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Frontispiece: A Merry Christmas
L. Rossi after Charles Green
1912
Lithograph
13.6 cm high x 11.1 cm wide, exclusive of frame
Frontispiece for Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth, The Pears' Centenary Edition, III, facing engraved title.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
There was a dance in the evening. With which general mention of that recreation, I should have left it alone, if I had not some reason to suppose that it was quite an original dance, and one of a most uncommon figure. It was formed in an odd way; in this way.
Edward, that sailor - fellow — a good free dashing sort of a fellow he was—had been telling them various marvels concerning parrots, and mines, and Mexicans, and gold dust, when all at once he took it in his head to jump up from his seat and propose a dance; for Bertha’s harp was there, and she had such a hand upon it as you seldom hear. Dot (sly little piece of affectation when she chose) said her dancing days were over; I think because the Carrier was smoking his pipe, and she liked sitting by him, best. Mrs. Fielding had no choice, of course, but to say her dancing days were over, after that; and everybody said the same, except May; May was ready.
So, May and Edward got up, amid great applause, to dance alone; and Bertha plays her liveliest tune.
Well! if you’ll believe me, they have not been dancing five minutes, when suddenly the Carrier flings his pipe away, takes Dot round the waist, dashes out into the room, and starts off with her, toe and heel, quite wonderfully. Tackleton no sooner sees this, than he skims across to Mrs. Fielding, takes her round the waist, and follows suit. Old Dot no sooner sees this, than up he is, all alive, whisks off Mrs. Dot in the middle of the dance, and is the foremost there. Caleb no sooner sees this, than he clutches Tilly Slowboy by both hands and goes off at score; Miss Slowboy, firm in the belief that diving hotly in among the other couples, and effecting any number of concussions with them, is your only principle of footing it.
Hark! how the Cricket joins the music with its Chirp, Chirp, Chirp; and how the kettle hums! ["Chirp the Third," Pears Centenary Edition, 139-140]
Symbolist Swiss painter Luigi Rossi (1853-1923) was a relative stranger to English book illustration. He had studied at the Accademia di Brera in Milan under Giuseppe Bertini, and in the 1870s and early 1880s had devoted himself to landscape painting. During the period 1885-89 in Paris he began to work in the French publication trade as an illustrator of novels. Undoubtedly, this experience brought him to the attention of journalist, author, literary critic, and collector Clement Shorter, editor of the Dickens Centenary edition of Dickens's Christmas Books (1843-48).
Although Rossi as a foreigner was probably not familiar with Dickens's Christmas Books before receiving the Pears commission to complete the series, his publishers may well have drawn his attention to the series in the 1845 first edition and Barnard's Household Edition illustrations from thirty years before. It is not unlikely, too, that editor Clement Shorter drew the Harry Furniss illustrations in the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910) to Rossi's attention.
Perhaps Rossi in choosing the subject for his frontispiece consulted the concluding illustration for the 1845 edition of The Chimes, The New Year's Dance (see below). Rossi's frontispiece brings all the characters together in pairs, except for the blind girl, who remains very much an alienated figure in the story, and achieves no romantic liaison at the story's close. In contrast, in the 1910 Charles Dickens Library edition of the Christmas Books Harry Furniss had looked for a suitable closing scene that would emphasise comedic Nemesis or poetic justice rather than the kind of whimsical pairing that Leech had so delightfully stage-managed in the 1845 volume's finalé. Rossi may not have been been aware of the novelist's expressed dissatisfaction with Leech's final contribution to the original program, The Dance, but Dickens had not objected so much to the topic as to Leech's handling of it: the writer disliked the illustrator's representation of the Carrier as disproportionately large and ugly. Rossi makes no such error, and indeed all his pleasantly-drawn dancers (including Tackleton to the right) elegantly sway to the music of Bertha's instrument.
Left: Leech's interpretation of the story's finalé, The Dance (1845). Centre: Barnard's Household Edition interpretation of the story's fairy-cricket, Title-page vignette (1878), featuring John's broken pipe. Right: Barnard's conclusion of the novella with Caleb's singing a melancholy version of what should be a jovial drinking-song, After dinner Caleb sand a song about the Sparkling Bowl.
Furniss had chosen in 1910 to juxtapose the bulky, imposing figure of the fashionably-dressed, middle-aged "gentleman," the exploitative employer Tackleton, against the others in the story, who present a uniform block to the left of the somewhat theatrical set.
Harry Furniss's rather stagey conclusion to the story, Tackleton's Wedding Day (1910).
Rossi takes a different tack entirely. Rossi's panoramic treatment of the exuberant dance may owe something to illustrations of Hardy's Wessex Tales, particularly such stories as "The Three Strangers" (1883) and the March 1891 Charles Green illustration Among Those Who Danced Continually Were the Two Engaged Couples for "The History of the Hardcomes" in Wessex Folk. In Rossi's realistic interpretation of the five couples' swaying to the music of Bertha's harp (lower left) and the interposed musical cricket (upper left) the returned sailor, Edward Plummer in full nautical garb, stands out as he dances with his bride, May. Rossi also makes John and Dot, centre, a focal point in the composition by emphasizing the carrier's height and positioning him and his wife so conspicuously, relegating Tackleton and Mrs. Fielding (right), Tilly and Caleb, and Old Dot and Mrs. Dot (extreme left) to inferior positions. Here Boxer the spaniel looks on approvingly from the fallen wicker chair. But Rossi injects no such whimsy as Leech's having the family dog dance with the cat in The Dance (1845, penultimate page). Above the dancers, amidst the greenery hung round the room, the artist has embedded the nominal title of the book's initial illustration, A Merry Christmas. In his beginning, therefore, Rossi anticipates the conclusion of the slight seasonal story published in the midst of the Hungry Forties, some sixty-seven years earlier.
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books, illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
_____. Christmas Books, illustrated by Fred Barnard. Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878. Vol. XVII.
_____. 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. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. VIII.
_____. 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. Edited by Clement Shorter. Illustrated by L. Rossi. The Centenary Edition. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
Created 26 March 2020
Last modified 10 April 2020