Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  22. She had been improving in self-knowledge as she grew up, Dickens shows in flashes. It is a pity he didn’t go into these more fully as some, like the influence on her childhood of her awareness that Miss Havisham’s relatives were intriguing against the adopted infant and that she couldn’t protect herself, are interesting and expressed with great force. We are entitled to complain that Estella isn’t given more scope, for unlike Biddy she is potentially someone to take seriously, though remaining for most of the novel a classical example of the child who, being unloved, can’t feel affection therefore, only hostility.

  7

  The Dickens Illustrations: Their Function

  WAS it necessary or desirable to have Dickens’s novels illustrated? Why did Dickens’s original publishers, all of them, think it essential to pay artists to illustrate novels, to illustrate even short pieces of light reading like Sketches by Boz? And even if illustrations were desirable or necessary then, do we, sophisticated intellectually, and capable readers of far more difficult novels than Dickens’s, need them now? Mr Lynton Lamb, in his Drawing for Illustration (Oxford, 1962) not only admits that ‘No work of imagination should need illustration’ but that some ‘fail to get satisfactory illustrations from any artist’ because, he feels, there are ‘some great novels that seem to me to be closed to any kind of illustrations’ – he makes this clear by specifying Jane Austen’s (‘I am embarrassed by the idea of seeing them illustrated’) and adding ‘It is the same with Shakespeare for me’; we would probably all agree with him, and add that Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and even the novels of George Eliot (though – significantly – not of Thackeray, Trollope or George Meredith) come into the same category. This is what every sensitive reader must surely feel, and it is encouraging to have the validity of such a prejudice confirmed by a very distinguished and widely successful professional in the field of book-illustration in our own time. Yet Mr Lamb also says – he is writing for young artists wanting to go in for illustration and gives them a brief history of this profession to start with – that in the second decade of the 19th century novels not only were expected to be illustrated but that the illustrations, being drawn by established artists, ‘were sometimes more eagerly awaited than the text’, and that the sixties, a time when the Victorian novel was in its prime ‘was a decade particularly distinguished for its illustrators and for the poetic and literary insight that they showed’.

