Trotty Veck and His Daughter Meg
Harold Copping
1924
Colour lithograph
Approximately 18 cm. by 12.5 cm
An illustration for The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and A New Year In from Matz, facing p. 130.
Copping illustrates "Trotty Veck's Dinner-Time," which occurs early in the "First Quarter" when Meg brings Toby, waiting outside the old church hard by his dwelling for somebody to commission a delivery, his lunch of hot tripe. Sitting on the church steps, Trotty chats with Meg about marrying her fiance, the blacksmith Richard as he consumes "with an unctuous and unflagging relish" a beverage, hot potato, and main course.
Scanned image, caption, and commentary below by Philip V. Allingham
Dickens wrote The Chimes, the successor to A Christmas Carol, in the autumn of 1844 while on sabbatical in Genoa, Italy. Although largely forgotten today, the novella sold extremely well, and was dramatized at various London theatres in late December, its humble and sensitive protagonist (a single parent, moreover) being far more appealing than the miserly curmudgeon-bachelor of the initial Christmas Book.
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References
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University.
Last modified 1 March 2009