How the ghost got his rattle.

Last weeks blog was about the illustrators of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and especially about the pictures they did of the scene of Marley's ghost.  There are probably hundreds of such illustrations of Marley, both pretty old and more recent as the book is so famous, it is constantly in print somewhere.  And they all show Marley in chains, because, of course, that's how Dickens described him.  He wears a long winding chain riveted around his waist from which hangs -

. . .cash boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.

These items are all to do with Marley's past, his mistaken pursuit of wealth for wealth's sake, his obsession with business over people; in fact, they represent all his sins in visible form.  Dickens obviously wanted to suggest that he is also imprisoned by his past, which is constantly with him, reminding him of his misdeeds.  He reveals to Scrooge that he also has a chain about him that he can't see - a chain of sins which is expanding ever longer, the longer he lives.

'Or would you know,' persued the Ghost, 'the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself?  It was as full as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas Eves ago.  You have laboured on it since.  It is a ponderous chain!'

Dickens is of course using the iconography of a century before, when criminals, highwaymen, pirates and murderers were hung in chains after execution or in an iron cage so that their bodies would act as a warning to others.  But the criminals of his day would have worn leg irons and manacles, and in the eighteenth century some prison inmates were still chained to the wall or floor.  The insane would also have been chained up in the days before a more enlightened approach to mental illness was adopted.

The body of Captain Kidd hangs in a iron cage.

We've all heard that ghosts rattle chains of course, and Dickens makes much of Marley rattling and shaking his chains.  So if we looked back over the woodcuts and engravings of the supernatural over the last three hundred years, we'd be sure in finding an image of a ghost wrapped in chains.  Actually in these days of the Internet I can make a good attempt at finding such images, and after a twenty -  minute search, have found only one.  Of course there are plenty of pictures from film and television, and also from stage performances of  - Marleys ghost.  But no others that I can find.

But if anyone mentions ghosts, especially in a jocular tone they always mention them rattling chains.  Does it all come from Dickens?  Is the description of Marley's ghost the source of it all?  A little internet research reveals the medieval ghost of a man who refused to leave his cloak to the poor, and is condemned in purgatory to wear the same cloak, but now as heavy as a church door.  This seems a little like Marley who wears his sins about him as a heavy chain which he has worked on since his death.  A kind of punishment that he must wear.

Charles Dickens.  Yes, he was young once.

But it's just possible that Dickens drew his description for Marley's ghost from a very ancient source.  Some time back I loaded down from Project Gutenberg a Kindle version of an old out of print book about ghost stories from the classical world.  Entitled 'Greek And Roman Ghost Stories' by Lacy Collison-Morley, formerly scholar of St John's College Oxford, it retells a tale that the Roman writer Pliny recounts in a letter.

In his letter to Sura, Pliny tells the story of a terribly haunted house in Athens that no one would live in because of it's awfully haunted reputation.   The philosopher Athenodoros saw it to be let or sold at a very cheap price so he inquires.  He is suspicious at first but on hearing the reason for the low price he takes the property for a month.  He has his bed placed in the front court yard of the house, and then spends the evening writing to keep himself occupied.  At length he hears at some distance a rattling of metal, which comes closer and closer.

Then the noise is inside the house, and soon in one of the nearby rooms.  He continues writing until a shape looms nearby.  Its of an old man, in tattered rags.  Around his body, arms and legs he has great chains.  It is the ghost, and the apparition beckons to him to follow.  But, although shaken, Athenodoros pretends not to see the ghost and carries on writing.  At last the apparition comes forward and shakes his chains over Athenododrus' head.  At last the philosopher puts down his pen, takes up the lamp and follows the ghost outside into the grounds of the house.

The ghost leads him to a spot, and then vanishes, vapour-like into the ground.  Athenodoros marks the place, and then returns the next day with a magistrate and a team of workmen with picks.  They dig up the earth and find the skeleton of a man in chains.  Athenododrus then pays to give the remains proper burial, and the ghost is never heard of again.

Apart for being the template for all haunted house stories, I think that Dickens was aware of the tale and used it in part for the description of Marley.  I may be wrong for I don't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all stories of the supernatural throughout history, but the Greek story prominently emerges as the only one I can find with chained ghosts.

Athenodoros and the ghost

So, I leave you with the only picture of a chained ghost (apart from Marley) that I could find - Its Athenodoros himself, and his chain rattling ghost.

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This Ghostly little book

 

As Christmas appears head and shoulders above the horizon, that hardy perennial of the season, A Christmas Carol will no doubt also appear in some form or other.  And that's no bad thing, for there's some fine writing in it, and it can claim to have shaped our present conception of the holiday like no other book.  We have had a hundred and seventy two years to form our thinking about the characters in the novel, and that has been helped along by the vision of illustrators who worked on the book and its re-issues in Dickens's life and after his death.  Charles Dickens was apparently somewhat ambivalent about having his work illustrated, probably because he felt it detracted from the seriousness of the writing, but as his publishers insisted throughout his career that his work have pictures he then tried to take as much control over the process as he was able.