  Thus we have to ask why Dickens’s novels differ from both Jane Austen’s and the (quite other) post-Romantic novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, in having been able to secure what are generally agreed as being satisfactory illustrations from several contemporary artists, and why – a different thing – Dickens’s publishers originally insisted on having illustrators for them. The second question is more conveniently answered first, since the answer is a matter of social history, and incidentally supplies an explanation for the other issue. The satiric art of the 18th century had a social focus in the coffee-house and an aesthetic meeting-point, between literature and visual art, in Hogarth, whose moral series of prints were accessible to the illiterate and implied a moral and fictional narrative which the viewer inevitably supplied for himself (there was of course a long tradition of popular art in woodcuts behind the popularity of Hogarth’s art). Hogarth’s moral and satiric work was known to the ale-house, the farm, the inn and the cottage, as well as to the frequenter of the London print-shops and coffee-houses. His pupil Gillray succeeded him, with an almost equally popular commentary on the social, political and literary scene throughout the Napoleonic period, establishing the mode of satire at a finer level of wit than Hogarth and in a convention more suitable for illustration of fiction, as we can see from the use made of Gillray’s stylization of life by Dickens’s two greatest illustrators, Cruikshank and ‘Phiz’ (Hablôt K. Browne). Cruikshank was born in 1792 and, says Mr Ruari McLean in his monograph on the artist,1 ‘was actually Gillray’s direct successor employed to finish plates that Gillray had started and was too ill to complete. The prints, brightly coloured and exhibited close against the panes of the printsellers’ windows, were an exciting feature of daily life in London to which there is no genuine parallel today. Their importance can be better understood when it is remembered that there were then virtually no illustrated papers or magazines, and that “the man in the street” usually could not read.’ Thus we have a public which, even when highly literate, was accustomed to a visual art going hand in hand with the presentation of political ideas and their discussion and with a moralistic literature, and that part of it which was semi-literate or illiterate had at least had this visual education. All were accustomed to taking in ideas in a stylized art form and had an imagination formed by the tradition of moral satire independent of literacy. Thus when the novel ceased to be entirely an expensive three-volume product for the upper classes and library-subscribers, because it was discovered that cheap part-publication was feasible to reach a larger public altogether, the parts had to be illustrated, and artists like Cruikshank who were caricaturists became also famous illustrators of books. Younger men like H. K. Browne imitated and adapted Cruikshank and Gillray in their turn. ‘When most of us think of “Dickens-characters”’, writes Mr Lynton Lamb, ‘we think of drawings by Cruikshank and “Phiz” rather than of later ones…. And although Cruikshank is the best of them all we are apt to forget that the only Dickens books with his illustrations are Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist. He has conveyed the idea of “Dickens’s London” better than any other artist’, etc.2 The suitability of Cruikshank and ‘Phiz’ for Dickens was not accidental; the principle of convergence that novelist and artists seem to exhibit so successfully is due to their all belonging to the tradition of a visual-literary moralistic-satiric art with its roots in Pope3 and Hogarth. Dickens’s brilliantly imaginative translation of Hogarth’s visual art into his own4 and for his own related purposes enriched with an extra dimension of Dickensian fantasy, has been mentioned in the essay on Dombey earlier in this book, and other instances of the kind can be found by the reader interested in this aspect of Dickens’s creativeness.5 A visual training of the kind Hogarth and Gillray had provided implied a sharpening of the wits, a habit of visualizing character and situation as types, and an instinctive practice of moralizing a spectacle, with an expectation of wildly exaggerated characteristics and of a satiric intention. This is what Dickens is to be found almost unconsciously satisfying in his early novels, and learning to refine on and bring into relation to a fuller apprehension of life in his maturer work, but he remained a great admirer of Hogarth, and an intelligent one, all his life. (A related influence, The Beggar’s Opera, also a part of this popular inheritance from the Augustan age, which added music [the songs sung to popular airs] and stage drama to the stylized satiric presentation of contemporary society, was also a strong and lasting influence in Dickens’s art: openly acknowledged in the introduction to Oliver Twist along with Hogarth, it can be seen more subtly present as late as Little Dorrit – as in Rigaud-Blandois’s various apologias which depend on the cynical undermining of values centring, as in Gay’s satire, on the word [and idea of the] ‘gentleman’, and in the cynical attitude to Society derived from Gay in terms of which the Merdle-Barnacle party in chapter XII is conducted. There ‘Bar’ has a long speech explicitly quoting Captain Macheath on law and lawyers and admitting Gay’s point that the company in the drawing-room is really no better ethically than that hanging on Tyburn Tree.)

  Thus thanks to this rich tradition and the visual education it provided, even those who took their instalments of fiction orally could fix those in their memories by the two or more full-page pictures that came with each, with the added help of the descriptive pictorial cover that Dickens always had drawn to summarize the plot and themes and show the leading characters in appropriate combinations and context, with the addition of the meaningful frontispiece and often a vignette on the title-page (which, as in the case of the very memorable one on the title-page of Little D
orrit, for instance, can be seen to stand half-way between a popular emblematic cut and a Blake-like symbolic vision). Lynton Lamb merely says, and this is the conventional view, that ‘The illustrations were of real importance in establishing the success of the series by fixing, as each part appeared, the identity of a character and the continuity of the action.’

  This was generally realized by both novelists, readers and illustrators. Even as late as 1853 I note that Surtees, introducing a new hero with Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, starts chapter IV with: ‘We trust our opening chapters, aided by our friend Leech’s pencil, will have enabled our readers to embody such a Sponge in their mind’s eye as will assist them in following us through the course of his peregrinations.’ But du Maurier wrote in an essay ‘The Illustrating of Books. From the serious artist’s point of view’ in The Magazine of Art in 1890: ‘What does not the great Dickens himself owe to Cruikshank and Hablôt Browne, those two delightful etchers who understood and interpreted him so well! … Our recollections (of his characters) have become fixed, crystallised and solidified into imperishable concrete by these little etchings in that endless gallery, printed on those ever-welcome pages of thick yellow paper, which one used to study with such passionate interest before reading the story, and after, and between. One may have forgotten what Mr Pecksniff has thought, or said, or done in this world, but what he looked like, never!’ Similarly, William Black, himself a Victorian novelist, wrote of Millais’s illustrations to Framley Parsonage, that they were ‘illustrations that remained vivid to the mind when the characters in the novel have all faded away into shadow or downright oblivion’. This however was, naturally, as far as possible from being Dickens’s idea of the function of his illustrators.

