The fireplace is dead. Long live the fireplace.
Different cultures have replaced fireplaces as they deemed fit. In the lofty, far-off Himalayas, they have been replaced by portable and cheap electric heaters. America has seen them being replaced by that insular creature - Central Heating. A few bookshops have saved the fireplace for long, winter evenings - but these are few and far between (They do include Townsend Bookshop in Pittsburgh, one of my regular haunts). Fireside dining in America, too, is - ahem - rare and overpriced. The fireplace in a residential dwelling has passed away - the ash pit sealed up, with crackling, electric fireplaces fitted in the firebox, and the flue used as the central A.C. exhaust tube. After all, what with fire hazards, chimney cleaning, cold drafts down the chimney, the reality of global warming and the threat of Carbon Monoxide poisoning, who can doubt that the Age of the Fireplace was fast coming to an end ? The only active fireplace in a residence that I've been to was a small charcoal fireplace at a townhouse in Darjeeling, India. There is of course the Fallingwater fireplace - hewn into a natural rock shelf, sporting an awesome wine warmer - but the Kaufmanns dont live in Fallingwater anymore, do they ?
But ... the fireplace lives on in books, music, and illustrations. Every alternate christmas card shows a fireplace, even those sold in India, where the majority of the people have never seen a fireplace! A vast majority of christmas songs refer to fireplaces. I can hear the dissenter out there grumbling that winter and Christmas are about fireplaces, but then - how does one explain the Pink Floyd numbers with crackling log fire, and the "Time" lyrics? And as for books ...
The Fireplace Syndrome: If book illustrators have a chance to illustrate fireplaces and hearths, then they will.
So long, Frank Lloyd Wright
Why is the fireplace such an ubiquitous entity in book illustrations ? Flip a page, and you'll probably see a fireplace burning brightly / casting eerie shadows / showing off mantelpiece knick-knacks. It is as if entire generations of cross-hatch artists learnt to draw the fireplace before they sketched a tree. A dog, left to an illustrator's devices, inevitably turns into a curled-up-canine-on-a-rug-on-the-hearth. Socks will gravitate towards being hung over the mantelpiece, and the rocking chair is always beside the fireplace.
Not that I mind, I'm all for cheery fireplaces - in fact, I remember quite a few books by their fireplace events, and illustrations. Lonely M'Adam huddled up in front of the fireplace in Bob, Son of Battle. James Herriot shaking off the Yorkshire chills in front of his clients' fireplaces in his autobiographies. Aunt Dahlia destroying china on the mantelpiece with well-aimed throws in P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. The only thing I liked about the TV show Guinness Book of World Records, was that the host, David Frost, would stand in front of a live (or was it electric ?) fireplace.
A variety of factors contribute to the ubiquity, methinks.
Eileen Soper's illustration for
The Five Go Down To The Sea
A fireplace, self-illustrated by Edith Durham
in High Albania
Beneath the roof there is a bed,
But not yet weary are our feet,
Still round the corner we may meet:
A sudden tree or standing stone
That none have seen but we alone.
...
Mist and twilight, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade! Away shall fade!
Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,
And then to bed! And then to bed!
- Lord of the Rings, Vol. I: The Fellowship of the Ring
J.R.R. Tolkien
The fact that Saint Nicholas uses the chimney as the primary mode of access to the house has caused most christmas illustrations to be drawn with a fireplace, or failing that, a chimney. Christmas-themed books are typically meant for Christmas gifts, and are consequently lavishly illustrated (and never complete without a picture of socks and fireplace). The anonymously published poem A Visit from St. Nicholas (1823) (better known as "The Night Before Christmas", and L. Frank Baum's The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902) introduced the concept of Santa Claus to the American public, and cemented his mythology, including his mode of entry - the fireplace. The Coca-Cola advertisements on the December issues of National Geographic for three decades (1930s - 1960s) cemented the visual correlation. The pictures below show the strong visual correlation of Santa Claus, fireplaces and christmas. In clockwise fashion, from top left : an animal - based retelling of The Night Before Christmas illustrated by Tasha Tudor; Robert Sabuda's pop up book on the same theme illustrating a pop-up fireplace with a santa climbing out of it; a rebus - based retelling of the same illustrated by Nan Brooks; Haddon Sundblom's 1963 Coca Cola ad campaign.
