Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  These Pickwick illustrations could move the reader with their social commentary, but comic fancy undeniably commanded the attention of the original reader-viewers and made Pickwick a commercial triumph. Phiz stages humor to dramatic effect in “The Middle-Aged Lady in the Double-Bedded Room.” The scene occurs when Pickwick arrives in Ipswich in pursuit of the rascally Alfred Jingle (before he lands in the Fleet). At the Great White Horse Inn in Ipswich, Pickwick dines with a Mr. Peter Magnus, who has come to propose to a middle-aged lady named Miss Witherfield. Given the lateness of the hour and the many rows of doors at the inn, Pickwick mistakenly enters a double-bedded room, the very chamber prepared for Miss Witherfield, who quietly enters the room after Mr. Pickwick has retired to his bed. In this illustration set as a dramatic stage, Pickwick, with a pointed nightcap, peeps out from the bed curtains to discover a mysterious lady (aka Miss Witherfield) in a nightgown combing out her hair. The scene anticipates the next moment where Miss Witherfield shrieks, “‘A strange man!’” (P, Oxf. 278) and “thrust him into the passage, and locked and bolted the door behind him” (279). This is a quintessential example of “‘English bedroom farce,’ that is, a situational comedy with mistaken identity but without genuine sexual impropriety” (P. Allingham, “Standing”),54 and the illustration prompts us to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

  Two chapters later, after Magnus proposes to and is accepted by Miss Witherfield, Magnus introduces his fiancée to Mr. Pickwick, and pandemonium breaks out. The two immediately recognize each other, but decency forbids them telling Mr. Magnus how they previously met. Magnus and Pickwick quarrel, and, fearing a duel has taken place and that Magnus is shot, Miss Witherfield tells her tale to a Magistrate named Mr. Nupkins, who promptly arrests Pickwick and Tupman, believed to be the second in the duel. Of course, no duel has taken place, and eventually, Pickwick secures his own release and Tupman’s by informing Mr. Nupkins of Alfred Jingle’s designs on the Magistrate’s own daughter.

  The accompanying plate is a pregnant moment: it anticipates Miss Witherfield’s indignation, which, in turn, sets in motion a series of events that lead to Pickwick’s mistaken guilt, temporary incarceration, and pardon. The dramatic expression of “horror and dismay” (P, Oxf. 277) on the bespectacled, night-capped Mr. Pickwick intimates he is worried what will come of a man being found in a woman’s bedroom, a most unbecoming situation in the early Victorian age even if it is a simple misunderstanding. To ensure that there is no actual impropriety in this English bedroom farce, Browne draws bed curtains around Mr. Pickwick (although the drapes reveal the silhouette of his wide shoulders) and depicts Miss Witherfield in a full-length nightgown. Nonetheless, Miss Witherfield has already removed her dressing gown and nightcap to comb her hair, and Pickwick looks as if he knows full well he should not be peering at a lady who is clearly unaware of his presence (her back is turned toward him). Broad-faced Mr. Pickwick peeps anyway, elevating the comedy.55

  Pickwick’s plumpness and the inclusion of a chorus of laughing onlookers in two particular plates—“Mr. Pickwick in the Pound” and “Mr. Pickwick Slides”—make “the comic fancy a reality one could laugh at” (Harvey 8). To be funny, Mr. Pickwick had to be fat.56 We can trace the well-established connection between plumpness and jollity from Shakespeare’s fleshy, jovial Falstaff to today’s portly, jovial Santa Claus with his trademark “ho, ho ho.” Readers today may be surprised to learn that Seymour in his original sketches drew Pickwick as a tall, thin sporting enthusiast.57 Chapman, in particular, urged Seymour to fatten up Pickwick even though Seymour, in drawing him as slim, was not actually contradicting Dickens’s text. In the monthly numbers, Dickens stipulates baldness, glasses, and genteel dress, but makes no mention of Pickwick’s physical size. Chapman, however, had peeked at Dickens’s script and knew that Pickwick remains good-humored throughout all his scrapes. Chapman insisted that Mr. Pickwick be plump and allegedly took Seymour with him to Richmond to see “‘a fat old beau who would wear, in spite of the ladies’ protests, drab tights and black gaiters’” (qtd. in Muir 89).