It was not that he disliked the illustrations, or the artists themselves, many of whom were close friends.   It's more that he felt the illustrations were another tool of his writing it was his right to take control of, just as he took control of every word in his novels.  Anyone who tried to keep him out of that decision process was a problem.  This is understandable to an extent, but he seems, like many other writers of the day, to have derived ideas about character from the pictures, often asking for sketches to be forwarded to him so as to gain a clearer idea of the characters during the ongoing work.  And so I think, the ambivalence; on the one hand the pictures were facile but on the other a source of inspiration.

Artists of 'A Christmas Carol'.  Top left - John Leech.  Top Right - Fred Barnard.  Bottom Left - Harry Furniss.  Bottom Right - Arthur Rackham.

His illustrators were often given rigid written or verbal instructions on how a picture should look, and many found themselves doing multiple versions of the same picture before the author was finally satisfied.  He was often fulsome in his praise for an artists work when he felt it was successful but sometimes the publishers must have used their veto on particular pictures and blocked Dickens's influence over them.   So even the illustrator most often associated with his work, H. K. Browne, could sometimes fall a little short of Dickens's standards.  In a letter to his friend John Forster, Dickens wrote of a plate by Browne:

I am really distressed by the illustration of Mrs Pipchin and Paul (Dombey and Son).  It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark.  Good heavens!  In the commonest and most literal construction of the text it is all wrong.....I can't say what pain and vexation it is to be so utterly misrepresented.  I would cheerfully have given a hundred pounds to have kept this illustration out of this book.

The artist who first illustrated A Christmas Carol was John Leech (1817 - 1864) a Londoner of Irish decent, who completed four plates for the novel, and Dickens must have been happy with them as all subsequent depictions of the characters have usually drawn something from them.  I don't think Leech illustrated more of Dickens novels, but then, he was heavily involved in work for the publication Punch, and may have found little time.  I was looking at the quartet of images he produced for A Christmas Carol, and especially the one of Marley's ghost.  This is a pivotal scene in the story, it is filled with atmosphere and really sticks in the mind.   Anyone who wishes to illustrate it would have to get this right, and I feel Leech's effort is a bit stiff and cramped, and although it is the first to realise a scene that other artists drew from, it is maybe not the most effective.

The original.  John Leech's version of Scrooge meeting Marley's ghost.

Another notable artist who tackled the story was Fred Barnard (1846 - 1896) who started illustrating Dickens beginning in 1871, the year after the author's death.  In his version of the Marley's Ghost scene, although his depiction of Scrooge could be sharper I think his version is pretty good, the ghost being impressive and a little comic which I think Dickens actually intended.  He is also possibly the first to include the detail of the ghost existing in its own infernal atmosphere, which causes his hair and clothing to seem to move.  In Barnard's version we see the ghost looking as if he's standing in a gale, but there's a good detail of the candle on the table with a long still flaring flame obviously unaffected by even the slightest draft.

Fred Barnard's version.

Next up there's Harry Furniss (1854 - 1925), born of an English father and a Scottish mother in Ireland.  Like Leech before him, he did a great deal of work for Punch magazine, and didn't start his work on A Christmas Carol until 1910, quite late in his career.  His picture of Marley's ghost is not bad, but is very strongly influenced by Leech's drawing, and looks almost like a re-tread of the same ideas.  Marley is shown in the same position, and posture, Scrooge is slightly more lively but in the same place in the composition, so, a reasonable effort, and a small improvement on John Leech's version.

Harry Furniss's version

Then lastly there's the great Arthur Rackham (1867 - 1939) who did his version of the story in 1915.  And surprisingly, as a lifetime fan of Rackham, I'm not hugely impressed by his version of the Marley scene.  It still seems static, with little response from Scrooge, the ghost, which should have greatly appealed to Rackham's sense of the grotesque, just seems ordinary, standing in a semi-threatening stance over a seated Scrooge.  I can only imagine that it illustrates the line: -

'How now!' said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever.  'What do you want with me?'

Arthur Rackhams version.

This is the only way to explain the calm and considered expression on Scrooge's face.  But both Leech and later Furniss seem also to have chosen that exact moment for their drawings too.  It got me thinking.  Modern illustrators would almost always choose the moment where the ghost removes the bandage that holds his mouth closed, (presumably placed around his head by the undertaker) and lets his lower jaw fall down onto his chest, a moment exploited wonderfully by Richard Williams in his fantastic 1970's animated version of the story.  To us it has more dramatic impact, but I think it must have been deemed too vulgar for inclusion in illustrations of the past.

So in the end, who gets my vote for the best Marleys Ghost?  Step forward Mr Fred Barnard.

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