by F. R. Leavis
Not only did he, with Bleak House, surpass the ability of the traditional illustrators to accompany him. It is evident to us, looking at the scene from this side, that a general change of taste was in progress which required more and different things from illustrated books than previously, and which eventually was seen as a complete revolution, and recognized approvingly as such by the art critics of late in the century, whose own taste was formed in the sixties and after. Thus Joseph Pennell in his Modern Illustration in 1895 says, with the assurance of being generally endorsed in such a judgment: ‘I suppose that among artists and people of any artistic appreciation, it is generally admitted by this time that the greatest bulk of the works of “Phiz”, Cruikshank, Doyle, and even many of Leech’s designs, are simply rubbish … Leech was the successor in this work of Gillray and Rowlandson, and though his designs appealed very strongly to the last generation, they do not equal those of Randolph Caldecott, done in much the same sort of way … The change from the style of Cruikshank, Leech [etc] … to Rossetti, Sandys, Houghton, Pinwell, Walker, Millais was almost as great as from the characterless steel engraving of the beginning of the century to the vital work of Bewick.’ He sees Once a Week, started in 1859, as the connecting link. Writing in 1897, Gleeson White similarly, in his compendious work English Illustration, The Sixties, testifies to the predominance of a taste in illustration that had completely lost touch with that of Dickens’s reading-public of the thirties, forties and fifties. Gleeson White exhibits a radical reaction against the line of caricature and satiric-moral illustration, which he fulminates against. It is evident that his, the then ‘modern’, idea of illustration was that of an art existing in its own right as ‘pictures’, which were to express the Pre-Raphaelite concept of Beauty and also refined comedy, domestic sentiment, naturalism in depicting scenery and correctly academic composition. Thus he deplores illustrations prior to the sixties except for Millais’s to Trollope and Fred Walker’s to Thackeray, which correspond more to his requirements, and far from finding any contribution to the success of Dickens’s novels in Cruikshank’s and ‘Phiz’s’ illustrations, he considers them blemishes: ‘Even the much-belauded Fagin in the Condemned Cell appears a trite and ineffective bit of low melodrama today … We recognize the power of the [Early Victorian] writers, but wish in our hearts that they had never been “illustrated”, or if so, that they had enjoyed the good fortune which belongs to the novelists of the sixties’, though reluctantly admitting that ‘the idea of Once a Week owes more to these serial novels than to any previous enterprise’.
This is of course an incontrovertible fact. This periodical’s lavish illustrations to fiction and verse by a galaxy of existing successful artists and illustrators, supplemented by new blood, continued by extending and enriching the earlier tradition of novel-illustration and yet ultimately impoverishing it by excising the wit and humour, the satire and moral comment, so that it ceased to be a popular and educational factor in the age succeeding Dickens’s. In fact, it rose in the world socially and became Art. That it met a need is shown by the success of similar illustrated periodicals that closely followed – e.g. The Cornhill (less thickly illustrated), and the abundantly illustrated Good Words were both founded in 1860 and the need for such periodicals was due to the need for fiction in instalments accompanied by attractive (i.e. striking and interesting) illustrations, the taste for which had been formed by those writers, artists and publics now written off by the Gleeson Whites and Pennells and who show what this soon led to – a separation out of illustrator and writer so that the illustration was conceived as a picture in its own right, and illustrations not so conceived were so down-graded as to be eventually despised. Gleeson White says of Thackeray’s own designs for ‘Lovel the Widower’ in The Cornhill (which actually were ghosted by better artists): ‘Like the “Phiz” plates for Dickens’s works, and many of John Leech’s sketches, they have undoubtedly merit of a sort, but not if you consider them as pictures pure and simple.’ He asserts the low intrinsic value of the work of ‘Phiz’, Cruikshank and Leech, among other pre-sixties illustrators, for, he says, only ‘certain qualities which are not remotely connected with art belong to them’. Here one sees ‘art’ should be understood to have a capital A. He specified Millais’s illustrations to Trollope as the right kind of thing, but these in fact do Trollope a disservice by ignoring the comedy, the humour and the recurrent satiric vein in his work. This new taste approves above all of the idyllic type of pictorial illùstration. In accordance with this changed taste we may note that collections of the new illustrations, as worthy to be Art and independent of a text, were provided from the sixties onwards, and evidently were at once successful. The Cornhill Gallery, of illustrations from The Cornhill, was published in 1864 and so popular as to be republished next year; the wood-engravings, of Millais’ drawings, mostly to Trollope, were published handsomely as Millais’ Illustrations in 1866, while illustrations from periodicals owned by one publisher (from Good Words, Argosy, Sunday Magazine etc.) were published in an anthology suggestively called Touches from Nature in 1876. Others followed, showing that the conception of illustration as picture was now established generally and that it was indeed high time to drop ‘Phiz’ after A Tale of Two Cities appeared at the end of 1859. We may note further that Ruskin found Keene’s art ‘coarse’ and that the poetess Alice Meynell considered it ‘obscene’. Gleeson White doesn’t select for reproduction any of Keene’s illustrations to Evan Harrington in Once a Week (which were admired by Meredith himself) and praises Millais and Walker in contrast; yet writing in 1928, when late Victorian taste had lost its authority, Forrest Reid in his book on Illustrators of the Sixties says: ‘somehow Keene’s kind of beauty appeals to me more than theirs’, and acutely remarks of Fred Walker’s illustrations: ‘In the drawings for Denis DuvaI he may clothe his figures in the costumes of a bygone age, but the drawings themselves breathe precisely the same idyllic Victorian spirit as his modern illustrations.’ The idyllic spirit had indeed completely replaced the comic spirit in illustrations of fiction, and from the sixties onwards Victorian illustrators when they aimed at the poetic tended to interpret this sentimentally or solemnly.