  Whether or not Seymour based Pickwick on this fat Richmond beau,58 Pickwick wears fitted tights and gaiters in the initial plates by Seymour, who sealed Pickwick’s appearance in the early Victorian consciousness. Indeed, Pickwick’s look changed surprisingly little from the pencil of Seymour to Buss to Browne, who perfected Pickwick’s image.59 Another stage technique, the inclusion of amused bystanders, like plumpness, invites viewers to laugh at Pickwick in an embarrassing moment. The tickled onlookers encourage laughter—not by holding up cue cards, as we still witness in live television programming today—but by giggling at Pickwick and encouraging the audience to laugh along with them. In “Mr. Pickwick in the Pound” and “Mr. Pickwick Slides,” the onlookers, far slimmer than Pickwick, magnify Pickwick’s roundness. And in both scenes, Pickwick wears a beaming expression and looks “as if [he] thought [his current misadventure] as good a joke as anybody else” (P, Oxf. 46).

  “Mr. Pickwick in the Pound” (see fig. 5) is a visual climax of a gaming outing where Pickwick joins three members of the Pickwick Club (Wardle, Winkle, and Trundle) when they go hunting in an open carriage and boldly trespass upon Captain Boldwig’s land. Mr. Pickwick—eager to observe the sport of hunting—accompanies the shooting party in a wheelbarrow, pushed by his faithful servant, Sam Weller. During a picnic lunch, Pickwick consumes too much punch, and his drunkenness along with the heat leads him to fall into a stupor. The shooting party, now including Weller, heads off to hunt some more, so the group leaves Pickwick asleep, snoring in a wheelbarrow in the shade. According to Dickens, “a gentleman in a barrow” is “a gross violation of all established rules and precedents” (P, Oxf. 225) of a shooting-party. When Boldwig, a “little fierce man in a stiff black neckerchief” (232), discovers a snoring gentleman in a wheelbarrow trespassing on his land, he takes action. This plate features the adventure’s climax: Pickwick awakens in an animal pound where he is being pelted with “a turnip, and then a potato, and then an egg, with a few other little tokens of the playful disposition of the many-headed” (235).

  A theatrical illustration, “Mr. Pickwick in the Pound” places an undignified, portly Samuel Pickwick center stage, sitting in a wheelbarrow in an animal pound next to a fat sleeping sow and two young pigs who sniff the turnip positioned close to Pickwick’s black-gaitered feet. A donkey turns away from its baby to bray directly into Pickwick’s right ear, exposed because his hat—though on his head—is askew. Pickwick’s slim legs sticking straight out of the wheelbarrow call attention to Pickwick’s huge belly. Browne also exaggerates the gestures and facial features of the young and old villagers chuckling at the spectacle, tipping—but not losing—their hats, some jeering at Pickwick, embarrassed by his predicament. Happily, Pickwick’s friends discover him in the pound, and he escapes intact with his good-humored smile on his face.

  “Mr. Pickwick Slides” (see fig. 6) also incorporates a crowd of amused onlookers as well as exaggerated expressions and gestures, caricature techniques that liken this plate to slapstick comedy. Pickwick is attempting the sport of ice skating, also called “sliding.” Dickens describes sliding as “skimming over the ice on one foot, and occasionally giving a two-penny postman’s knock upon it, with the other” (P, Oxf. 369). Pickwick is envious of the “fancy slide” of his fellow Pickwickian, Mr. Weller, whose fancy footwork on ice resembles a common sound in the days before affordable prepaid postage.60 Though Pickwick admits he has not skated since he was a boy, at the urging of the ladies pictured here, Pickwick amiably agrees to join Weller, Wardle, and Winkle and slide in his black gaiters.61

  Figure 5. “Mr. Pickwick in the Pound.” Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne 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.

  Figure 6. “Mr. Pickwick Slides.” Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne from an 1837 serial instal
lment 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.

