Frontispiece: "Scrooge's Christmas Visitors"
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
12.5 high x 9.3 cm.
First 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.
While Dickens's original Christmas Carol illustrator, John Leech, never attempted the challenging and contradictory figure of "The First of the Three Spirits," the child/old man with white hair and skin of "the tenderest bloom," Eytinge realizes this strange figure effectively in three separate, full-page plates — the frontispiece, "Scrooge's Christmas Visitors," "The Spirit of Christmas Past" (p. 36), and "A Retrospect" (p. 50), as well as in the vignette at the head of Stave 2, "The Vision of Ali Baba" (p. 34), in which, in anticipation of Bob Cratchit's carrying Tiny Tim in the vignette "Tiny Tim's Ride" (p. 56) — incidentally the first artistic rendering of that scene in the streets of Camden Town — Scrooge is actually holding the diminutive spirit in his left arm. Eytinge has realized the problematic figure by making the head of a lesser rather than greater scale than an adult's relative to the body, but otherwise, as the text stipulates, retaining "a child's proportions," the spirit's long arms, "dress trimmed with summer flowers," and the jet of light springing from its head. The only property of the spirit that Leech realized in "Scrooge extinguishes the First of the Three Spirits", "a great extinguisher for a cap," Eytinge employs in three of the four representations to maintain narrative-pictorial continuity.
The first of these occurs in the frontispiece, the only Eytinge illustration that is a type of postmodernist synthesis rather than a realisation of an actual moment in the text. Scrooge looks up in wonder untainted by fear at the "Jolly Giant" of Christmas Present, apparently ignoring the ominous implications of the spectre clad in a black shroud. In fact, none of them appears to Scrooge when he is in bed, but all three, Past, Present, and Future, do indeed "contend" within him after their monitory visitations, and just as the Spirits "can do anything they like" (Stave 5), including defying temporal boundaries, so the visual artist (implies Eytinge) can disregard the limitations imposed by the author. The plate prepares the reader for those key moments of confrontation in the text, but undoubtedly even in 1868 rehearsed for many American readers their experience with that culturally iconic text over the past two decades, a foreshadowing then that is also a flashback, a recollection and reification of readings and Christmases past.
Reference
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose: being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
Last modified 23 December 2010