Alternately, critics including Richard Maxwell claim that Scott was indifferent to illustration or only interested in book illustration for commercial reasons.3 The illustrated editions of Scott’s Waverley novels do not follow the definition of the Victorian illustrated book that guides this examination: “The novelist wrote in collaboration with an artist he had worked with often before; he wrote knowing he must have illustrations” and often determined which scenes should be illustrated while writing the monthly parts (Harvey 180). Whereas the first illustrations for the Waverley novels came out in 1820 in a separate supplement to accompany preexisting editions of Scott, Dickens’s Pickwick Papers came out in monthly parts with illustrations that were integral to the serial’s success.
Serendipity
In the early to mid-1830s, Charles Dickens was an energetic but relatively unknown author. Working as a journalist, Dickens covered election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle and, between 1833–36, published dozens of literary “sketches” of London life in periodicals and newspapers, such as the Evening Chronicle, the Monthly Magazine, Bell’s Life in London, and the Morning Chronicle. Publisher John Macrone collected fifty-six of Dickens’s nonfiction sketches and printed them in two volumes under the title Sketches by Boz (1836) with illustrations by George Cruikshank. Already well established as a caricaturist and satirist, Cruikshank drew an audience to Dickens’s vignettes of character types that Dickens developed into memorable characters in his best-known novels: a parish beadle from Sketches by Boz forms the basis for Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist (OT, 1838); a schoolmaster from Sketches reappears first in Hard Times (1854) as the exacting Mr. Thomas Gradgrind and later in Our Mutual Friend (OMF, 1865) as the mentally unbalanced Bradley Headstone; a pickpocket from Sketches transforms into the Artful Dodger in Fagin’s merry band in Oliver Twist.
The positive reception of Sketches by Boz led Edward Chapman and William Hall to approach Dickens with the idea of providing letterpress for a series of engravings by Robert Seymour to be published in monthly parts. Chapman and Hall specifically hired Dickens in “the secondary role of script-writer” (Kinsley vii) to enhance Seymour’s pictures. This contractual arrangement recalls a pre-1820s definition of illustration, which meant verbal explanation, enrichment, or annotation (Meisel 30–31),4 not an “illustrative picture; a drawing, plate, engraving, cut, or the like, illustrating or embellishing a literary article, a book, etc.” (OED) as we take for granted today; the insertion of a well-known artist’s name or a term like “engraved” in the book’s title was essential to convey that a picture illustrated the text and not vice versa. Only after the 1820s, when technological innovations expanded the production of illustrated books, did the meaning of illustration begin to shift from verbal enrichment or annotation to a Victorian conception of illustration meaning pictorial re-creation and/or enhancement, an image shedding light on a written text.5
There are Regency precedents for Chapman and Hall’s proposed arrangement of contracting an author, in this case Dickens, to illustrate by writing up an artist’s pictures. William Combe provided comical verse to accompany Thomas Rowlandson’s caricatures for The Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of the Picturesque: A Poem (1812) and its two sequels published in 1820 and 1821.6 These parodies of the popular picturesque movement, particularly books by William Gilpin, follow Dr. Syntax, a comical clergyman and schoolmaster, who sets out on his horse to make a tour with the intention of writing about his rambles, which are filled with silly misfortunes. Rowlandson’s enormously popular hand-colored caricature-style illustrations grant the hapless character a decidedly long chin that did not escape the attention of Jane Austen, who told her beloved sister, Cassandra, in a letter dated 2–3 March 1814: “I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr Syntax.”7
Dr. Syntax—a genteel and good-natured figure of folly who visually anticipates the character of Samuel Pickwick in inviting viewers to laugh at him—has an excessively long jaw in Rowlandson’s “Doctor Syntax & The Bees” (see fig. 1) for The Second Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search of Consolation: A Poem (1820). Combe’s comic verse magnifies the plate’s broad humor:
Talk’d o’er in terms of frolic ease
