Figure 15. “The Last Chance.” Illustration by George Cruikshank for Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” in Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1839. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
Well-lit are the ominous noose at the end of the rope (dangling along the wall of the tenement building), Sikes’s muscular front leg (trying to steady his wavering balance), his scarf whipping in a strong wind (inferred from the angle of the cloth), and his eyes (emanating terror of what likely awaits him). The diagonal clouds in the sky magnify the one onlooker’s outstretched arm as well as the angle of Sikes’s downward-turning eyes and his muscular arms that strain against the pull of the rope and the violent wind.34 Cruikshank stages a pregnant moment that teeters between the present and the future. Sikes’s desperate eyes and the noose foreshadow his impending death and how he will die by hanging. In contrast to Jack in “Jack Sheppard in Company with Edgeworth Bess” (see fig. 7), Sikes is not romanticized in this plate, nor will he escape to safety. The “murderer,” as Dickens now refers to Bill Sikes,
uttered a yell of terror. “The eyes again!” he cried, in an unearthly screech.
Staggering as if struck by lightning, he lost his balance and tumbled over the parapet. The noose was at his neck. It ran up with his weight, tight as a bow-string, and swift as the arrow it speeds. He fell for five-and-thirty feet. There was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung. (OT, Oxf. 1982 328)
Rather than render Sikes’s graphic end—all jerking motion and convulsed limb—Cruikshank dramatizes the moment before Sikes dies in a noose of his own making. In Sikes’s haunted eyes, which project his “yell of terror,” we see Sikes’s psychological undoing. Cruikshank also spotlights Sikes’s abused but loyal canine, Bull’s-eye, concealed from Sikes’s view but visible to the reader-viewer. We anticipate Bull’s-eye’s frantic leap after his cruel master:
A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards on the parapet with a dismal howl, and, collecting himself for a spring, jumped for the dead man’s shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the ditch, turning completely over as he went; and striking his head against a stone, dashed out his brains. (328–29)
Bull’s-eye’s end becomes a gruesome coda to his master’s death, but “The Last Chance,” which arrests the moment before dying, captures canine and human desperation.
“Fagin in the Condemned Cell” (see fig. 16), one of Cruikshank’s most famous etchings and among the most powerful examples of Victorian book illustration,35 delineates psychic terror, demonstrating how the caricaturists were capable of capturing psychological depth.36 Dickens’s Fagin is strange and ugly in appearance with matted hair and a large nose, and he is deceitful, greedy, miserly, smarmy, and cowardly.37 As critics have previously noted, the characterization of Fagin subscribes to conventions of the archetypal “stage Jew” from Elizabethan drama and is second in notoriety only to Shylock. Popular cartoonists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries including Isaac Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson characterize Jews as having a different physical appearance than gentiles; Isaac Cruikshank’s “A Jew and a Bishop” (1796) and Thomas Rowlandson’s “Money Lenders” (1784), for example, present this stereotype of the hook-nosed Jew, but it was Dickens’s Fagin that “embedded itself in popular culture and prejudice…. Over the years, Oliver Twist became a staple of juvenile literature, and the stereotype was perpetuated” (Eisner, FTJ 123).
Figure 16. “Fagin in the Condemned Cell.” Illustration by George Cruikshank for Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” in Bentley’s Miscellany, March 1839. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
Just as the eyes of martyred Nancy haunt Sikes until his final hour delineated in “The Last Chance,” the swinging rope terrorizes “the Jew” as he contemplates his death by hanging in “Fagin in the Condemned Cell.” Dickens presents the judge’s pronouncement of a guilty verdict and Fagin’s punishment through indirect discourse. Cruikshank pictures the scene where Fagin “began to remember a few disjointed fragments of what the judge had said … To be hanged by the neck, till he was dead—that was the end. To be hanged by the neck till he was dead” (OT, Oxf. 1982 343). In this pregnant moment where Fagin is envisioning his death at the gallows, Cruikshank moves us into Fagin’s now deranged mind. Fagin crouches on a stark pallet bed and endlessly repeats the judge’s death sentence. The stippled effect on the dungeon walls—a pattern of circles about the size of Fagin’s widened pupils—magnifies his crazed eyes that project Fagin’s intense fear of the rope and the scaffold.
