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The Fezziwig's Ball
Harry Furniss
1910
14.5 x 9.4 cm framed
Initial illustration for A Christmas Carol in Christmas Books, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), VIII, facing the title-page.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort of man who knew his business bet- [29/30] ter than you or I could have told it him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley." Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.
But if they had been twice as many — ah, four times — old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig cut — cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger. [Stave Two, "The First of the Three Spirits," 29-30]
Paul Davis (1990) notes that Furniss has taken pains to make the reader regard the scene as an extension or presentation of Scrooge's memory: “Furniss's frontispiece redoes Fezziwig's ball, the subject of [John] Leech's frontispiece for the original Carol. However, in Furniss's version Scrooge's framing consciousness becomes a dominant element in the composition of the picture and in the vision of Christmas” (127).
In theory, we read the energetic illustration in anticipation of the passage that it realizes (proleptically), since we shall not encounter for almost thirty pages the spectacle of the dance in Fezziwig's warehouse — a substitute for the baronial hall of Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists (1822) and the sixth canto of Sir Walter Scott's Marmion (1808) — but in practice Furniss's readers in 1910 likely all knew the scene by reputation, even if they had not already become familiar with it over the past seventy years, so that the reading of the picture may participate in the analeptic, that is, deciphering the picture after encountering the textual passage that it realises. Davis notes that Furniss has taken pains to make the reader regard the scene as an extension or presentation of Scrooge's memory.
This initial illustration acknowledges Furniss's debt to Leech by its subject and its position, and sets the keynote: what the reader will experience is Scrooge's dream and Scrooge's journey to redemption, rather than the tenderness of the Cratchit family scenes upon which the Household Edition illustrators focussed. However, in terms of the later, "familial" reading of the novella Furniss
comes closest to representing the sentimental side of the story in the frontispiece of Fezziwig's ball . . . . The familiar scene of the dancers, led by the rotund head couple, is framed with an elaborate border of distorted caricature. At the edge of the picture, peeping through the frame, stands Scrooge, analogous to the reader who experiences the tableaux of Scrooge's life through the frame of the narrator's commentary. [Davis 126]
We can take Davis's point if we regard the original Leech version of the scene, which gives such prominence to the affluent mercantile couple and the lovers under the mistletoe (left), a realistic presentation devoid of the jolly goblins who frame Furniss's version. Furniss has derived the senior in the comfortable arm-chair and the child at her knee (left) directly from similar figures in the right foreground of Leech's 1843 illustration. And yet, Furniss has rejected the narrative simplicity of the Leech engraving for a much more spectacular and complex — one might well say "psychological," but certainly suggestive of the seasonal pantomime in its elaborate staging — treatment that foreground the dreamer, but loses his spiritual guide, The Spirit of Christmas Past. Although somewhat more realistically, both Eytinge and Abbey focus on the commanding figure of the founder of the feast, Mr. Fezziwig, and the dance in progress, whereas Furniss compels his viewer's eye to stray to the cartoonish goblins derived from such later Christmas Books as The Chimes. Untextual interpolations though they may be, these figures suggest the magical and theatrical dimensions of a child's experience of Christmas that the other illustrators fail to communicate. Furniss's lithograph, despite its very nineteenth-century subject, possesses all the exhuberance and energy of a Baroque composition — and Furniss's own whimsical humour.
Left: Leech's Mr. Fezziwig's Ball. Centre: E. A. Abbey's Old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!". Right: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s The Fezziwig Ball (1868);
Davis, Paul. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven: Yale U. P., 1990.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1878.
Dickens, Charles. The Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. VIII.
_____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.
Created 28 May 2013
Last modified 4 March 2020