The Night Before Christmas - a typical example of a Christmas-themed book
and the Coca Cola ad campaign derived from its descriptions
The cosy atmosphere elicited by fireplace illustrations, as well as the large number of christmas-themed children' books make fireplaces in children's books a recurrent theme. Campfires and open-air fireplaces are also very common depictions. Graphic novels like Asterix always end with a fireside scene. Early 20th century illustrator E. H. Shepard, and original Noddy book illustrator Harmsen van der Beek used fireplace scenes extensively to achieve the warm and comfortable feeling. Shepard, famous for his Wind in the Willows and Winnie the Pooh illustrations, casts most of his subjects sooner or later in front of the fireplace. Beek even went so far as to improvise a fireplace in Noddy's friend Big-Ears' toadstool-turned-house.
From L to R: Beek's toadstool house fireplace;
Piglet's fireplace in Winnie the Pooh by Shepard;
Arthur Rackham illustration for Snow Queen
Fireplaces are natural fodder for mystery and supernatural stories. Fireplaces throw bizarre, dancing shadows and offer the illustrator an eerie perspective like no other. Illustrations in The Haunted Bookshop, by Christopher Morley, use this point of view. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens, though hardly having anything to do with Saint Nicholas, is mostly a supernatural tale virtually played out in front of the fireplace. However, perhaps the best use of shadows and silhouettes was made by the Victorian illustrator Arthur Rackham, who had a penchant for silhouettes, and often depicted fireplaces, campfires or dawn and dusk scenes.
Rackham's depiction of shadows cast by a fireplace in Snow Queen, and John Leech's
hand-coloured etchings for the first edition of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
Fireplaces also feature prominently in fantasy stories. In a well-secured house, the only point of entry from or exit into the great (and often fantastic) external world is .. the fireplace. Generations of storytellers - fantasy or otherwise, have exploited this fact, ever since the author of Three Little Pigs set pen to paper. Children's fantasy stories have consistently used fireplaces as means of escape, a la C.S. Lewis' wardrobes. Fireplaces do have an inherent use in fantasy stories - the boiling place for the witch or wizard's brew - everywhere from Noddy to Terry Pratchett, with the glorious exception of the Lord of the Rings.
The wolf jumps in through the chimney - The Golden Goose Book illustrated by L. Leslie Brooke.
Cover art for Terry Pratchett's play by Stephen Player.
In detective and adventure stories For those well-versed in Enid Blyton stories, it should be blatantly obvious where to look for the secret tunnel or room. Hollow walls are all very well, but nothing really beats the fireplace. Fireplace illustrations in adventure and detective stories are present for just the same reasons as in fantasy and mystery stories : interesting points of entry and exit for the author, offering a unique perspective for the illustrator. Just between you and me, I would attribute the large number of fireside illustrations in detective novels to The Strand's Sidney Paget, the person who was mistakenly asked to illustrate the serialized Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes solved a great majority of his cases by the fireside - from un-bending fire pokers in Speckled Band, to fireside deliberations in Five Orange Pips, and Paget faithfully illustrated a wide range of fireside activities. While most of his illustrations do not directly show the fireplace beside the mantelpiece, the reassuring glow of the fire, and the mantelpiece clock are omnipresent in his "indoor" illustrations.
Paget's illustrations for the Adventure of the Naval Treaty, and The Hound of Baskervilles (from L to R)
The rocking chair, the hearth rug and a book. With the possible exception of snoozing, no fireside activity is probably as popular as reading. Bookshops, reading rooms and libraries often feature fireplaces, and quite a few books are fireplace-themed. Take Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home, a Victorian christmastime book. Book on fireplaces like "Frank Lloyd Wright's Fireplaces" have also been popular.
Dickens' The Cricket on the Hearth, lavishly illustrated by G.C. Widney
Postscript : Another aspect of fireplaces are the unerring accuracy with which they make their way into film scripts. (Remember the library scene in The Ninth Gate?) But then, as they say, that is another story.
