Stephen and Rachael
Approximately 10 cm high by 7.5 cm wide (framed)
Fourth illustration for Dickens's Hard Times in the Ticknor & Fields single volume Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times Diamond Edition, facing p. 406.
Some thirteen years after the initial publication of Dickens's industrial novel, Eytinge correctly highlights several of the novelist's chief concerns in this story — the plight of the working poor, and the lack of humane divorce laws for all bust the most affluent. [Commentary continued below]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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These same concerns appear in the illustrations of Fred Walker (1868), Charles Stanley Reinhart (1876), and Harry French (1876), in particular in their depictions of the power-loom weaver Stephen Blackpool, his cherished friend Rachael, and his slatternly wife, the alcoholic and laudanum addict without a Christian name and simply designated as "Mrs. Blackpool." Whereas the other illustrators mentioned have chosen more critical moments for realisation — Fred Walker highlights Stephen's temptation to let his wife poison herself by accident, for example, in the 1868 Illustrated Library Edition woodcut "Stephen and Rachel in the Sick-Rooms" — Eytinge has chosen to realise that tender, initial meeting of the middle-aged factory-workers in the street outside the mill (left) just after late-afternoon shift-change. Eytinge appropriately shows Rachael as still attractive, despite the severity of factory work, and Stephen as prematurely grey, careworn, and almost numb, standing in the rain after hours of service to the implacable machine, driven by steam engines whose nine chimneys dominate the backdrop. [commentary continued below]
Moreover, in emphasising the industrial backdrop Eytinge connects the labouring couple to the source of Bounderby's and Gradgrind's wealth: the north of England factory (dominating the left-hand register), which could as easily be a mill in a New England factory-town such as Manchester, New Hampshire, or Lowell, Massachusetts. In the four illustrations of the Illustrated Library Edition, the substandard working environment is only indirectly alluded to in "Stephen Blackpool recovered from the Old Hell Shaft" (1868); the Household Edition illustrators, however, make a similarly direct connection between the plight of the couple and their inhuman working conditions. C. S. Reinhart would later introduce Stephen in the context of his marital difficulties in "Heaven's Mercy, Woman! . . . . Hast Thou Come Back Again!", shocking the reader with the animalistic woman who repeatedly despoils him; although his view of the same moment is less graphic, Harry French again references Stephen's unfortunate domestic circumstances and his victimisation by his wife in "'Heaven's Mercy, Woman!' He Cried, Falling Farther Off From The Figure. 'Has Thou Come Back Agen?'" The passage of description that Eytinge is realising in the cloth-capped figure of Stephen occurs much earlier, in chapter 10:
. . . in the last close nook of this great exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes, as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically called "the Hands," — a race who would have found mere favour with some people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs — lived a certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.
Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life. It is said that every life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a misadventure or mistake in Stephen's case, whereby somebody else had become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same somebody else's thorns in addition to his own.
He had known, to use his words, a peck of trouble. He was usually called Old Stephen, in a kind of rough homage to the fact. A rather stooping man, with a knitted brow, a pondering expression of face, and a hard-looking head sufficiently capacious, on which his iron-grey hair lay long and thin, Old Stephen might have passed for a particularly intelligent man in his condition. Yet he was not. He took no place among those remarkable "Hands," who, piecing together their broken intervals of leisure through many years, had mastered difficult sciences, and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely things. He held no station among the Hands who could make speeches and carry on debates. Thousands of his compeers could talk much better than he, at any time. He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity. What more he was, or what else he had in him, if anything, let him show for himself. [chapter 10, p. 406]
However, Eytinge has chosen not merely to realise Dickens's description of Old Stephen but also to capture the moment at which he is relieved to catch Rachael in the street:
But, he had not gone the length of three streets, when he saw another of the shawled figures in advance of him, at which he looked so keenly that perhaps its mere shadow indistinctly reflected on the wet pavement, — if he could have seen it without the figure itself moving along from lamp to lamp, brightening and fading as it went, — would have been enough to tell him who was there. Making his pace at once much quicker and much softer, he darted on until he was very near this figure, then fell into his former walk, and called "Rachael!"
She turned, being then in the brightness of a lamp; and raising her hood a little, showed a quiet oval face, dark and rather delicate, irradiated by a pair of very gentle eyes, and further set off by the perfect order of her shining black hair. It was not a face in its first bloom; she was a woman five-and-thirty years of age. [chapter 10, p. 406-407]
Other artists who illustrated this work
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1988.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
Last modified 27 November 2011