  In showing in a previous essay how the illustrations to Copperfield draw attention to the novelist’s theme and make apparent his deeper intentions, I have shown that Dickens made the illustrations that he had to have, to satisfy traditional expectation and need, serve the purposes of an altogether new art of the novel. The illustrations of Dickens’s novels up to Bleak House are a unique addition to the text, not only visualizing a scene for us in its historical social detail, and giving a visual embodiment to the characters which expresses their inner selves for us inescapably, besides being a visual embodiment of dramatic flash-points: the illustrations are frequently indispensable even to us, the highly-trained modern reader, in interpreting the novels correctly because they encapsule the themes and give us the means of knowing with certainty where Dickens meant the stress to fall (since his touch is often lightest where most meaningful, and tactfully indirect). Even we lose much if we don’t read the Dickens novels with their original illustrations, and this is true of no other English novelist. For fortunately Dickens was not only a genius as a novelist, he was also a gifted editor and had an intuitive as well as an informed understanding of the problems of providing a diverse and even largely semi-literate and illiterate public with, not something it would have no effort to absorb as entertainment, but with what he himself wanted to write yet which must be presented in a form that such a mixed readership could cope with and get something out of – if not all that there was in it to get. It was part of his genius that he was able to seize the opportunity presented by the well-established custom of employing artists as illustrators. It was not his merit of course but his good fortune that the age in which he wrote was that of the great age of English illustration6 both in technical achievement, in craftsmen like the famous brothers Dalziel who could carry out the artist’s designs, and in the many gifted exponents of the art of illustration such as Cruikshank, ‘Phiz’, Leech, Keene, Doyle, among others.

  Thus Dickens was able to carry with him on his progress from entertainer to artist both a public that even when literate was not educated in reading fiction that had broken with the eighteenth century novel,7 and also a public that without the illustrations would hardly have been able to cope with a novel doled out in portions at intervals of as much as a month, or even a fortnight, much less the novels of Dickens with (after Oliver Twist) their enormous numbers of characters and range of scenes. Cruikshank, twenty years older than Dickens and already famous, was naturally engaged by Dickens’s publisher to make the collection of Dickens’s early journalism, Sketches by Boz, attractive for publication in book form, and his etchings for the book, many of which are independent of the text and exist as works of art which are recognized classics of their kind, were rightly admired as such. But whether he was, as artists and art-lovers always allege, Dickens’s best illustrator is another matter, which is of interest in deciding the whole question of the function of the Dickens illustrations. When Dickens started as a novelist, after some puerile attempts at fiction in story form which can be seen in Sketches by Boz, it was, as we all know, through being engaged at the age of 25 to furnish a story for illustrations by Seymour in the projected form of cockney sporting plates for a Nimrod Club, an engagement which Dickens accepted while, characteristically, refusing to provide sporting scenes and rejecting the subordinate role generally. According to him:

  I said that it would be infinitely better for the plates to arise naturally out of the text; and that I would like to take my own way, with a freer range of English scenes and people, and was afraid I should ultimately do so in any case, whatever course I might prescribe to myself at starting. My views being deferred to, I thought of Mr Pickwick, and wrote the first number; from the proof-sheets of which Mr Seymour made his drawing of the club. I connected Mr Pickwick with a club because of the original suggestion; and I put in Mr Winkle expressly for the use of Mr Seymour.

