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Caleb Plummer the Toy-maker
Harold Copping
1924
Line drawing
4 inches high by 1¾ inches wide (10.2 x 4.1 cm), vignetted
Opening illustration for "The Blind Toy-Maker" from Children's Stories from Dickens, p. 71.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter lived alone in a little cracked nutshell of a house. They were toy-makers, and their house was stuck like a toadstool on to the premises of Messrs. Gruff & Tackleton, the Toy Merchants for whom they worked, — the latter of whom was himself both Gruff and Tackleton in one.
I am saying that Caleb and his blind daughter lived here. I should say Caleb did, his daughter lived in an enchanted palace, which her father's love had created for her. She did not know that the ceilings were cracked, the plaster tumbling down, and the wood work rotten; that everything was old and ugly and poverty-stricken about her and that her father was a grey-haired stooping old man, and the master for whom they worked a hard and brutal taskmaster; — oh, dear no, she fancied a pretty, cosy, compact little home full of tokens of a kind master's care, a smart, brisk, gallant-looking father, and a handsome and noble-looking Toy Merchant who was an angel of goodness.
This was all Caleb's doings. ["The Blind Toy-Maker," Character Sketches from Dickens, 71]
The domestic felicity, melodramatic plot, and lower-middle class social milieu of the previous Christmas Book, The Chimes (1844) seem to have inspired Dickens's next seasonal offering, The Cricket on the Hearth (1845). Like Trotty Veck, Caleb Plummer is a middle-aged widower bringing up an adolescent daughter with meagre income and little assistance. Although Mary Angela Dickens's title "The Blind Toy-Maker" would seem to suggest that her subject and perhaps even her protagonist will be the blind daughter, Bertha Plummer, her shabby but kind-hearted middle-aged father, Caleb, opens the sequence, and appears a total of three times in the five illustrations; gone entirely from the version in Children's Stories from Dickens are such significant Dickens characters from the novella as the old carrier, John Peerybingle, his young wife, Dot, a Victorian "Angel in the House" (pictured by their hearth in Character Sketches from Dickens), their gangling, comic nurse Tilly Slowboy, and the long-lost lover Edward in this realistic re-working of Richard Doyle's headpiece Caleb Plummer and his Blind Daughter (1845).
The tiny plant in the pot does not relate to Mary Angela Dickens's initial description of the toymaker on the opening pages. Rather, it occurs in the chapter after Tackleton has entered the workshop. Her father has led her to believe that "the beautiful little tree" is flourishing and robust, and that it was Tackleton's present:
"I am thanking you for the little tree, the beautiful little tree," replied Bertha, bringing forward a tiny rose-tree in bloom, which, by an innocent deception, Caleb had made her believe was her master's gift, though he himself had gone without a meal or two to buy it. [73]
Since it is not yet blooming in Copping's illustration, we must assume that the opening illustration is a flashback to the point where Caleb had brought it home for his daughter. This detail corresponds precisely with Dickens's description of the rose in "Chirp the Second":
"When it rose, and the bright light I almost fear to strike myself against in walking, came into the room, i turned the little tree towards it, and blessed Heaven for making things so precious, and blessed you for sending them to cheer me!" [68]
Tackleton, of course believes that the girl has become demented as he has no knowledge of this supposed gift that Caleb "with his own hands . . . had brought ... home for her, so carefully" (68).
Three illustrations of the toy-makers in their parlour: Left: Doyle's Chirp the Second (1845). Centre: John Leech's caricatural Caleb at Work (1845). Right of centre: Fred Barnard's Household Edition title-page plate for the novella, Caleb, Bertha, and Tackleton (1878).
Three further late illustrations of the toy-makers and the workshop-parlour: Left: Luigi Rossi's's Caleb Plummer's Home (1912). Centre: E. A. Abbey's American Household Edition plate for The Christmas Books caricatural "Halloo! Halloo!" said Caleb. "I shall be vain presently!" (1876). Right: Harry Furniss's Caleb Plummer — The Toy Maker (1912).
Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise. London: Chapman & Hall, 1845.
Dickens, Mary Angela, Percy Fitzgerald, Captain Edric Vredenburg, and Others. Illustrated by Harold Copping with eleven coloured lithographs. Children's Stories from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1893.
Dickens, Mary Angela [Charles Dickens' grand-daughter]. Dickens' Dream Children. London, Paris New, York: Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd., 1924.
Matz, B. W., and Kate Perugini; illustrated by Harold Copping. Character Sketches from Dickens. London: Raphael Tuck, 1924. Copy in the Paterson Library, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada.
Created 1 March 2006 Last updated 21 September 2023