"John's Reverie" — thirteenth illustration for Dickens's "The Cricket on the Hearth" (1845) (original) (raw)

Passage Illustrated: John Wrestles with His Conscience

There was a gun, hanging on the wall. He took it down, and moved a pace or two towards the door of the perfidious Stranger’s room. He knew the gun was loaded. Some shadowy idea that it was just to shoot this man like a wild beast, seized him, and dilated in his mind until it grew into a monstrous demon in complete possession of him, casting out all milder thoughts and setting up its undivided empire.

That phrase is wrong. Not casting out his milder thoughts, but artfully transforming them. Changing them into scourges to drive him on. Turning water into blood, love into hate, gentleness into blind ferocity. Her image, sorrowing, humbled, but still pleading to his tenderness and mercy with resistless power, never left his mind; but, staying there, it urged him to the door; raised the weapon to his shoulder; fitted and nerved his finger to the trigger; and cried "Kill him! In his bed!" . . . .

He recoiled from the door, like a man walking in his sleep, awakened from a frightful dream; and put the gun aside. Clasping his hands before his face, he then sat down again beside the fire, and found relief in tears.["Chirp the Third," 118-119]

Commentary: The Dark Night of the Soul, Minus the Fairy Cricket

Under the strain of John's all-absorbing jealousy of the youth disguised as the elderly traveller (ill-founded, as it turns out), John Peerybingle wrestles all night with his conscience, remembering the happy times before the hearth, now considerably shrunken. This is not the well-dressed, independent businessman depicted by later artists as in such domestic idylls as Fred Barnard's John Peerybingle's Fireside (1878), but a Dorset peasant in a linen smockfrock brooding before a cold fireplace and an enormous shotgun, which become in this wood-engraving dropped into the text symbols of the choices that John faces. Significantly, Leech omits the Fairy Cricket of the Hearth suddenly appears at this point to comfort the suffering husband and awaken his conscience. This was the moment in the Dion Boucicault adaptation Dot! when the fireplace parted to reveal the story's supernatural agents.

Relevant Illustrations from the 1845, 1905, and 1910 editions

Left: Richard Doyle's melodramatic treatment of John's anguish, Chirp the Third (1845). Right: Harry Furniss's pen-and-ink drawing transferred to lithograph, The Vacant Stool(1910).

E. C. Brock's's large-scale depiction of the Fairy of the Hearth appearing to the despondent carrier: Headpiece for "Chirp the Third," John by the Hearth with the Fairy (1905).

Bibliography

Bolton, H. Philip. Dickens Dramatized. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

Dickens, Charles. The Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home. Illustrated by John Leech, Daniel Maclise, Richard Doyle, Clarkson Stanfield, and Edwin Landseer. Engraved by George Dalziel, Edward Dalziel, T. Williams, J. Thompson, R. Graves, and Joseph Swain. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1846 [December 1845].

Created 20 February 2001

Last modified 4 April 2020