  Browne elects not to show the climax of the scene where Pickwick falls through the ice, “and Mr. Pickwick’s hat, gloves, and handkerchief were floating on the surface; and this was all of Mr. Pickwick that anybody could see” (P, Oxf. 372). Nonetheless, Browne chooses a “pregnant moment” that might have even pleased Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (originator of that term in Laocöon) in foreshadowing Pickwick’s ice escapade. Staged for comic effect, the illustration shows Pickwick just before he plunges into the water and surfaces with his clothes covered with water and clay. In this illustrated moment, Pickwick, complete with his trademark circular spectacles and black hat and gaiters, stands erect in the center of the ice with his legs very wide apart. Pickwick is approaching a split “with his feet about a yard and a quarter apart” (370), and he looks as if he may just split his breeches or be knocked down, “which happened [to him] upon the average every third round” (370). The woman to the right of the picture plane looks straight at the audience, covering her mouth to hide her laughter. A cute canine positioned in the front of the plate also looks amused and wags its tail. Other onlookers gaze at each other and Pickwick, a figure of folly. In this plate, we glimpse the future amusement Mr. Pickwick will afford the crowd when he actually falls through the ice. Friends quickly rush in to drape Pickwick in shawls and carry him to his friend Tupman’s farm. Tucked in bed, Pickwick, essentially unharmed, presides as President of the Pickwick Club and readies himself for his next adventure.

  Packed with comedy, theatricality, and some social commentary, The Pickwick Papers generated a broad readership for illustrated fiction in the 1830s and quickly became a model for publication of newly released, illustrated serial fiction for adult readers. Browne stands among the first generation of caricature-style illustrators who visually interpreted texts by Dickens and other early Victorian authors for a mass public, as I explore in the next chapter. Clearly something magical and momentous was happening in 1836–37 in England, and Pickwick was at the heart of this confluence of events.

  2

  Caricature

  A Theatrical Development

  And, indeed, what does not the great Dickens himself owe to Cruikshank and Hablôt Browne, those two delightful etchers who understood and interpreted him so well!

  George Du Maurier, “The Illustrating of Books from the Serious Artist’s Point of View—1,” 1890

  When George Du Maurier published “The Illustrating of Books” at the fin de siècle, Charles Dickens’s works had already been re-illustrated for the Household Edition. Du Maurier, a Sixties artist and a fan of the caricaturists, returns his late Victorian readers’ gaze to the aesthetics of two of Dickens’s original caricature-style illustrators, George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), whose Pickwick illustrations gave Dickens celebrity status.

  Caricature-style illustration of the 1830s and 1840s evolved from sixteenth-century mock portraits by Annibale Carracci, satiric eighteenth-century progresses by William Hogarth, and individual comic prints by Hogarth’s heirs: James Gillray; Thomas Rowlandson; and George Cruikshank, who earned a reputation for his early nineteenth-century satiric plates before he entered the field of book illustration. The term “caricature” derives from the Italian “caricare,” which means “to overload” or “surcharge.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, caricare applied only to mock portraiture. Beginning with Gillray and Rowlandson, Cruikshank’s direct forebears, comic “prints and similar products began to be called ‘caricatures,’” note E. H. Gombrich and E. Kris in Caricature (19); “Aims and means were the same in both types—to ridicule and castigate by means of light-hearted playful distortion” (19). Distortion and exaggeration have come to stereotype the achievement of the caricaturists and diminish their contribution to the Victorian illustrated book, but even those invested in Sixties illustration recognize that the caricature school of illustration is “above all, theatrical” (Goldman and Cooke 28).1

