On 'Change
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
12.6 high x 9.6 cm wide
Fourteenth full-page Illustration for Dickens's A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a ghost story of Christmas in the Ticknor and Fields (Boston), 1869, Diamond Edition.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"On 'Change" (p. 86) is perhaps based on Eytinge's misreading the sequence of scenes that are set in and around the London Exchange, Scrooge's usual place of business when not actually in his office. While the great pillars behind the three capitalists suggest that they are standing in the street immediately in front of the edifice, Dickens makes clear that the three meet — and discuss the possibility of attending the funeral of a recently deceased associate — inside the building, near Scrooge's accustomed corner, in the very "heart" of the Exchange.
on 'Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.
Since the "great fat man" with the largest chin is yawning, we may assume that Eytinge assimilated elements from the above description — trifling with seals and checking pocket-watches — with a specific moment in the trio's conversation:
"What has he done with his money?" asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.
"I haven't heard," said the man with the large chin, yawning again. "Left it to his Company, perhaps. He hasn't left it to me. That's all I know. [Stave Four, "The Last of the Spirits"]
The physically repulsive trio's detached complacency and distorted faces suggest how the relentless pursuit of pelf warps human nature. The three bear no names in Dickens's text, for they are entirely interchangeable, like the three pillars of the Exchange immediately behind them. Dickens's depersonalizing trick of rendering unpleasant people as if they were animals or machines certainly predates the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, but Dickens's reference to "the gills of a turkey-cock" combined with the predatory beaks of Eytinge's merchants imbues the scene with a Darwinian ethos. After this overheard conversation, the Phantom takes Scrooge out into the street, where they overhear another such exchange between a pair of Scrooge's business associates. Either the illustrator has confused the two conversations or he has deliberately attempted to fuse them into a single, protoMarxist image that, showing the businessmen and the 'Change, indicts Scrooge's entire class, who grow fat upon their investments while others starve. The pillars of the Exchange in Eytinge's illustration, incidentally, could as easily have been inspired be those of the Wall Street Stock Exchange in New York (the building at the present site, 10-12 Broad Street, replaced one built in 1865), as they could have been by those of the new Royal Exchange that the young Queen Victoria opened in October, 1844.
Reference
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
Hearne, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: Avenel, 1989.
Last modified 2 January 2011