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The Cricket
L. Rossi
1912
Lithograph
10.5 cm high x 7.4 cm wide, vignetted
Sixth illustration for "Chirp the Third" in Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, The Pears' Centenary Edition, III, 131.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"And when I speak of people being middle-aged, and steady, John, and pretend that we are a humdrum couple, going on in a jog-trot sort of way, it’s only because I’m such a silly little thing, John, that I like, sometimes, to act a kind of Play with Baby, and all that: and make believe."
She saw that he was coming; and stopped him again. But she was very nearly too late.
"No, don’t love me for another minute or two, if you please, John! What I want most to tell you, I have kept to the last. My dear, good, generous John, when we were talking the other night about the Cricket, I had it on my lips to say, that at first I did not love you quite so dearly as I do now; that when I first came home here, I was half afraid I mightn’t learn to love you every bit as well as I hoped and prayed I might — being so very young, John! But, dear John, every day and hour I loved you more and more. And if I could have loved you better than I do, the noble words I heard you say this morning, would have made me. But I can’t. All the affection that I had (it was a great deal, John) I gave you, as you well deserve, long, long ago, and I have no more left to give. Now, my dear husband, take me to your heart again! That’s my home, John; and never, never think of sending me to any other!" ["Chirp the Third," 129-130]
Mary Peerybingle (otherwise, "Dot," as in John's little arithmetical joke about his wife being pregnant as "Dot and carry one"), possesses "a capacity for managing other people's affairs, to wit, those of Edward Plummer and May Fielding, who, but for Dot's secret intervention, would have married the disagreeable Tackleton" (The Dickens Index, 194). Perhaps to advance the pseudo-adultery plot, Dickens has not had Dot has reveal the actual identity of the Old Stranger to her husband. Because she has kept Edward's return a secret, probably to aid him in his plan to marry May before Tackleton could act against him, John suspects her of marital infidelity.
John, feeling guilty about having married a much younger woman, had subsequently offered to send Dot, the baby, and the nurse Tilly to the cottage of Dot's parents as his gesture towards an amicable separartion. In retrospect, the reader feels that Dot's silence about Edward's plans to marry May has been unreasonable, and might have led to John's shooting the young sailor, thinking he was having an affair with Dot. In this comic reunion of husband and wife, John gladly realizes that all his suppositions have been false, and he is relieved that he does not have to spare his young wife "the daily pain of an unequal marriage" (112). However, through the putative marital separation Dickens raises the whole matter of marital breakdown in the era prior to the divorce acts of the late 1850s onward. Now that Edward has revealed the nature of his relationship with Dot and his marriage to May, Dickens can restore Dot to John. Other illustrators have celebrated this restoration of domestic and marital harmony in scenes such as Leech's The Dance (1845), which emphasizes Dot's petiteness, which is obvious in this final Rossi illustration of her. In the illustration's caption, she is the spirit of domesticity incarnate: "Now, my dear Husband, take me to your heart again! That’s my home, John" (bottom of 131).
Illustrators have agreed upon several points: Dot is still in her early twenties, in contrast to John, who is as much as twenty years older, as in the original edition's versions of the young housewife and mother (see below); and slight, delicate, round-faced Dot is physically at least a head shorter than her burly husband, as in the Household Edition volumes in England and America. However, with an eye for feminine beauty Barnard in the British Household Edition makes Dot far more attractive than the other Dickens illustrators in "Ain't he beautiful, John?" (see below). In the long program of twenty-six illustrations, Rossi leaves no doubt about the preeminence of Dot and her husband in the book: she appears in thirteen of the illustrations, he in fourteen, in contrast to Dot's appearance in eight of the sixteen illustrations in the 1845 edition, and John's appearance in seven.
Rossi here offers a precise parallel to the climactic scene in Boucicault's Dot (1859, 1862) when Edward arrives in his own person rather than in his disguise as the Old Stranger, and announces that he has married May Fielding. The script also better explains why Dot has kept John in the dark about the identity of the Old Stranger:
Dot:
And when I asked him to let his old friend John into the Secret, he said John was too open-hearted to keep the Secret. And I promised to keep the Secret if he wouldn't run off to Sea again, and I did it, John, and they were Married an hour ago, and here's the bride [Enter [58/59]
May
And Old Tackleton may hang himself or die a bachelor. [III]
Left: Leech's vision of the domestic tranquillity that the Old Stranger's arrival disrupts: John and Dot at the opening of the novella in the cheerful parlour (1845). Centre: Maclise's elegant scene detailing the human and metaphysical dimensions of the Peerybingle hearthside: Frontispiece (1845). Right: Leech dramatizes Dot's domesticity as she sets the table for John's well-earned supper: John's Arrival (1845).
Left: Barnard's version of John's enjoyment of his family, as he obviously dotes on both Baby and Dot: John Peerybingle's Fireside (1878). Centre: Brock's engraved title-page sets the keynote for the domestic bliss that the adultery plot imperils: The Cricket on the Hearth (1905). Right: Furniss's line-and-wash drawing depicts both the husband's contentment and the threat to it: The Shadow on the Hearth (1910).
Abbey's lower-middle-class idyll of the Peerybingles and their infant as a modern "Holy Family," with that awkward attending angel, Tilly Slowboy: "Ain't he beautiful, John?" (1876).
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Bentley, Nicolas; Michael Slater; and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford, New York, and Toronto: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Bolton, H. Philip. "The Cricket on the Hearth." Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987, 273-295.
Boucicault, Dion. Dot. A Drama in Three Acts. 10 April 1862. Add. MS. 53013 (E). Licensed 11/04/1859. The Lord Chamberlain's Manuscript Collection, The British Library, London.
Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edwin Landseer. Engraved by George Dalziel, Edward Dalziel, T. Williams, J. Thompson, R. Graves, and Joseph Swain. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846 [December 1845].
_____. The Cricket on the Hearth. Illustrated by L. Rossi. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Created 27 April 2020
Last modified 18 July 2020