  In its theatricality, caricature-style book illustration approximates the dramatic tableau, a style of performance that predates the nineteenth century but is closely associated with early nineteenth-century drama. Defined inclusively, “tableau vivant, or ‘living picture,’ refers to the representation of some well-known person, scene, or incident, whether taken from a verbal or visual source, by a performer or performers who, appropriately attired and positioned, hold their poses silently and motionlessly” (J. E. Hill 438). In the nineteenth century, charades, private theatricals, and tableaux vivants were enormously popular forms of entertainment in private homes among members of the upper middle class and the gentry. As Martin Meisel notes in Realizations, “The tableau vivant apparently took hold as a widespread genteel social entertainment on the order of charades after Goethe published Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809)” (47). In England, James Robinson Planché and Douglas Jerrold established the tableau vivant on the London stage with, respectively, The Brigand (1829), based on three paintings by Charles Eastlake, and Rent Day (1832), after two paintings by David Wilkie.2 Painting, drama, and fiction were interdependent genres, as Meisel reminds us: “In the nineteenth century all three forms are narrative and pictorial” (3). Moreover, at the time Cruikshank was designing plates for serials by Charles Dickens and William Harrison Ainsworth, the middle class was beginning to attend the theater (although this group once considered the theater disreputable), and Dickens’s and Ainsworth’s popular serials were quickly being translated into plays.3 The success of such dramatizations drew more potential reader-viewers to these very serials with illustrations that reflect the style of the dramatic tableau.

  As Jonathan Hill posits in “Cruikshank, Ainsworth, and Tableau Illustration,” Ainsworth’s works were well suited to the stage because Cruikshank’s illustrations “were never really designed to be viewed buried within the pages of an Ainsworth novel but rather to be resurrected on the stage and ‘mysteriously made to breathe’” (459). To apply this insight more broadly, popular serials illustrated by Cruikshank and Phiz were easily adapted into plays because the illustrations often present the illusion of a stage. Indeed, one anonymous 1838 reviewer of Oliver Twist in the Spectator points to the appropriateness of theatrical illustration for Dickens’s early novels by calling the literary characters “actors”: “[Dickens] has the great art of bringing his actors and incidents before the reader by a few effective strokes” (“Boz’s Oliver Twist” 1115).

  This chapter examines book illustrations by George Cruikshank, Hablot Knight Browne, Richard Doyle, John Leech, and Robert Cruikshank that, like tableaux, capture a theatrical moment in works by, among others, Dickens, Ainsworth, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Using theatrical techniques including lighting, props, clever casting, and detail-laden backdrops, the caricaturists staged scenes ranging from the sensational to the sentimental, from the deeply psychological to the broadly comic. I include two Victorian author-illustrators on this list of recognized caricaturists: Thackeray, Cruikshank’s most fervent fan, and Lewis Carroll. Better known as an author than an illustrator, Thackeray designed pictorial capital letters, vignettes, tailpieces, and full-page engravings for his best-known Vanity Fair (VF, 1848). In his casting of Becky Sharp in various stage roles, Thackeray arouses our suspicions without ever condemning his heroine. Carroll designed amateur caricature-style illustrations for Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (UG, 1864), the first version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Looking across the arc of the Victorian illustrated book, we see how at a time when realistic illustration held sway, Carroll in the 1860s recalled popular caricature techniques of the 1830s and 1840s to dramatize Alice’s frequent bodily transformations. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the caricaturists’ artistic limitations and scandals (for example, Robert Seymour’s suicide and Cruikshank’s claim of authoring Dickens’s works) that led to a devaluation of the cari
caturists and a privileging of Royal Academy-trained artists who became book illustrators in the 1850s.

  Theatricality in Early Illustrated Blockbusters

  Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–39) and William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (1839–40)—both illustrated by George Cruikshank4—made their appearance in Bentley’s Miscellany, reminding us of the fluid relationship between nineteenth-century book publication and the periodical press. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we might be surprised that Jack Sheppard (JS), a largely forgotten “book of the hour,” surpassed Oliver Twist (OT) in sales; today, it is hard to find a copy of Jack Sheppard in print while Oliver Twist is a “book of all time.”5 Reviews compared Oliver Twist and Jack Sheppard, which overlapped in Bentley’s Miscellany, a journal associated with Newgate fiction. “The two novels were naturally linked in the eyes of the reading public,” as Diana Archibald argues in “‘Of All the Horrors … the Foulest and Most Cruel’: Sensation and Dickens’s Oliver Twist” (54).6