The Haunted Man

John Gordon Thomson (1841-1911)

Fun 57-58 (11 January 1893): 15

Source: Hathi Digital Library Trust web version of a copy in the University of Minnesota library.

Beneath the main caption: “As the gloom and shadow thickened behind him — out of it there came — an awful likeness of himself” — Charles Dickens

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Hathi Digital Library Trust and the University of Minnesota library and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

The verses that accompany this editorial cartoon proclaim that although “John Bull sits snugly by his fire” while “fiercely without may winter roar,” he finds himself haunted by “his other self, a phantom lean.”

Hunger seems written on his face,
Where misery’s pangs have left their trace — . . .
Ah, but that phantom never flies
’Tis ever at hand in woeful guise —
        He is a haunted man! [16]

Since , in Dickens’s The Haunted Man a “terrible secret from the past . . . blights the present,” it is possible that the cartoonist intends to remind us not only of present “starving folk” but also of the horrific Irish famine of the 1840s. The cartoonist assumes that readers of Fun will immediately make the connection between the 1848 novella and social conditions in England, personified as a less-than-jolly, highly ruminative John Bull. The image bears witness to the continuing popularity of The Haunted Man; or, The Ghost's Bargain and alludes specifically to the John Leech illustration Redlaw and the Phantom (1848), but perhaps also to the middle-class's ignoring the plight of homeless in the 1878 Household Edition illustration by Fred Barnard, "You speak to me of what is lying here," the Phantom interposed.. Ironically, the cartoon anticipates the precise posing in the 1912 illustration by Charles Green, The Haunted Man frontispiece. Over forty years after the close of the Hungry Forties John Bull seems to have had the plight of the urban poor on his conscience. — George P. Landow and Philip V. Allingham

Related material

• The Last of Dickens's Five Christmas Books: The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain (19 December 1848)
• The Irish Famine: 1845-49
• John Leech’s Redlaw and the Phantom
• Fred Barnard’s "You speak to me of what is lying here," the Phantom interposed.
• Charles Green’s frontispiece for The Haunted Man

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Last modified 4 February 2016