John Leech's "Redlaw and the Boy" — Plate 7 from "The Haunted Man" (1848)

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Redlaw and the Boy

John Leech; engravers, Smith & Cheltnam.

1848

12.4 cm by 7.5 cm (4 ¾ by 3 inches), framed.

Seventh illustration for Dickens's The Haunted Man, "Chapter I, The Gift Bestowed," page 48.

[Click on the images to enlarge them.]

Little of Leech's usual sense of comedy and caricature appears in his second plate. However, he allows a strongly felt emotion to dominate. The pathos of the protagonist's confrontation with a personification of poverty and ignorance recalls Leech's 1843 wood-engraving Ignorance and Want in A Christmas Carol. [Commentary continues below.]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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Commentary: A Street Boy Has Taken Shelter in Redlaw's Anteroom to the Lecture Theatre

Everything [about the creature] is double; a rounded youthful face, yet pinched and twisted by experience. Beautiful delicate feet, "ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of a man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast" [47]. It is, in short, the essence of a life to be lived without progress in anything but somatic growth. Not Frankenstein's monster, an assemblage of parts, but a child without any nurture or care whose ravenous future has been etched on his robe: Ignorance and Want. . . . . This wild boy is what neglected children will grow into and ravage the world. [Patten, 252]

Prof. Redlaw has entered, raising the lamp as the street urchin invited in by Milly cowers in the corner: "A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant's, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man" (47). The precise moment realised is found as one turns the page: "Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow" (47-48). Neither has yet spoken a word.

The centre of the printed page describes the child exactly as we see him in the plate, right. Is he, as John Butt suggests, a more realistic treatment of the boy Ignorance in the Carol plate? Leech's allegorical boy in Ignorance and Want in "The Second of the Three Spirits" is a head shorter than his sister, Want, and shivers in the cold outside a factory, his clothing in tatters, his feet bare, despite the season. This second street urchin has more hair, and his face a mask of savagery rather than an impassive façade. The street child cowers before the blow he anticipates that Redlaw will deliver, rather than from the elements. The industrial smokestacks behind Ignorance and Want in the 1843 etching are symbols supplied by the radical Punch cartoonist to connect these social problems with the factory system and businessman Scrooge's Malthusian doctrine of "The Surplus Population." But neither the author nor the artist here offer any explanation for the savage creature whose invaded the venerable precincts of the privileged and educated; he merely is an inconvenient fact of urban life in this 1848 etching.

In Redlaw and the Boy, Leech has placed a stack of folios on the chair that separates the pair, books that have no counterparts in the printed text. Perhaps they mutely assert the upward climb that Redlaw has made from childhood through education — "I strove to climb!" (38), since, at a realistic level, the boy can hardly have placed them there in order to steal something from the bare wainscotting. The books, then, serve to connect the unloved child Redlaw once was with the deprived child he sees before him. The Boy, if he is any sort of abstraction, is Hunger. However, the boy is merely "like some small animal of prey" (50). Dickens does not employ metaphor ("wolfish") or allegorical terms ("Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked"), and the artist has charged this boy with a feeling (well conveyed by the pose) quite absent from his Christmas Carol plate. The nameless child has speech (unlike his mute counterpart in the Carol plate), but does not immediately recognize the meaning of "live."

The closed curtain from the sixth plate becomes the just-opened curtain behind Redlaw (left), joining the two scenes. The printed text focuses on the "heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to pass into and out of the theatre where he lectured, — which adjoined his room" (46). Both artist and novelist emphasize the palpable reality of the ghetto child: "A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast" (47). Redlaw, with money, position, and education, has the ability, as Scrooge has, to change the prediction.

Relevant Illustrations from the 1867 through 1910 editions

Left: Green's study of the sleeping waif, Beyond the boy, the Phantom stood, immovable and silent, with his eyes upon him (1895). Centre: Fred Barnard's British Household Edition version of Redlaw, the Phantom, and the sleeping waif, "You speak to me of what is lying here," the Phantom interposed (1878). Right: Harry Furniss's highly impressionistic more psychological study of Redlaw and the ragged intruder, "I'll bite if you hit me" (1910).

Left: Fred Basrnard's Household Edition illustration of the boy before the fire, "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!" (1878). Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s Diamond Edition version of the pair: Redlaw and the Boy (1867).

Illustrations for The Haunted Man (1848-1912)

Bibliography

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 4 June 2024