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"Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?"
Arthur Rackham
1915
Lithographic reproduction of line drawing with watercolour wash
13.7 high by 10 cm wide, framed.
Illustration for Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol, "Stave Four: The Last of the Spirits," p. 112
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking that the explanation might lie here.
He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.
“How are you?” said one.
“How are you?” returned the other.
“Well!” said the first. “Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?” [Stave Four, "The Last of the Spirits," p. 113]
The scene of the brief dialogue is presumably in the street (suggested by the cobblestones) just outside the 1838 Royal Exchange building in The City (London's business and financial centre). The pair meet to exchange not merely commodities but also gossip not long after Scrooge's death has been reported to his business associates. These two "good men of business" seem rather cheerfully dressed for a discussion of the recent death of a colleague. Rackham represents as diminutive figures the two Victorian capitalists who are discussing Scrooge's demise. Above their puny, quotidien forms Rackham juxtaposes the gigantic figures of the goat-legged Devil and, clutching his money bags fearfully in his arms, an elderly, balding Ebenezer Scrooge in rumpled trousers. Although elegantly and colourfully dressed, Scrooge's former associates on the 'Change seem blasé about their wealthy colleague's involuntary withdrawal from scenes of enterprise and endeavour. However, the illustrator forces readers to consider not his illustration of the text, but his extension of it, as the conventional expression takes shape above the interlocutors. In the fanciful depiction of the idiom, the spirit of miser, dressed exactly as he was in life, meets the red-haired, cunningly smiling Devil, whose pitchfork oddly resembles a shepherd's crook.
Rackham has made the radical decision to foreground the extension of the text (the image of a fearful Scrooge confronting an accusatory Devil) and reduce the realization of the text (the depiction of the two businessmen in the prime of life) to a visual footnote. He has therefore rebelled against conventional Victorian notions of textual illustration in order to comment upon the futility of the aging miser's quest for personal security by accumulation of wealth over a lifetime — a quest yjat the illustrator symbolizes in the two bags of coins that the tremulous Scrooge clutches. Rackham creates a note of ambiguity in the Devil's beckoning gesture as Scrooge fears the Common Enemy of Man may be asking him to give up those ample bags. The reader must supply the realistic backdrop of the dialogue, the London Exchange, from Dickens's text (that is, the new Stock Exchange building in Capel Court – possibly Scrooge's "place of occupation"), and imagine an appropriate metaphysical backdrop for the confrontation of the anguished soul and the horned Satan, with his talons beckoning the miser to come forward for judgment and retribution.
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1915.
Last modified 16 June 2019