"Chapter I. The Gift Bestowed" by John Tenniel for Dickens's "The Haunted Man" (1848)

Chapter I. The Gift Bestowed

John Tenniel; engraver, Martin & Corbould.

1848

Wood engraving

12.1 cm by 6.9 cm (4 ¾ by 2 ¾ inches), framed.

Third illustration for Dickens's The HauntedMan, "Chapter I, The Gift Bestowed," page 1.

Details: top and bottom of plate.

[Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Text enclosed within the frame: Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true. Everybody is, often, as . . . . [1]

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 it and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Passage Realised: The Shadows around the Domestic Hearth

When little readers of story-books, by the firelight, trembled to think of Cassim Baba cut into quarters, hanging in the Robbers’ Cave, or had some small misgivings that the fierce little old woman, with the crutch, who used to start out of the box in the merchant Abudah’s bedroom, might, one of these nights, be found upon the stairs, in the long, cold, dusky journey up to bed.

When, in rustic places, the last glimmering of daylight died away from the ends of avenues; and the trees, arching overhead, were sullen and black. When, in parks and woods, the high wet fern and sodden moss, and beds of fallen leaves, and trunks of trees, were lost to view, in masses of impenetrable shade. When mists arose from dyke, and fen, and river. When lights in old halls and in cottage windows, were a cheerful sight. When the mill stopped, the wheelwright and the blacksmith shut their workshops, the turnpike-gate closed, the plough and harrow were left lonely in the fields, the labourer and team went home, and the striking of the church clock had a deeper sound than at noon, and the churchyard wicket would be swung no more that night.

When twilight everywhere released the shadows, prisoned up all day, that now closed in and gathered like mustering swarms of ghosts. When they stood lowering, in corners of rooms, and frowned out from behind half-opened doors. When they had full possession of unoccupied apartments. When they danced upon the floors, and walls, and ceilings of inhabited chambers, while the fire was low, and withdrew like ebbing waters when it sprang into a blaze. When they fantastically mocked the shapes of household objects, making the nurse an ogress, the rocking-horse a monster, the wondering child, half-scared and half-amused, a stranger to itself,—the very tongs upon the hearth, a straddling giant with his arms a-kimbo, evidently smelling the blood of Englishmen, and wanting to grind people’s bones to make his bread. ["Chapter I. The Gift Bestowed," pp. 6-9]

Commentary: Proverbial Wisdom and Orally Transmitted Tales

Tenniel's third plate, Chapter I. The Gift Bestowed, illustrates an early moment in the text that occurs immediately after the passage realised by plate four. In the headpiece for the opening chapter, a mother and her five children, the youngest an infant with whom she is playing, are foregrounded by shadows as they sit by the fire. In semi-darkness, the oldest child is reading a small book, which he holds up to catch the flickering light of the fire, which illuminates the other five figures. Rising like smoke from the shadows are one-dimensional figures whose outlines fill the upper-left register of the page, enclosing the text: an old woman (a witch?) with a crutch, a turbanned Eastern warrior with a scimitar, a puppet, and four identical toy soldiers, all surmounted by mistletoe, a round fruit (an orange, perhaps), and four mice running along a vine. In short, The artist has rendered the real and imaginary worlds of childhood, connected by the chime or rattle by the reader that is the original of the shadow that, transformed into an ornate shepherd's crook, dominates the left-hand side of the page.

Plate three, we suddenly realise a few pages later, is actually an illustration of the passage after that realised by the fourth plate; plate three complements the passage which describes children reading tales from the Arabian Nights, specifically how Ali Baba's brother, Cassim, inadvertently trapped himself in the robbers' cave (as a result of his failing to remember the magic password) was subsequently cut into quarters, and how an old hag on crutches started out of the box belonging to the merchant Abudah, and exhorted to search for the talisman of Oromanes.

Dickens is clearly recalling his own childhood responses of terror and enchantment when reading these tales: "When little readers of story-books trembled" (6) has been interpreted by Tenniel as one child reading to its younger siblings. Dickens presumably chose to allude to these tales in order to point the moral that Redlaw must learn, that our own self-pity can trap us in a labyrinth of bitterness, and that the only way out, the open sesame, is forgiveness and acceptance. As in many later plates, the illustration encloses a small amount of print: "Everybody said so. Far be it from me to assert that what everybody says must be true (1). An enigmatic opening indeed.

Illustrations for The Haunted Man (1848-1912)

Bibliography

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. 2 vols. 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. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978.

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 3 June 2024