John and Dot Peerybingle
Harold Copping
1924
Colour lithography
Approximately 18.1 cm. by 12.7 cm
An illustration for The Cricket on the Hearth from Character Sketches from Dickens, facing p. 132.
The domestic felicity, melodramatic plot, and lower-middle class social milieu of the previous Christmas Book, The Chimes continue in Dickens's seasonal offering for Christmas 1845, The Cricket on the Hearth. The middle-aged carrier, John Peerybingle, and his young wife Dot, a Victorian "Angel in the House," are pictured by their hearth without their gangling, comic nurse Tilly Slowboy, in this realistic re-working of the fourth illustration for "Chirp the First," John Leech's "John and Dot."
Scanned image, caption, and commentary below by Philip V. Allingham