Arthur Hughes is an exception here, and as regards his possibilities as the illustrator of the Blakean side of Dickens’s art we may cite Forrest Reid’s testimony to Hughes’s achievement: Hughes made 231 drawings for the first five volumes of Good Words (1860–5) and of these Reid wrote: ‘Here, in these figures of children, he at last enters his own world – a world very close to that of Blake’s Songs of Innocence … faithful to the imaginative side of childhood’; and he makes an important point in Hughes’ favour when he says of his unforgettable illustrations to George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1870) that ‘The artist was unhampered by George MacDonald’s strong moral purpose.’ In effect, Hughes could express tenderness without sentimentality and ideally he would (if he had been available at that date!) have been a far better collaborator for Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop than Cattermole (‘Phiz’ would still have been needed too); but Dickens’s public would not at that period have been able to assimilate, or be helped by, such an artist as Hughes, nor could Hughes have developed such an art as his without the influences that emanated from the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Beside his imaginative innocence that enabled him to recapture the child’s view of the world Hughes had an indescribable poetic quality, such as Dickens combines in his later novels with a wholly adult recognition of the squalor, corruption and degradation inherent in Victorian society, but this Hughes could not have interpreted. There was therefore no one adequate illustrator possible for Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend. There is now, judging by the recent biography and its reception by reviewers, a wholesale revolt against du Maurier’s work as an artist, based mainly on his undeniably deplorable novels, and on his alleged defects of character and personality (which were not, however, noted by his contemporaries, including his admiring friend He
nry James). But as an artist du Maurier did not deteriorate until the late seventies, and Dickens had much better have got him for Edwin Drood (and such associated stories as Hunted Down and No Thoroughfare) than anyone else working in illustration then. Of the illustrations du Maurier made for The Notting Hill Mystery which ran as a serial (1862–3) Forrest Reid says: ‘never, I should think, has a story of this class found such illustrations – illustrations that cover its poor horrors with a veil of dark romance at once sinister and poetic, and that linger in the memory long after the tedious and involved plot is forgotten.’ And du Maurier’s earlier work is successful in the grotesque and satiric modes also, and, in addition, as we may see from his sensitive and intelligent illustrations to Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, he was thoroughly capable of interpreting civilized social life and its painful situations in memorable and moving compositions. He was thus qualified to be the Dickens illustrator of the most difficult period of the novelist’s art in that respect.
