"Charles Dickens in cameo, based on 1839 portrait" by Charles Green (p. 17). 1912. 9 x 6 cm, cameo and laurels only. Dickens's The Chimes, Pears Centenary Edition, in which each volume, whether illustrated by Charles Green or L. Rossi, begins with an ornate headpiece featuring Dickens as a young man framed by laurels, suggestive of his achievement in fiction and serving as an iconic presence in an edition commemorating his birth in Portsmouth a century earlier. Complementing his youthful image, which of course changed considerably over his lifetime since its initial mass publication appearance (exclusive of his miniature likeness as a balloonist in the monthly wrapper for Sketches by Boz) in the March 1837 advertisement Publishing Day of "Bentley's Miscellany" in Bentley's Miscellany, is his enduring signature, still a guarantee of genial satire, an active social conscience, and literary quality.
Passage Following
There are not many people and as it is desirable that a storyteller and a story-reader should establish a mutual understanding as soon as possible, I beg it to be noticed that I confine this observation neither to young people nor to little people, but extend it to all conditions of people: little and big, young and old: yet growing up, or already growing down again there are not, I say, many people who would care to sleep in a church. I don't mean at sermon-time in warm weather (when the thing has actually been done, once or twice), but in the night, and alone. ["First Quarter," 17, 1912 edition]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
Bibliography
Dickens, Charles. The Chimes. Introduction by Clement Shorter. Illustrated by Charles Green. The Pears' Centenary Edition. London: A & F Pears, [?1912].
_____. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1844.
_____. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In. Illustrated by John Leech, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Daniel Maclise. (1844). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978. 137-252.
_____. 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.
_____. Christmas Books. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910.
Solberg, Sarah A. "'Text Dropped into the Woodcuts': Dickens' Christmas Books." Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 103-18.
Thomas, Deborah A. Dickens and The Short Story. Philadelphia: U. Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
Welsh, Alexander. "Time and the City in The Chimes." Dickensian 73, 1 (January 1977): 8-17.
Created 6 May 2015
Last modified 26 February 2020