His curious battle with the bees,
And made his tumble in the water
A source of fun and gen’ral laughter. (221)
At war with a swarm of bees attacking his white wig, Dr. Syntax in this plate rises out of his chair and “tumbles” toward a large sarcophagus of water to escape the bees’ stings.8 The pointed configuration of insects above Syntax’s head exaggerates the conical shape of his wig and his exquisitely pointed nose and chin, which juts out far beyond his nose. Combe’s verse narrative also draws the reader-viewer’s attention to the crowd of amused onlookers, who view Dr. Syntax’s mishap as a “source of fun and gen’ral laughter.” One woman to the left of the picture plane leans over a parapet to get a better look at the humorous spectacle of bees pursuing Dr. Syntax, whose hat is literally tipping off his head; six additional onlookers armed with pots and pans to scare away the insects reveal in their facial expressions that they are enjoying watching Dr. Syntax’s battle with the bees.9
Figure 1. “Doctor Syntax & The Bees.” Illustration by Thomas Rowlandson for William Combe’s The Second Tour of Dr Syntax, in Search of Consolation: A Poem, 1820. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
Pierce Egan also provided letterpress to annotate illustrations by George and Robert Cruikshank for Life in London; or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq. and his elegant friend Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, The Oxonian, in their Rambles and Sprees through the Metropolis. In serial and volume form, Life in London captured a large audience because of George and Robert Cruikshank’s illustrations. In the first chapter, which Egan calls a “preface, or a prelude to the work” (1), the author pays lavish tribute to the Cruikshanks for their lead role in this picture-word collaboration:
In all thy varied portraiture of the interesting scenes of Life, let me invoke thy superior talents, BOB AND GEORGE CRUICKSHANK [sic] (thou Gilray of the day, and of Don Saltero greatness), to my anxious aid. Indeed, I have need of all thy illustrative touches; and may we be hand and glove together in depicting the richness of nature, which so wantonly, at times, plays off her freaks upon the half-finished bone-rakers and cinder-sifters round the dust-hill. (11–12)10
Egan places “Bob and George” in the illustrious tradition of eighteenth-century graphic satire and caricature associated with William Hogarth and James Gillray, the latter named in the above tribute. Egan also ranks the Cruikshank brothers with Don Saltero’s Coffee House and Curiosity Museum, a Chelsea establishment founded by James Salter in 1695 that drew Londoners and noted overseas visitors including Benjamin Franklin. Most telling, however, is Egan’s description of the artist and author relationship as “hand and glove together.”
The Cruikshank brothers’ illustrations are clearly the “hand” in this collaboration and Egan’s annotations the “glove” that adorns them. For example, in chapter 2 of book 2, Egan both directs the reader to and describes the full-page hand-colored engraving entitled “Midnight. Tom & Jerry, at a Coffee Shop near the Olympic” (see fig. 2): “This group (which the plate so correctly delineates, and in the point of character, equal to any of HOGARTH’S celebrated productions) displays a complete picture of what is termed ‘LOW LIFE’ in the Metropolis; drunkenness, beggary, lewdness, and carelessness, being its prominent features” (181). Here Egan praises the Cruikshanks’ depiction of respectable and lowlife characters by comparing the plate to work by the great Hogarth, well known for mixing gamblers, prostitutes, and prosperous gentlemen in serial paintings like The Rake’s Progress (ca. 1733–35). “Midnight” brings the viewer into a crowded room with drinkers, looters, prostitutes, and fighters of mixed races. For example, one woman with grotesque features is in the act of climbing over a booth to fight another similarly grotesque woman, who raises
both her fists and also opens her mouth wide, seemingly to shout obscenities back at her. Front and center, amidst the “drunkenness, beggary, lewdness, and carelessness,” a scantily dressed prostitute—baring her arms, breasts, and ankles—tugs on the coat of Jerry Hawthorn, who seems oblivious to her enticements. In a setting conspicuous for its cracked windows, bare furnishings, and dirt, Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn, dressed like gentlemen with fashionable coats and top hats, stand out amidst the “LOW LIFE” that Egan here calls to the reader-viewer’s attention.11
