles. The Haunted Man; or, The Ghost's Bargain. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. Engraved by Martin & Corbould, T. Williams, Smith & Chellnam, and Dalziel. 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.
Guida, Fred. "Lord Keep my Memory Green" (illustration). "A Christmas Carol" and Its Adaptations: Dickens's Story on Screen and Television. London & Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. 150.
Parker, David. Dickens and Christmas. New York: AMS Press, 2005.
Created 29 December 2004
Last modified 8 June 2024