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Christmas Morning: "Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?"
Charles Green
c. 1912
10.6 x 7.3 cm. vignetted
Dickens's A Christmas Carol, The Pears' Centenary Edition of The Christmas Books, I, 129.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
"What's to-day?" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.
"Eh?" returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.
"What's to-day, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.
"To-day?" replied the boy. "Why, CHRISTMAS DAY."
"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!"
"Hallo!" returned the boy.
"Do you know the Poulterer's, in the next street but one, at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.
"I should hope I did," replied the lad.
"An intelligent boy!" said Scrooge. "A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there — Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?"
"What, the one as big as me?" returned the boy.
"What a delightful boy!" said Scrooge. "It's a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck."
"It's hanging there now," replied the boy.
"Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go and buy it." ["Stave Five: The End of It," 129-130]
The first of the five scenes that Green has included for the final stave is a vignette (integrated into the very dialogue it realises) intended to communicate how profoundly the visitations have affected Scrooge, who (textually at least) is now full of bonhommie rather than curt, anti-Christmas sentiment. His new attitude towards Christmas is signalled by a dusting of snow on his window ledge and on the neoclassical capital for his doorway, the kind of monumental decoration suitable for a bank building — or a tomb. Punch cartoonist John Leech provided only a single image of the post-visitation Scrooge, but Green, witha much longer program of illustration, feels that the redeemed Scrooge is worthy of visual comment. The whole turkey-ordering episode, foregrounded to demonstrate Scrooge's social re-integration is curiously devoid of religious overtones, despite the street-boy's being in his "Sunday clothes" (129) and therefore presumably on his way to church.
The unrepentant, dour Scrooge muttering "Bah! Humbug!" to anyone dares to wish him "Merry Christmas!" is is a far more interesting subject for satirical illustration and caricature than this reborn Scrooge, who has become a caring humanitarian rather than a callous curmudgeon. Although the comic genius of Alastair Sim exploited the joyful unconventionality of the reborn miser effectively in the 1951 Rank-Renown black-and-white cinematic adaptation, and George C. Scott was laughing until he cried after he ordered the prize turkey in the 1984 made-for-tv colour adaptation, illustrators have tended to neglect the Scrooge of the fifth stave. The original illustrator, John Leech, included just one small wood-block engraving to demonstrate Scrooge's change of heart as an employer, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit, or The Christmas Bowl (see below), but, of the other nineteenth-century illustrators of the novella, only Sol Eytinge, Junior in the 1868 Ticknor and Fields edition has devoted a significant proportion of his program to the new, improved Scrooge, showing him joyfully putting on his socks on Christmas morning and smiling broadly as he digs into his pocket to find the coins to pay the poulterer for the prize bird he intends to send anonymously to the Cratchits in The Prize Turkey. Green utilizes the detailing of the ornate, eighteenth-century neoclassical headpiece for Scrooge's front-door to convince us that, although still living in Jacob Marley's house and wearing his dressing-gown and night cap from his visitations, this is not the Scrooge of Stave One, seen in precisely the same clothing in the chilling ghost-encounter of the frontispiece. Acting in accordance with the advice of the ghost whom he first encountered just a few feet below that window ledge as his door-knocker transformed, now Scrroge himself is transformed. The illustration shows us the redeemed misanthrope from the perspective of the plucky boy in his Sunday best — "Boy Who Gets Turkey," (1984 film cast) or the "Boy Sent to Buy Turkey" (1951 film cast) — who is the subject of Green's next illustration. Whereas the boy is seen from Scrooge's aerial perspective in the 1951 and 1984 films, Green gives us his perspective of Scrooge as seen from the street, and then gives us a street-level view of the lad. In other words, the two illustrations, taken together, give the reader a sense of a genuine dialogue between Scrooge and the boy. However, it is one thing to hire a boy and engineer the delivery of an anonymous gift, and quite another to apologise to another young man whom he has consistently rejected — his sister's son, Fred. As E. A. Abbey realised in the 1876 American Household Edition; the former is merely another cash transaction, after all, giving the lad a bonus of half-a-crown if he returns quickly with the poulterer's man, then buying the bird and sending it to Camden Town in a cab; this is generosity, but not contrition.
Left: Leech's tailpiece of Scrooge and his employee sharing punch, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit, or The Christmas Bowl. Right: Eytinge's attempt to capture the reformed Scrooge's child-like ebullience, "Scrooge Awakes," vignette for "Stave 5. The End of It".
Above: E. A. Abbey's 1876 engraving of Scrooge's "mending fences" with his nephew, "It's I. Your Uncle Scrooge! I have come to dinner. Will you let me in, Fred?"
Bolton, H. Philip. "A Christmas Carol." Dickens Dramatized. London and Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. 234-67.
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.
_____. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.
_____. A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1868.
_____. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being A Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. (1843). Rpt. in Charles Dickens's Christmas Books, ed. Michael Slater. Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, rpt. 1978.
____. A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth. Illustrated by Charles Edmund Brock. London: J. M. Dent, and New York: Dutton, 1905, rpt. 1963.
_____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Charles Green, R. I. London: A & F Pears, 1912.
_____. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1915.
_____. Christmas Stories. Illustrated by E. A. Abbey. The Household Edition. 16 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.
Created 30 August 2015
Last modified 11 March 2020