It was a Turkey!
Charles Edmund Brock
1905
10 x 9.5 cm, vignetted
Dickens's A Christmas Carol, initial illustration for Stave Five, "The End of It," 93.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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Context of the Illustration
"I'll send it to Bon Cratchit's!" whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. "He shan't know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's will be!"
The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's man. As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye.
"I shall love it, as long as I live!" cried Scrooge, patting it with his hand. "I scarcely ever looked at it before. What an honest expression it has in its face. It's a wonderful knocker. — Here's the Turkey. Hallo! Whoop! How are you? Merry Christmas!"
It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped them short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.
"Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town," said Scrooge. "You must have a cab."
The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried. [Stave Five, "The End of It," 96-97]
Commentary
Brock in illustrating the 1905 edition of A Christmas Carol did not have to be nearly as selective as John Leech since he had a program of twelve illustrations to provide, Leech only eight. Moreover, Leech did not have a free hand in what he chose to illustrate, but Brock had no such limitation as a writer with whom he had to collaborate. Although both illustrators represented key moments in the text, such as Scrooge's confronting Marley's Ghost, Leech found himself with but had but one small illustration (a tailpiece) to furnish for the final stave. He and Dickens elected to underscore Scrooge's new relationship with his clerk in Scrooge and Bob Cratchit; or, The Christmas Bowl (see below), in which the business-associates-now-friends share a glass of hot punch ("Bishop") in the former miser's own rooms, thereby blurring the lines between home and workplace in the idealized Carlylean relationship of man and master.
A strong theatrical tradition may possibly have also influenced such later illustrators as Charles Green and Brock to realise the scene in which Scrooge, full now of the Christmas spirit, calls down to a passing boy to run to the poulterer's in the next street and order the prize turkey hanging in the window. Dickens well sums the passing boy's total incredulity in the phrase Walk-ER!, and served as a high point in Dickens's public readings in England and America. The part of the boy given in cast lists for dramatic adaptations of A Christmas Carol from 1844 onward further suggests that audiences found the Christmas morning dialogue delightful, and would be looking for an illustration of that comic scene in later editions. The walk-on of the passing boy in a cap similar to that worn by the boy in the Brock illustration strikes an appropriately comic note in the 1951 Renown Rank black-and-white film adaptation scripted by Noel Langley. Alastair Sim (Scrooge), delighted with the pluckiness of David Hannaford ("The boy sent to buy the turkey" is an inaccurate description of his role), and in particular with the boy's chirpy response to Scrooge's query about the prize turkey: "What, the one as big as me?" Scrooge replies, "Yes, my buck!" The young actor's delivery of the Cockney expression remains unequalled.
Brock had few possible models from which to work here, particularly since the only really comparable scene, that which Dickens's American illustrator, Sol Eytinge, Junior, realised, The Prize Turkey (see below), was not likely available to him. In the Pears Christmas Annual for 1892 Brock would have seen a pair illustrations in which an ebullient Scrooge (in the text; on the contrary, he seems to be driving a shrewd bargain in the Green illustration) commissioning a passing boy to bring the poulterer from the nearby street so that Scrooge can arrange to have the prize bird sent to the Cratchits in Camden Town. However, whereas Green's Christmas Morning — "Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?" (see below) focuses on Scrooge at his second-storey window, looking down on the boy, and "Walk-ER!" exclaimed the boy provides a cameo of the incredulous boy at street level in his Sunday best, Brock describes on the subsequent scene with the poulterer's man and the prize turkey, although unlike Scrooge in Sol Eytinge's scene Brock's reformed miser is still admiring his purchase.
Moreover, Brock has included a significant detail from the text in the upper-right-hand corner: the knocker which had momentarily been transmuted by Scrooge's imagination the evening before into Marley's face. The knocker as envisaged by Brock is neither psychologically magnified nor animated, but resembles the actual door-knocker that Dickens had in mind and described, a knocker with a man's face rather than (as was usual) a lion's. It was the doorknocker on a house in eighteenth-century Craven Street that gave Charles Dickens the idea for one of the most memorable scenes in the novella. T. W. Tyrell in "The 'Marley' Knocker" in the Dickensian (October 1924) has suggested that Dickens's transformation of bronze door-knocker into Marley's face was influenced by an unusual knocker with a man's face "that hung on the front door of No. 8 Craven Street when it was occupied by one Dr. David Rees in the 1840s" (cited in Guiliano and Collins, I: 841, and Hearn, Note 55, p. 70]. The unwanted attention that the door received in the twentieth century on account of Dickens's description and various illustrations of it resulted in the owner's having it taken down and placed in a bank vault.
That object, which he previously took for granted (like so much in his life) and Scrooge's silk dressing-gown and white, tasselled nightcap are reminders of the night's experiences, and of the former curmudgeon and miser, alienated and cynical. The garments remain the same as in the previous Brock illustrations, but Scrooge's benign face implies a sea change in his outlook and ability to interact with others in a genial manner. Now, he smiles subtly and wrings his hands in pleasant anticipation, speculating about how the Cratchits will receive his gift — and joyfully consume it. The boy in his period cap and the poulterer's man in linen smock-frock smile at Scrooge, believing him (one may presume) to be a magnanimous employer.
Relevant Illustrations from various editions, 1843-1912
Left: The original Leech tailpiece featuring Cratchit and Scrooge as new-found boon companions, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit; or, The Christmas Bowl (1843). Centre: Eytinge's interpretation of the scene in which Scrooge digs into his trouser pocket to pay the poulterer's man, The Prize Turkey (1868). Right: Green depicts Scrooge's accosting the passing boy to facilitate his ordering the prize turkey, in Christmas Morning — "Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?, in the 1892 illustration issued in the Pears Centennial volume of 1912.
Above: Eytinge's headpiece for the final chapter showing the scene in which Scrooge gleefully hops about, trying to put on his socks, "Scrooge Awakes," vignette for "Stave 5. The End of It" (1868).
Bibliography
Bolton, H. Philip. Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
"A Christmas Carol: Full Cast and Crew." IMDb. Accessed 27 September 2015. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044008/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ql_1.
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.
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_______. 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. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978.
_______. A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth, illustrated by C. E. [Charles Edmund] Brock. London: J. M. Dent, 1905; New York: Dutton, rpt., 1963.
_______. A Christmas Carol, illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A. & F. Pears, 1912. I.
_______. 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.
Guiliano, Edward, and Philip Collins, eds. The Annotated Dickens. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986. Vol. 1.
Hearn, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Christmas Carol. New York: Avenel, 1976.
Langley, Noel, screenwriter. Scrooge; or, Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol". London: Renown Rank, 1951.
Patten, Robert L. "Dickens Time and Again." Dickens Studies Annual 2 (1972): 163-196.
Created 27 September 2015
Last modified 31 May 2020