Caleb Plummer and His Blind Daughter
Harold Copping
1924
Colour lithography
Approximately 8.4 cm by 12.5 cm.
An illustration for The Cricket on the Hearth from Character Sketches from Dickens, facing p. 134.
Scanned image, caption, and commentary below by Philip V. Allingham
Whereas John Leech's point of interest in the scene "Caleb at Work" in the original illustrations for the 1845 Christmas Book The Cricket on the Hearth is the delightfully crowded workshop for toys which Dickens describes in "Chirp the Second," Copping focuses on the relationship between the laughing daughter Bertha and her devoted father. Richard Doyle's treatment of the pair at the outset of "Chirp the Second" is crude caricature even compared to Leech's more sensitive rendering, but both of the original illustrators of the novella interpret the toys as works of the imagination or fancy whose beauty and variety contrast the blandness and poverty of those who created them. Copping, in contrast, humanizes father and daughter, making them individuals worthy of our attention without reference to their creations.
Caleb is bitten by care, guarding the secret of their poverty; "The Blind Girl never knew that ceilings were discoloured, walls blotched and bare of plaster here and there, . . . that iron was rusting, wood rotting, paper peeling off" ("chirp the Second"), but knows their living-room and work-room are one and the same. All three artists chose to illustrate these lines: "In the midst of all these objects, Caleb and his daughter sat at work. The Blind Girl busy as a Doll's dress-maker; Caleb painting and glazing the four-pair of a desirable family mansion."
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