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A flushed and boisterous group
Arthur Rackham
1915
Lithographic reproduction of line drawing with watercolour wash
13.5 high by 10.1 cm wide, framed.
Illustration for Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, Stave Two: "The First of the Three Spirits," 60.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received! The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll’s frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter! The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided. ["Stave Two: The First of The Three Spirits," 66-67]
In The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (1990) Paul Davis notes that Rackham, like other early twentieth-century illustrators, depicted Belle's Christmas with her children (and grandchildren) differently than had than Dickens’s earlier illustrators. He was one of at least twenty-one artists (including O. J. Stevenson, J. R. Neill, H. C. Appleton, A. I. Keller, S. B. Nichols, C. M. Boog, A. C. Michael, Charles Pears, Charles E. Brock, and most notably Harry Furniss), who emphasize the modern custom of giving of gifts and the playfulness of children rather than her family’s consumption of turkey (or goose) and Christmas pudding, the subject of many earlier representations of the Cratchits' Christmas dinner: “Rackham devoted two of his twelve color illustrations to it, one showing Belle's children frolicking around her, the other depicting the arrival of the porter with the children's Christmas presents. In its focus on present-giving, Belle's Christmas was also a more modern celebration than many others in the book. Dickens had not considered present-giving central to the Christmas festival. . . . . His celebration centered instead on the Christmas feast” (108-09).
Positioning the illustration some six pages ahead of the passage it depicts makes its relationship to bachelor Scrooge enigmatic, since it faces the text describing the conclusion of the Fezziwig's warehouse Christmas dance. The clutter of toys and the painting askew behind Belle's teenaged daughter imply a somewhat chaotic parlour as well as the spontaneous overflowing of the children's enthusiasm for their older sister. Such are the intense and pleasurable feelings that younger Scrooge denied himself when he let love of money replace his love of Belle.
Left: Sol Eytinge, Junior's scene of Scrooge's being rejected, A Retrospect. Centre: Leech's interpretation of Scrooge's attempting to suppress painful memories, Scrooge Extinguishes the First of The Three Spirits. Right: Charles Green's depiction of the parting of Scrooge and Belle in a park, The End of Scrooge's Early Love Story (1912).
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by John Leech. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843.
_____. 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.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.
_____. The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 1990.
Last modified 6 March 2020