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The Spirit and the Children: "They are man's," said the Spirit. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want!"
Charles Green
1912
10.4 x 7.6 cm, framed
Dickens's A Christmas Carol, The Pears' Centenary Edition of The Christmas Books, I, 102.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"Oh, Man, look here! Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
"Spirit, are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end."
"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"
The bell struck twelve. ["Stave Three: The Second of The Three Spirits," 101-102]
The finalé of the six scenes that Green has produced for the third stave fills the page, and serves as the fin de siecle illustrator's homage to the book's original illustrator, John Leech, whose simple but eloquent tailpiece for "Stave Three: The Second of the Three Spirits" (see below) is yet to be equalled as an appeal to the Victorian social conscience, although a number of illustrators have attempted moving versions of the scene captured in Leech wood-engraving. Although Green might not have seen Sol Eytinge, Junior's full-page wood-engraving of Scrooge's encounter with the realistically drawn waifs who are also allegorical figures, Want and Ignorance (see below), his approach is similar as he emphasizes the massive form of the Christmas Spirit and places the suffering children, products of the neglect of the exploitative capitalist system, at the giant's feet.
Whereas the Eytinge version substitutes a tenement slum for a factory as the backdrop for the midnight scene, Green merely offers footprints in the snow (foreground) to imply an outdoor setting; the impenetrable darkness certainly implies that the scene occurs at night, and the snow combined with Scrooge's pulling his dressing-gown close about him indicates that December is the date, but the artist provides no buildings of any sort. The white-bearded Spirit of Christmas Present, gesturing towards the children who cling to his ankles, dominates the scene, dwarfing Scrooge in his nightcap and slippers — and presumably late-nineteenth-century pyjama-bottoms rather than a nightgown.
In his composition, Green (undoubtedly anticipating the reader's familiarity with the Leech original) has reversed the positions of the spirit guide and dreamer, has replaced standing, emaciated children with shivering (but equally poorly clothed) and supine waifs who cling to one another, and has eliminated the Spirit's admonitory gesture. The absence of the informing context of the blighted trees and lit factory buildings blunts somewhat the social criticism implicit in the accompanying text. However, Green's giving the Spirit a markedly white beard and drooping torch whose flame throws the children into chiaroscuro effectively implies that the termination of his existence is "drawing near" as the church chimes ring three-quarters past eleven, although the faintness of Leech's spirit more immediately implies his impending disappearance.
Left: Eytinge's realisation of Scrooge's confronting the brutal consequences of laissez-faire economics, Want and Ignorance. Centre: Leech's original realisation of Dickens's attack on the factory system, Ignorance and Want (1843). Right: Harry Furniss's representation of dire poverty in London's mean streets in the 1840s, Phantoms in the Street (1910).
Above: Barnard's different approach to ridiculing capitalistic excess, This pleasantry was received with a general laugh. (1878)
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
Davis, Paul. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. London & Glasgow: Collins' Clear-Type Press, 1906.
____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910.
____. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.
____. A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
____. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being A Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. (1843). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978.
____. A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth. Illustrated by Charles Edmund Brock. London: J. M. Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1905, rpt. 1963.
____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1915.
____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Created 26 August 2015
Last modified 10 March 2020