Figure 2. “Midnight. Tom & Jerry at a Coffee Shop near the Olympic.” Illustration by George and Robert Cruikshank for Pierce Egan’s Life in London, 1821. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
Chapman and Hall designed Pickwick to follow in this tradition of an author writing up a popular artist’s pictures. “The Adventures of the Nimrod Club” was the title Chapman and Hall intended for the series of Seymour’s engravings about amateur Cockney sportsmen on holiday to be accompanied by Dickens’s letterpress. Although he is relatively unknown today, Seymour was the senior partner in this original production. “By the time [Seymour] started Pickwick in 1836,” notes Jane R. Cohen in Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators, “Seymour was fully established with the public as a prolific, influential, and popular caricaturist. His fame even crossed the Channel” (40). Seymour’s acclaim as a political caricaturist and humorist came from his weekly front-page caricatures for Figaro in London (the precursor of Punch) and his own published Sketches by Seymour (1835) where overdressed and bumbling working-class Londoners on holiday and Sunday outings, masquerading as sportsmen, chase stray cats and pigs. Seymour initially used the nom de plume of “Short-shanks” for his illustrations until Cruikshank protested. Seymour did not have the reputation of George Cruikshank, whose style and name he emulated, but Cruikshank clearly recognized Seymour as a competitor.
“Mr. Pickwick in Chase of His Hat” demonstrates Robert Seymour’s skill as a humorist and reminds us how “Seymour’s plates had called Pickwick into existence” (J. R. Cohen 46). In this plate (see fig. 3), a stout, out-of-breath, Mr. Pickwick races after his hat “gambolling playfully away” (P, Oxf. 45). Pickwick loses his hat when he and three companions chance upon troops in full uniform performing regimental maneuvers, including the firing of muskets with blank cartridges. Like Combe and Egan, Dickens provides script for a picture that in this case shows the embarrassing moment when Pickwick, “an enthusiastic admirer of the army” (42), runs after his hat that has blown off his head. Even in this second Pickwick installment, we see Dickens creating a word picture rich in metaphor and onomatopoeia that is concomitantly earnest and comical and in no way derivative of the picture:
Figure 3. “Mr. Pickwick in Chase of His Hat.” Illustration by Robert Seymour from an 1836 serial installment of Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. From an 1837 edition in the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
There are very few moments in a man’s existence, when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat…. The best way is, to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head: smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else. (45–46)
The hat continues to roll away “as merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide” (46). A “completely exhausted” (46) Samuel Pickwick prepares to give up the chase just when his hat rubs against the wheel of an open carriage, and the “porpoise” stops moving.
This is the pregnant moment Seymour stages. Samuel Pickwick’s respectable black hat, placed brim down in the cloud of dust, serves as an essential prop on Seymour’s illustrative stage. Although hats are not commonplace today, to the Victorians, a misplaced hat in public was more than a major wardrobe malfunction; losing one’s hat meant losing one’s dignity. Seymour hints at the future restoration of the hat by showing a flustered Pickwick, extending both of his arms to “seize [the hat] by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head: smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else” (P, Oxf. 46). An onlooker gingerly sticks out his foot as if to stop the hat’s approach before it is flattened by the oncoming open barouche; this choice of Regency vehicle affords the artist the opportunity to show mirth on the faces of all the passengers, who—akin to Rowlandson’s onlookers in “Doctor Syntax & The Bees”—consider Mr. Pickwick’s hat chase a very good joke indeed. Two jeering members of the crowd waive their own hats at Mr. Pickwick as if to magnify that they have what he has lost (but happily will soon regain). One onlooker even climbs high up a tree to get a better view of Pickwick’s distressed spectacled face and his rounded butt. “Dickens himself made the most of Mr. Pickwick as a butt” (9) of a practical joke, notes John Harvey, and Seymour literally exposes portly Pickwick’s “butt” in “Mr. Pickwick in Chase of His Hat.”
