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Mrs. Tetterby and the Baby
Charles Green
1895 & 1912
8.4 x 7.5 cm, exclusive of frame
Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time, The Pears' Centenary Edition, V, 130.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Mrs. Tetterby had [Johnny] into the parlour by the collar, in that same flash of time, and repaid him the assault [on his infant sister, Sally or "Moloch"] with usury thereto.
"You brute, you murdering little boy," said Mrs. Tetterby. "Had you the heart to do it?"
"Why don't her teeth come through, then," retorted Johnny, in a loud rebellious voice, "instead of bothering me? How would you like it yourself?"
"Like it, sir!" said Mrs. Tetterby, relieving him of his dishonoured load.
"Yes, like it," said Johnny. "How would you? Not at all. If you was me, you'd go for a soldier. I will, too. There an't no babies in the Army."
Mr. Tetterby, who had arrived upon the scene of action, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, instead of correcting the rebel, and seemed rather struck by this view of a military life.
"I wish I was in the Army myself, if the child's in the right," said Mrs. Tetterby, looking at her husband, "for I have no peace of my life here. I'm a slave — a Virginia slave": some indistinct association with their weak descent on the tobacco trade perhaps suggested this aggravated expression to Mrs. Tetterby. "I never have a holiday, or any pleasure at all, from year's end to year's end! Why, Lord bless and save the child," said Mrs. Tetterby, shaking the baby with an irritability hardly suited to so pious an aspiration, "what's the matter with her now?"
Not being able to discover, and not rendering the subject much clearer by shaking it, Mrs. Tetterby put the baby away in a cradle, and, folding her arms, sat rocking it angrily with her foot.
"How you stand there, 'Dolphus," said Mrs. Tetterby to her husband. "Why don't you do something?" [Chapter Three: "The Gift Reversed," 129-30]
Left: Leech's cartoon-like study of Augustus Tetterby, Johnny, and "Moloch" in the street, Johnny and Moloch (1848). Right: Barnard's treatment of an earlier scene in which Johnny was carrying the infant Sally through the streets, It roved from door-step to door-step, in the arms of little Johnny Tetterby, and lagged heavily at the rear of troops of juveniles who followed the Tumblers (1878).
Green has a rather dour and judgmental Sophia Tetterby dozing off beside the enormous cradle containing Sally, otherwise known as Baby Moloch. The caption immediately below the illustration points directly towards the moment he has realised: "Mrs. Tetterby put the baby away in a cradle, and, folding her arms, sat rocking it angrily with her foot" (130, quoted verbatim from the bottom of the same page). The bare caption fails, however, to reveal the full situation, namely that Mrs. Tetterbys' disgust with the baby and dissatisfaction with her marriage and family life all stem from her having been exposed to the contagion of Redlaw's double, "The Phantom."
Right: Harry Furniss's realisation of Mrs. Tetterby's harsh treatment of Johnny, The Tetterbys' Baby (1910). Right: John Everett Millais' signature illustration Bubbles, advertising the producers of the the Centenary Edition, the Pears' Soap company, facing the concluding page (160) in the 1912 edition, and reaffirming a more idyllic vision of childhood than that implicit in the Tetterby scenes.
Green does not depict the Tetterbys in a humorous, but rather a workaday and serious vein quite unlike Leech's animated depictions of the newsagent's shop front and parlour. Green's interior scene, without either humour or drama, focuses upon Sophia Tetterby and the consequence of the Phantom's "gift." He shows neither the rebellious Johnny nor the henpecked Adolphus. In Green's illustration about mother and infant, Mrs. Tetterby has lost her customary cheerfulness and tender-heartedness because the Phantom has erased her familial memories. As a realist, Green has opted for a more prosaic and less caricatural interpretation of the domestic situation. His realisation is neither, in the Leech manner, amusing, nor, in the Furniss manner, dramatic. Green's treatment suggests that Mrs. Tetterby's brooding dissatisfaction is slight rather than aggrieved; he does not show her provoked to sudden anger as Furniss does. Nevertheless, Green shows considerably more interest in the Tetterbys than other illustrators of the novella. The present illustration forms part of what one might term Green's "child-rearing" sequence, a theme natural enough in a new edition of The Christmas Books wholly underwritten by the Pears Soap Company, which with Millais child logo entitled Bubbles (1865-6) clearly marketed itself as "child-friendly." Of the twenty Green illustrations in this volume, nine involve the quintessential lower-middle-class Tetterbys, and eight involve children (the Tetterby brood and the waif), so that Green's subject is as much (in the abstract) childhood as it is the benevolent effects of memory.
Clement Shorter’s introduction to the Pears Edition explains the sudden change in the Tetterbys, pointing out that “the boon is a curse, for recollections of unhappiness and ill-will are accompanied by memories of happiness and generous kindness. Redlaw and his associates all suffer alike. The delightful Tetterby family, usually so united, quarrel when he approaches; so do the other nice people of his environment” (10).
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Cohen, Jane Rabb. "The Illustrators of the Christmas Books, John Leech." Charles Dickens and His original Illustrators. Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1981. 141-151.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Haunted Man; or, The Ghost's Bargain. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1848.
_____. The Haunted Man. Illustrated by John Leech, Frank Stone, John Tenniel, and Clarkson Stanfield. (1848). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978. II, 235-362, and 365-366.
_____. The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. (1895). London: A & F Pears, 1912.
_____. 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.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910.
_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
_____. The Haunted Man. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861. II, 155-300.
Created 7 September 2015
Last modified 15 April 2020