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Uncaptioned tailpiece: Jacob Marley as he was in life [?]
Charles Edmund Brock
1905
4.6 x 3.2 cm, framed
Dickens's A Christmas Carol, tailpiece to Stave One, "Marley's Ghost,"25.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face.
Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.
As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again. [Stave One, "Marley's Ghost," 14-15]
Brock provides no caption for the Stave one tailpiece. However, the passage immediately above the genial image provides a context because this is where Dickens suggests that Scrooge has just had a "glimpse of the Invisible World" (25). Brock challenges the reader to consider why Marley might be smiling — and at whom. Is Marley laughing at Scrooge, or enjoying the joke with the reader? If Scrooge is convinced that the apparition is a mere hallucination produced by "the fatigues of day" (25), why then does he jump into without removing his clothes? The man who credits nothing but his bank account and Malthusian statistics seems genuinely afraid. Marley's genial facial expression seems inconsistent with either of the Malthusian twins (Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge) at this point in the story, but the absence of glasses suggests the image might be Scrooge rather than Marley; moreover, Brock leaves the reader in doubt by not listing this tailpiece in his "Illustrations: Black and White" (vii). This happy, middle-aged bourgeois hardly recalls the terrifying spectre of his former partner has just visited Scrooge. Then, too, this image does not likely resemble Marley as he would have looked on his deathbed since the artist has not included the wrappings around his head. Nevertheless, this face does beare some resemblance to that of Marley in the title-page vignette.
The other possible interpretation is that Brock intends this image to foreshadow in its benign, pleasant expressions the kind of person that Scrooge will become once he has profited (as it were) from the night's visitations and journeys abroad among humanity. Whereas Marley is specificallywearing his hair in a pigtail in the text — "Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head" (18), we may take the figure in Brock's tailpiece as a balding double for the vigorous (albeit bespectacled) Scrooge of Brock's final sketch, "I am about to raise your salary!" (100). Although the partners once must have looked much alike, Scrooge has long since abandoned the style of the Regency so evident in the Ghost's dress and hairstyle. In Brock's subsequent representations of Scrooge, the miser facially resembles the figure in the tailpiece for "Stave One: Marley's Ghost." This image of Marley (if it is of Marley) bears little resemblance to the Ghost depicted in other illustrated editions of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially the awkward,transparent, lugubrious spectre of the John Leech's Marley's Ghost (see below).
Left: Leech's interpretation of the ghost and his former partner, Marley's Ghost. Right: Sol Eytinge, the dreaming Scrooge in bed, gazing inwonder at the Spirits of Christmas, Scrooge's Christmas Visitors, frontispiece to the 1868 Ticknor-Fields volume.
Left: Harry Furniss's composite scene in which a suspicious Scrooge scowls at the wandering spirit, Marley's Ghost (1910). Right: Fred Barnard's equally humorous rendering of the scene, Marley's Ghost (1878).
Above: E. A. Abbey's full-page rendering of the scene as a frontispiece for the entire series of Christmas Books and stories, "What do you want with me?" (1876). [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Bolton, H. Philip. Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. 16 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. X.
_____. 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.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910.
_____. 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 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.
_____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1915.
_____. 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. Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978.
_____. 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.
Created 19 September 2015
Last modified 28 May 2020