Dickens was one of four authors Chapman and Hall considered as potential scriptwriters for Seymour’s comical engravings in the fashion of “Mr. Pickwick in Chase of His Hat.” The other three contenders—Thomas Hood, Theodore Hook, and Leigh Hunt—had already proven themselves as authors. Why did Chapman and Hall choose Dickens, who had only a book of collected sketches to his name? Percy Muir speculates in Victorian Illustrated Books:
One imagines that the publishers had encountered reluctance on the part of established authors to subject themselves to the artist’s whims and William Hall, who interviewed Dickens on the subject, may have thought that youth and inexperience would make him more subservient. (89)
“Subservient” is an unlikely adjective to describe Dickens at any age—he was never submissive or a secondary player. But Dickens took on the job of providing letterpress for Seymour’s engravings in 1836 for a practical reason: he was poor and needed money to be able to marry his intended, Catherine Hogarth. Dickens could not resist the steady income of £14. 3s. 6d. per monthly part to be paid on the date of publication (typically the last day of the month). In a letter to Catherine Hogarth dated 10 February 1836, he confides: “The work will be no joke, but the emolument is too tempting to resist” (House and Storey 1: 129). This regular income could amply provide for a wife. Receiving a slight advance after completing the first two Pickwick installments, Dickens, who was newly married, went on a honeymoon.12
Although Seymour’s pictures were foremost in the genesis of Pickwick, the up-and-coming Dickens, immediately upon accepting Chapman and Hall’s offer, shaped not only Pickwick but also the arc of the Victorian illustrated book. Perhaps Dickens simply interpreted to his own advantage Chapman and Hall’s request to provide a monthly script “for a book illustrative of manners and life in the Country to be published monthly” (House and Storey 1: 648). To Catherine Hogarth, Dickens discloses that Chapman and Hall “have made me an offer of £14 a month to write and edit a new publication they contemplate, entirely by myself” (House and Storey 1: 128–29). We can assume that Dickens, daydreaming of fame, may never have considered his text secondary to Seymour’s drawings. At twenty-four, Dickens was strong-willed and ambitious enough to turn to his own advantage what became The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, better known as The Pickwick Papers or just Pickwick for short. Neither a sportsman nor a countryman, Dickens considered Seymour’s pet topic of amateur Cockney sportsmen on country escapades to be narrow, stale, and decidedly not suited to his interest in urban London or his creative imagination. To Seymour, Dickens conceded the idea of a club, but he revised the assignment to his liking and quickly determined that illustrations should light up the text, not vice versa. Pickwick combines urban and rural settings as backdrops for the comic adventures of Samuel Pickwick (named after
a “jobmaster”13 Dickens knew in Bath) and his fellow members of the Pickwick Club—Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass, and Nathaniel Winkle.
Much as chance favored Dickens when Chapman and Hall serendipitously chose him to provide letterpress for Seymour’s pictures, chance again favored Dickens after Seymour tragically ended his life.14 Seymour’s death freed an ambitious author from the unpleasant yoke of writing up an artist’s pictures as he was hired to do. The contractual format for the first two monthly numbers that Seymour illustrated gave the artist top billing in the picture-word collaboration: Dickens provided twenty-four pages of text to write up four illustrations by Seymour.15 Following Seymour’s decease, Dickens hit on what became a popular formula for serial publication that was advantageous to the writer: for each monthly number, the author provided thirty-two pages of text while the artist contributed two illustrations. Different from his Regency predecessors, Combe and Egan, who acquiesced to the task of writing up an artist’s pictures, Dickens quickly elevated the authority of the author over the artist and essentially reversed the dynamic for future author and artist collaborations: to recall Egan’s own analogy of the relationship between author and artist, Dickens turned the illustrator into a “glove,” molded to fit the author’s “hand.” Increasing the allotment of text and decreasing the number of plates expanded the author’s role, granting Dickens greater room for plot and character development.16 With this improved plan, Dickens earned more money (£21 a part); however, by cutting the number of plates in half and hiring artists less established than Robert Seymour, Chapman and Hall offset the total cost.
Serials to Graphic Novels Page 5