The Christmas books which Dickens produced annually as money makers (also from a feeling that it brought his readers closer to him and helped keep their loyalty) were all well done by pictorially, and undoubtedly created some special bond between the novelist and the public. They are linked very strongly with the novels – A Christmas Carol, so delightfully adorned and interpreted by Leech, being a bridge between Pickwick and the subsequent more serious Dickens, while The Chimes clearly associates with Hard Times, for example. For The Battle of Life Dickens tried the experiment of a number of artists, either to do it justice (he over-valued it, but we tend to do the opposite no doubt because it was this trivial tale for which he broke the continuity of his creation of Dombey, very visibly to the novel’s detriment) or to make sure of an extra large sale. It wasn’t worth the pains Dickens and his team lavished on it, and the combination of artists must have been confusing for the readership in spite of a graceful pseudo-Blakean frontispiece by Maclise, and a lovely interior of the reunited sisters which pleased Dickens as well as it does us. For The Chimes Leech, Maclise and Stanfield all did their best, and Leech’s pictures are again perfect for the purpose; The Cricket on the Hearth which associates with the idealization of domestic life in Dickens’s middle phase from David Copperfield, and which was nearly as popular as that novel, has some of Leech’s enchanting interiors and vignettes, preceded by an elaborate frontispiece by Maclise covering the whole story which gave that preview of the tale that Dickens always had provided for his novels. No doubt the proliferation of artists was to make the buyer feel he had value for money and to promote the sale of Dickens’s annual Christmas offering as a gift-book, and it is true that the illustrations alone must have accounted for the sales of the gloomy and obscure story of The Haunted Man, of which they are much the best part, though the chopping and changing from one artist’s style to another’s throughout its pages is disconcerting, to say the least. Altogether the collected Christmas stories re-published in one volume under the title Christmas Books (not to be confused with the inferior Christmas Stories volume) show the work of seven artists and gave Dickens as well as his public great satisfaction – he was less critical of these illustrations since he knew the texts were not important like those of the novels – that is, not likely in any case to be taken seriously by his readers. But in one case, that of The Cricket on the Hearth, where Dickens had initiated the airing of serious themes – later to be consolidated in David Copperfield – the illustrations actually do the tale a disservice: their charm and quaintness underplay the text instead of confirming and reinforcing its implications as they might have done if more seriously conceived, or if Dickens had taken the trouble he did next year for Dombey to see that they should be. The fact is that Dickens himself had wrapped up his serious interests here in fantasy and fairies (sub-titling it ‘A Fairy Tale of Home’) and Leech and Maclise followed suit. That Dickens was not at bottom satisfied with the consequences is evident in the strange afterthought, with its Hans Andersen-like melancholy, attached to the ‘fairy tale’:
‘But what is this! Even as I listen to them, blithely, and turn towards Dot, for one last glimpse of a little figure very pleasant to me, she and the rest have vanished into air, and I am left alone. A Cricket sings upon the Hearth; a broken child’s toy lies upon the ground; and nothing else remains.’
A confession of regret unique in Dickens’s creative work and which acknowledges a mistake he never repeated.
Finally, I think it worth suggesting that just as in the previous century of Pope, Gay, Hogarth and the novelists who admittedly fertilized themselves on the dramatic satire of The Beggar’s Opera and Hogarth’s pictorial satires, so in the Victorian age the influences of literature and art were not merely mutual but inseparable. In general Dickens can be seen and felt to have passed through a similar development to the illustrators and humorous artists of his age – an age which covered an 18th-century tradition lasting into the Regency Period up to the latish Victorian revulsion against the Early Victorian heritage. For instance, Dickens hailed Leech (giving excellent reasons) as an improvement on Rowlandson or Gillray in subtlety and as effectively more persuasive therefore as a satirist: ‘his opinion of Leech in a word was that he turned caricature into character’ Forster summarized. Dickens, however, never accepted anyone as an improvement on Hogarth, whose merits as a satirist and moralist he showed he thoroughly appreciated in specifying why Cruikshank’s teetotal series, The Bottle, is essentially inferior to Hogarth’s Gin-Lane. Yet nevertheless Dickens was not so much a chameleon to these changes of taste as an anticipator of genius and an influence directing them himself in some respects, it seems to me. The inmates and visitors at Chesney Wold might have been written in for Keene to illustrate; we recognize the debilitated cousin in all his detail of dress, action, attitudes and speech-habits as a genuine Keene. Keene had a nice ear for the articulation and idiom of such types as well as a fine eye and hand for their embodiment (like Dickens he used to mime his characters first to be sure he had got them right), and with the immortal dictum: ‘Better hang wrong fler than no fler’ Dickens would seem to have added just the necessary element of satiric caricature to be doing a Keene himself. Yet Keene had only recently started drawing for Punch when Bleak House was appearing and had not got into his characteristic stride. In Our Mutual Friend the society gathered round the Veneerings’ dinner-table is recognizably that of Keene’s and du Maurier’s art worlds which, incidentally, Dickens had already occupied with masterly authority in the drawing-room drama of Book the Second, chapter XII of Little Dorrit. Lady Tippins’s interior monologue at the Lammle wedding might have been a drawing with words from Punch, though at an exceptionally brilliant level of social comedy, for Dickens always transcends his models. Eugene and Mortimer with their languid and self-conscious insolence and their contempt for moral earnestness anticipate du Maurier’s renderings of the socialites influenced by the currents from Wilde and the aesthetes of the next generation – Eugene and Mortimer were created in 1864 when du Maurier had only recently begun to contribute to Punch and Once a Week and was not yet a social satirist.
Rightly therefore, implicitly recognizing the dependence of the Victorian artist on the creative genius of the masters of language, du Maurier wrote, for the instruction of the young illustrator:
And if the disappointed author says to him: ‘Why can’t you draw like Phiz?’ he can fairly retort: ‘Why don’t you write like Dickens?’
