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Mr. Redlaw and the 'Waif'
Charles Green
c. 1912
16.2 x 10 cm, exclusive of frame
Dickens's The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain. A Fancy for Christmas Time, The Pears' Centenary Edition, V, 53.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
A shrill cry reached his ears. . . . he caught up the lamp, and raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to pass into and out of the theatre where he lectured, — which adjoined his room. Associated with youth and animation, and a high amphitheatre of faces which his entrance charmed to interest in a moment, it was a ghostly place when all this life was faded out of it, and stared upon him like an emblem of Death.
"Halloa!" he cried. "Halloa! This way! Come to the light!" When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and crouched down in a corner.
"What is it?" he said, hastily.
He might have asked "What is it?" even had he seen it well, as presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered up in its corner.
A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant's, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man's. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy, — ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.
Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow.
"I'll bite," he said, "if you hit me!" ["Chapter One: The Gift Bestowed," Pears edition, 52]
The caption immediately below the illustrations points directly towards the moment realised: "Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at" (53). The child of the streets, having been granted refuge by Milly Swidger in the Old College, cowers in the corner of Redlaw's anteroom adjacent to the lecture theatre, raising his arm to protect himself from an anticipated blow — as in John Leech's Redlaw and the Boy (see below), a confrontation attempted by a number of subsequent illustrators, including Ticknor-Fields' house illustrator Sol Eytinge, Jr. in the Diamond Edition's Redlaw and The Boy, set, like the scene in the British Household Edition, when Redlaw interrupts the boy in his intense enjoyment of a roaring coal-fire. The great seventies interpreter of Dickens, Fred Barnard tackled the issue of urban poverty in a highly realistic manner in "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!" (see below). Although the desolate child first seen in Green's Mrs. William and the "Waif", in which Milly notices the six-year-old sleeping in a street doorway, is lacking shoes, he seems too well-dressed and not nearly savage or "bestial" enough when one compares him to earlier illustrators' interpretations. Perhaps by 1912 such poverty as Barnard had incarnated was no longer to be found in London — or Green did not want to address the unpleasant social reality of such places as those which Gustave Doré depicts in his expose of the East End of London in the sordid and disreputable immigrant area of Dudley Street, Seven Dials (1872).
As in the Leech original of the boy by the fire, Professor Redlaw has entered, raising the lamp (not a candle, as in the Leech engraving) as the street urchin cowers in the corner. However, the waif in the present Green plate does not much resemble his Leech and Dickens originals: "A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant's, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man" (52). The precise moment that Green has attempted to realise occurs at the very bottom of the facing page: "Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a best, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow" (52). Neither Redlaw nor the boy has yet spoken; the boy is about to counter Redlaw's apparent, physical threat with a verbal threat — although Green's well-dressed child does not possess feet "ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them" (52). However, as in the Leech plate, Green's Redlaw dominates the entire left side of the full-page lithograph: a realistically drawn figure whose professional dress, age, and stature contrast the cowering child on the right side of the page.
There is nothing particularly mysterious about Green's Redlaw, nor is there anything particularly atavistic or primal about the cornered boy. Whereas the original illustration (to which Green is undoubtedly reacting) includes the curtain, the wainscoting, the chair separating the two figures (significantly supporting a pile of books), and Redlaw's guttering candle held aloft, Green focuses on the contrasting figures: to the left, Redlaw in his professional suit, stares down at the cringing boy as he holds a kerosene lamp aloft, casting an ominous shadow of his profile and pointing hand; to the right, the child of the streets in tattered clothing seems merely afraid rather than "desperate" and "savage." Moreover, in the Green illustration, various glass bottles (upper left) imply that this is the room where Redlaw conducts his chemical experiments, although the text does designate "his room" as "the laboratory." Whereas Leech shows the connecting doorway, its curtain drawn aside, Green intensifies the child's feeling of entrapment by having one of his feet engulfed by Redlaw's shadow and by eliminating any possible escape.
Leech's somewhat wooden but atmospheric cartoons versus Barnard's modelled study of the Boy and Redlaw: left: Leech's "Redlaw and The Boy". Centre: Barnard's realistic "I'm not a-going to take you there. Let me be, or I'll heave some fire at you!". Right: Harry Furniss's dynamic and dark "I'll bite if you hit me" (1910).
Each contains about thirty illustrations from original drawings by Charles Green, R. I. — Clement Shorter [1912]
Dickens, Charles. 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; 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, 365-366.
_____. The Haunted Man. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by Felix Octavius Carr Darley. The Household Edition. New York: James G. Gregory, 1861. II, 155-300.
_____. 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.
Created 2 July 2015
Last modified 2 April 2020