"God Bless Us Every One!" [Tiny Tim and his crutch] -- Title-page vignette by E. A. Abbey for Dickens's "Christmas Stories" (2024)

In the title-page vignette, marking the simultaneous opening ofA Christmas Carol and the American Household Editionof Dickens's collected Christmas Stories, E. A. Abbeyprepares the reader for the final moment of the novella, reiterating one ofDickens's most famous tag lines for his characters. Significantly, although hisfate is closely connected with that of the story's protagonist, Tiny Tim doesnot appear in the original sequence of eight images by Dickens's original illustrator, the Punch cartoonistJohn Leech. However, Abbey may have seenthe scene of Bob and Timothy Cratchit on their way home from church inSol Eytinge, Junior's "Tiny Tim's Ride". Inthis chapter-heading illustration in the narrative-pictorial sequence for theTicknor and Fields A Christmas Carol — A Ghost Story of Christmas (Boston, 1868), at the start of Stave Three ("The Second of the Three Spirits") Eytinge depicts the pair returning home through the snowy streets of Camden Town together. Eytinge again features Tim in his father's arms in "Bob Cratchit at Home", and in a death-bed scene entitled "Poor Tiny Tim", but does not accord the poor man's child any particular prominence. In contrast, although Barnard depicts Bob's younger son but once in his series of five woodcuts for the British Household Edition, he places the boy squarely in the centre of the full-page frontispiece "He had been Tim's blood-horse all the way from church". Abbey's thumbnail study of a rather sturdier and less restrained Timothy Cratchit, against no backdrop and accompanied by no other characters, points to no one specific moment in the text about to be read. Rather, through the vignette Abbey alludes to two passages in the novella, the first at the Cratchit Christmas dinner, and the second, the narrator's quoting Tim in the very last line, which thus becomes a parting benediction on all the story's readers:

"A merry Christmas to us all, my dears! God bless us!" Which allthe family re-echoed.

"God bless us every one !" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.[Stave Three, "The Second of the Three Spirits," p. 27]

and

[Scrooge] had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived uponthe Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was always said of him,that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed theknowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Timobserved, God bless Us, Every One! [Stave Five, "The End of It," p. 39]

Thus, although the initial scene, the frontispiece describing the momentousmeeting of Scrooge and the ghost of his business partner on Christmas Eve,introduces the reader to the most famous of The ChristmasBooks with which the American Household Edition volume begins, thetitle-page vignette of Tiny Tim, saluting us with his iconic crutch andoft-repeated tag line, welcomes us to Dickens's annual tributes to Christmas,both in the Christmas Books of the 1840s and in hismore journalistic and collaborative seasonal pieces of the 1850s and 1860s inHousehold Words and All the YearRound.

The semi-circular shape of the caption above the figure is interesting in severalrespects: none of the other Household Edition title-page vignettes has any sort ofcaption; moreover, this quotation is given in a shape suggestive of both a halo (suitable to the angelic child who, returning home from church, reflects upon Christ's message about caring for the disadvantaged and physically challenged) and perhaps a wreath ora portal — to the Christmas message and the "lived" holiday experience of thoseamong the lower orders whose commonplace lives were rarely the subject of fiction.

Illustrations of Bob Cratchit's younger son by Fred Barnard and Sol Eytinge, Jr.Left: Barnard's conceptions of Tim — detail from the frontispiece of the BritishHousehold Edition (1878), and of Tim arriving home from church (1885); detail from"Tiny Tim's Ride" by Sol Eytinge, Jr. (1868). [Click on images to enlarge them.]

For other nineteenth-century images of Tiny Tim, see the diminutive figure infour illustrations by Sol Eytinge, Jr., for the 1868 Ticknor and Fields edition, and Fred Barnard's wood-engraving of Tim and his doting father in the frontispiece for the British Household Edition, and his 1885 photogravure for the third series of Characters from Dickens. Althoughboth Eytinge and Barnard associate the crutch with the appealing child, bothillustrators render him as exceedingly small in relation to hisfather, who is a middle-aged man of but medium height:

Tiny Tim arrives home, enjoysChristmas dinner in his father's arms, and lies on his deathbed (Eytinge). [Click on images to enlarge them.]

References

Guiliano, Edward, and Philip Collins, eds. AChristmas Carol. The Annotated Dickens. Vol. 1.New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z:The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts OnFile, 1998.

---. The Lives and Times of EbenezerScrooge. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 1990.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol —A Ghost Story of Christmas. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor andFields, 1868.

---. ChristmasBooks. Il. Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapmanand Hall, 1878.

---. Christmas Stories. Il. E.A. Abbey. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876.

Guida, Fred. "A Christmas Carol" and ItsAdaptations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Parker, David. Christmas and CharlesDickens. New York: AMS Press, 2005.

Last modified 20 November 2012