  Mr Winkle was unnecessary, it turned out, since Seymour committed suicide before the second number and later artists were never in the position of being able to dictate to or make any such demands on the novelist: Dickens saw to that. After temporary aid had been called in (a weak illustrator called Buss) Dickens himself made the excellent choice of H. K. Browne, who signed himself thenceforward ‘Phiz’ in harmony with Dickens’s pen-name of ‘Boz’ (which however Dickens soon dropped, though it had earned for him the title of ‘The Inimitable Boz’). The fact that Browne was younger even than himself and obviously not a formidable artist like Cruikshank was no doubt an attraction for the novelist; but Browne’s real merit must have been that he was decidedly in the Hogarth tradition – Dickens had wisely rejected Thackeray who had applied for the vacant post, and who would have had nothing to offer for Dickens’s purposes. (He also rejected the young Leech, with less reason, for Leech’s illustrations later to some of Dickens’s Christmas tales are both finely executed and appropriately enchanting, and Leech was a widely successful illustrator all his life.) Thus, having had illustrators thrust upon him in his literary beginnings, Dickens had, in learning to work with them, soon realized that they could be made to serve his own purposes as collaborators, as well as the publishers’ in promoting the sales.

  In fact, Seymour did well to remove himself from the Pickwickian scene. As we can see from the arrangement of the characters up the staircase in his drawing of ‘Dr Slammer’s defiance of Jingle’ which was used in the second number of Pickwick, Seymour could make an elegant and memorable design, but his Pickwick is unconvincing (he had even had originally, it seems, the misguided idea of making Mr Pickwick a tall, thin man) and his scenes are weak too – compare his plate ‘The Pugnacious Cabman’ with similar street-scenes and character-pieces of both Cruikshank and ‘Phiz’, to see his inferiority for Dickens’s purposes. Dickens now had two admirable artists at his disposal, but he did not choose the distinguished illustrator of Sketches by Boz for his next novel, Oliver Twist; Bentley, the publisher for whom Dickens was editing Bentley’s Miscellany, a magazine in which Oliver Twist was published in instalments, himself engaged Cruikshank to illustrate the novel. Cruikshank seems to have sent his plates to be printed independently of the author. Dickens objected to some but only just succeeded in stopping the very trite last illustration and having that replaced by one less u
nsatisfactory. While some of the illustrations to Oliver Twist have been immensely admired, with justice, the illustrations as a whole are very uneven, and it seems to me that there is no doubt that Dickens did the best for himself and his readers in electing to stick to ‘Phiz’ after that (sometimes supplemented by Cattermole and others) until in his late novels he no longer needed any illustrations. It seems to me evident that the kind of free connexion with a text, and preferably with a non-novelistic text such as most of Sketches by Boz, was what suited Cruikshank best, and that where the text of Oliver Twist offered similar opportunities to Sketches, the illustrations to the latter are the better. The ‘Public Dinners’ where characters of the beadle kind lead in the infant objects of charity, would have done well for the novel, since it superbly incarnates the theme of the early satiric part of Oliver Twist, while the ‘Seven Dials’ and ‘Monmouth Street’ he did for the Sketches show how much the novel lost by not having any such illustrations – how odd that Cruikshank did not take the opportunity, which his ‘Seven Dials’ suggests he could have taken successfully, of supplying more vigorous illustration for the crucial scene of the recapture of poor Oliver by Nancy and Sikes! Cruikshank neglects most of the opportunities he had for helping the reader by illustrating the key points of the novel, since he took no directions from the author – other than the very fine ‘Oliver asking for More’ and the supremely imaginative success of ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’. It is odd that Mr Lynton Lamb asserts the superior dramatic power of Cruikshank as well as the undeniably superior bite, depth, solidity and luminous texture of his drawings compared with ‘Phiz’s’, for Cruikshank did not adequately illustrate the recapture of Oliver, or illustrate at all the intensely dramatic court scene where Fagin feels the moral condemnation of the court in the accusing eyes focused on him; and when he takes such an opportunity as the important scene of Oliver’s trance (in which Oliver feels, without seeing, the terrifying presence of Fagin and Monk at the window) there is nothing supernatural, no thrilling sense of the mystery of Oliver’s vision, and no horror, all of which the text demands. The pictures of Bill Sikes after the murder of Nancy are crude and none of these drawings containing the Artful Dodger and his set convey the combination of a degraded humour with brutality that Dickens has created there. Yet Oliver, with its sequence of satiric, melodramatic, tragic, and potentially symbolic scenes, was surely stimulating for any artist with flexibility and who would be willing to be directed by an intelligent sympathy with his author’s aims.