'Poor Tiny Tim!'
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
12.5 high x 9.4 cm wide
Sixteenth 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.
In "'Poor Tiny Tim!'" (p. 98) Eytinge realises the type of child death-bed scene that made Dickens's Victorian sentimentality so maudlin to modern critics, the locus classicus being the death of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41). Once again we are in the crowded, lower middle class home of the Cratchits in Camden Town, the common thread between this and the previous scenes, "On 'Change" and "Old Joe's" being Scrooge himself. The caption for this sixteenth full-size illustration in Eytinge's narrative-pictorial series is a direct quotation from the latter part of Stave 4, "The Last of the Spirits." It is, in essence, an example of editorializing since it is a comment which the novella's narrator makes in response to Mrs. Cratchit's trying to remain positive and hold back the tears (which she attributes to the "colour" of her needlework) while upstairs her son is dieing. The picture captures a moment some time later, when Bob Cratchit has returned home and gone upstairs to pray at his child's bedside. The perspective must be that of the Phantom (otherwise, "The Spirit of Christmas-yet-to-Come") and of Scrooge, since as shades from the past they may move freely through the house's walls and storeys. The visions which previous spirit guides have shown Scrooge have consistently dwelt on Tiny Tim's affliction and his optimistic outlook, so that Scrooge, like the reader, has come — we may assume, if we judge by our own responses — to identify himself or herself with the crippled child. The moment realised is likely this:
He left the room, and went up stairs into the room above, which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas. There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were signs of some one having been there, lately. Poor Bob sat down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what had happened, and went down again quite happy.
The reader now notices, if he or she has not done so before, that the story's characters often suffer personal loss at Christmas, and that Marley, Scrooge, and Tiny Tim all die at Christmas, yet another instance of Victorian coincidence. Compare Eytinge's rendering of the dead or dying child here, with his arms crossed on his chest, with that of Little Nell in "At Rest" by George Cattermole for Chapter 71 of The Old Curiosity Shop in the serial illustration for 30 January 1841 in Master Humphrey's Clock.
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 3 January 2011