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Passage Illustrated

It may be noted of Miss Slowboy, in spite of her rejecting the caution with some vivacity, that she had a rare and surprising talent for getting this baby into difficulties: and had several times imperilled its short life, in a quiet way peculiarly her own. She was of a spare and straight shape, this young lady, insomuch that her garments appeared to be in constant danger of sliding off those sharp pegs, her shoulders, on which they were loosely hung. Her costume was remarkable for the partial development, on all possible occasions, of some flannel vestment of a singular structure; also for affording glimpses, in the region of the back, of a corset, or pair of stays, in colour a dead-green. Being always in a state of gaping admiration at everything, and absorbed, besides, in the perpetual contemplation of her mistress's perfections and the baby's, Miss Slowboy, in her little errors of judgment, may be said to have done equal honour to her head and to her heart; and though these did less honour to the baby's head, which they were the occasional means of bringing into contact with deal doors, dressers, stair-rails, bedposts, and other foreign substances, still they were the honest results of Tilly Slowboy's constant astonishment at finding herself so kindly treated, and installed in such a comfortable home. For, the maternal and paternal Slow-boy were alike unknown to Fame, and Tilly had been bred by public charity, a foundling; which word, though only differing from fondling by one vowel's length, is very different in meaning, and expresses quite another thing. [Chirp the First," 80]

Commentary: The Theatrical Miss Slowboy

A. E. Abbey draws attention to the character of Tilly Slowboy, the  Perrybingle's adolescent nurse for their infant, by making her the subject of the separate frontispiece for the novella for The Cricket on the Hearth in Christmas Stories. This large-scale illustration is just one of three full-page illustrations among his twenty-eight for the 1876 American publication. What is surprising, perhaps, that Abbey focuses on the gangly, one-dimensional comic character rather than on one of the novella's more developed principals — John and Dot Peerybingle — or even on the secondary characters around whom the subplot of the lost son revolves (Caleb and Bertha Plummer, the toymakers). Perhaps the reason lies in the popularity of the novel as adapted for the stage since as the Comic Woman of the melodrama the gangly, androgynous orphan Tilly would have been a favourite with theatre audiences. The celebrated British comedian J. B. Buckstone even made it an hilarious cross-dressing role in the December 1845 adaptation by Ben Webster at London's Haymarket Theatre. In America alone after its December 1845 debut in London until the year of the publication of the Harper and Brothers New York edition, The Cricket on the Hearth was the subject of twenty-six theatrical adaptations, most of which would have featured a comic headliner in the role. The play seems to have experienced a resurgence in theatrical interest in the United States in the 1870s, with productions in New York City, Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Towsontown (Maryland), Lowell, and St. Louis.

Abbey's choice is nonetheless surprising in light of the contemporary interest in Dot Peerybingle, as evidenced by Dion Boucicault's highly popular 1859 adaptation Dot, A Drama in Three Acts, first performed at New York's Winter Garden and many times afterwards in various New England centres, most pertinently perhaps at Boston's Liberty Hall, Boston's Opera House, and Lowell’s Music Hall in 1874. Abbey might well have travelled north from New York City to see one of these productions, although he would certainly have found it easier three years earlier to see Boucicault's adaptation at Booth's in New York City in November 1871.

Although, as Henry James has suggested of Abbey's mature style, the simple line drawing is a "direct, immediate, solicitous study of the particular case" (the Peerybingle family's adolescent nurse), in choosing her as his focal character Abbey has hardly "steered clear of the danger of making his people theatrical types" (James), although he lovingly depicts the infant and the rocking cradle which give Tilly her present purpose in life. The style, like the composition itself, is minimalist — to Abbey in this scene nothing else matters. Consequently, the Sixties style, of which this full-page composite woodblock engraving is a fine example, offers a sharp departure from the humorously detailed style of the Punch cartoonist John Leech, as well as from the elaborate engravings of the other original illustrators: Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Edwin Landseer, and Clarkson Stanfield. If one may judge from her besotted expression, which implies that she is a kindly "natural," the foundling Tilly clearly dotes upon the infant whom the Peerybingles have placed in her charge. Her dress is patched but utterly lacking in ornamentation — indeed, as the text stipulates, it is little more than a shift, which implies her background as an orphan. Abbey has illustrated Dickens's detailed description of Tilly, which occurs four pages later, and thereby implies a proleptic or advance reading of the picture, an initial impression that is clarified by encountering this textual moment after seeing the image: "Don't let the dear child fall under the grate, Tilly, whatever you do!"

A comparable moment in the original 1845 series appears in Leech's John's Arrival (see below). There Tilly, seated in the rocker, struggles to hold the baby (right foreground) while Dot sets the table in preparation for John's arrival in "Chirp the First." Leech's focus is the kettle on the hearth and the numerous fairies emanating from its steaming spout. She appears a second time in a thumbnail by Leech entitled Tilly Slowboy (see below), which again features the solid rocker, the nursing stool, and an angular Tilly tipping the "precious darling" backwards (89). The loving detail with which Abbey has conveyed the comic particulars of Tilly's visage departs sharply from Leech's caricature.

For alternate versions of Tilly Slowboy, see details of the two Leech illustrations below, and the much more sympathetic large-scale wood-engraving by the Household Edition illustrator Fred Barnard just two years after Abbey's series. Essentially a satirical cartoonist, Leech does not extend his sympathy to the awkward adolescent nurse; in contrast, Barnard and Abbey seem to have found something endearing about Tilly and her fascination with the "precious darling."

Relevant Illustrationss from the 1845​and later editions

Other nineteenth-century illustrations of Tilly Slowboy by Leech (1845) and Barnard (1878).

C. E. Brock's interpretation of Tillky, the baby, and the intrusive Boxer: . . . an obtrusive interest in the Baby (1905).

Bibliography

Bolton, Philip H. "The Cricket on the Hearth." Dickens Dramatized. London and Boston: Mansell and G. K. Hall, 1987. 273-95.

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.

_____. 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.

_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.

_____. 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.

James, Henry. Picture and Text. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1893. 44-60.

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Created 10 December 2012

Last modified 20 April 2020