Well known is Thackeray’s comment on this plate—“the Jew,—the dreadful Jew—that Cruikshank drew!” (57); less well known is a line in this very same paragraph of An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank where Thackeray declares this illustration rendered him near speechless: “As for the Jew in the dungeon, let us say nothing of it—what can we say to describe it?” (57–58). Nonetheless, G. K. Chesterton aptly describes Fagin’s psychological terror: “it is not drawn with the free lines of a free man; it has the half-witted secrecies of a hunted thief. It does not look merely like a picture of Fagin; it looks like a picture by Fagin” (112). While this picture looks as if it could be a self-portrait of a “hunted thief,” Cruikshank allegedly based it on his own image in a cheval glass when he was acting the part of the desperate thief in an attempt to capture the pose just right.38
Even if Cruikshank incorporated his own likeness into this character study of Fagin, the illustration engages a stereotype of the villainous Jew perpetuated from the Elizabethan stage. Spotlighted are pronounced features of a Sephardic Jew—large nose, jutting chin, shifty eye—that carry into Du Maurier’s depiction of Svengali as I explore in chapter 4. These are the very repugnant Semitic features that Will Eisner revises in his graphic novel adaptation of Oliver Twist as I demonstrate in the conclusion. In “Fagin in the Condemned Cell,” Fagin may not be grinning like a devil as he appears, for example, in “Oliver Introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman,” but in this plate Fagin embodies the repugnant anti-Semitic traits of Dickens’s typecasting, and he appears appropriately subhuman: “the hideous old man seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of some rich offal for a meal” (OT, Oxf. 1982 116). Cruikshank’s Fagin looks like some slimy, coldblooded “loathsome reptile,” a Jew “as if Jews were a species of which he was a representative example,” notes Jeet Heer; “Fagin’s Jewishness is not an incidental feature of his character but rather is the term that is used to sum up what he is” (130) and what he looks like—an anti-Semitic character type.
Different from earlier representations of Fagin in Oliver Twist, in “Fagin in the Condemned Cell” he is completely alone in a bare setting. The only light in this plate comes from a thick double-barred Newgate Prison window that illuminates the shackles on Fagin’s legs, the hand he is biting, his terrified eyes, and two sheriff’s notices, possibly referring to his looming execution. The book against the wall, presumably a Bible, lies in shadow. There is no redemption for Fagin, whose death takes place off stage.39 His dark hat on the bed lies brim up and ominously empty. The confident Fagin from his earlier appearances—grinning at Oliver as he toasts sausages at his hearth in “Oliver Introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman” and gesturing he is “in the know” to Noah Claypole/Morris Bolter in “The Jew and Morris Bolter Begin to Understand Each Other” (see fig. 45B, ch. 4, 181)—has simply vanished. What remains of “the Jew” is raw terror, lit up by a stream of filtered light.40
Caricature, Comedy, and Bodily Distortion
Distortion, exaggeration, and comparison are standard caricature techniques to stage comedy. No facial feature or body shape escaped the attention of the caricaturists, particularly George Cruikshank, who specialized in nose play. Cruikshank twists and distorts noses into a range of humorous and, at times, grotesque forms in “A Chapter of Noses�
�� for My Sketch Book (1834): the top vignette features two dozen gentlemen drawn in profile with noses that vary in length, width, shape, and species. Some curve into beaks, some extend outward like Pinocchio’s, and others—in the manner of Rowlandson’s Dr. Syntax and Cruikshank’s Fagin—nearly touch their chins.
Thackeray’s caricatures of Jos Sedley for Vanity Fair recall to comic effect the tradition of fatness and folly associated with Samuel Pickwick. In the pictorial capital to chapter 2, Jos’s ample form nearly fills the entire capital letter A. The design realizes Thackeray’s own description of Jos as “[a] very stout, puffy man, in buckskins and hessian boots, with several immense neckcloths, that rose almost to his nose, with a red striped waistcoat and an apple-green coat with steel buttons almost as large as crown pieces (it was the morning costume of a dandy or blood of those days)” (24). Jos’s small head, swathed in neck cloths, sits upon an enormous torso. Jos’s fatness makes him funny especially because, like a true dandy, he is very vain.
Jos takes the form of a fat fish in the comical pictorial capital to chapter 4 (see fig. 17). Becky Sharp, like the Widow Bardell in The Pickwick Papers (1837), is fishing for a husband. In this design, sharp-nosed Becky daintily holds a fishing rod as she sits on a capital P that resembles a tree. The fish shares Jos’s girth and appetite—he is ogling the bait. The design gives concrete form to a figurative reference that Old Mr. Sedley makes later in this chapter: “‘Here is Emmy’s little friend making love to him as hard as she can; that’s quite clear; and if she does not catch him some other will. That man is destined to be a prey to woman … mark my words, the first woman who fishes for him, hooks him’” (36). The Oxford English Dictionary uses this very line from Vanity Fair to define the figurative meaning of hook, “to catch, secure as a husband.” This picture also directs us to earlier scenes where orphan Becky, daughter of a Bohemian artist and a French opera dancer, meets Jos Sedley, brother of her school chum Amelia Sedley, and determines, “‘If Jos Sedley is rich and unmarried, why should I not marry him?’” (23). Within this first installment, Becky attempts to hook Jos with a feigned rapture for India (where he served in the East India Company as the Collector of Boggley Wallah), keen interest in his tiresome elephant stories, eagerness to sample a “chili” that does not taste as coolly delightful as it sounds, and display of her “byoo-ootiful” singing, as Jos calls it. The pictorial capital design predicts that Jos, the dandy caricatured as a fat fish, is “destined to be a prey to woman.”
Lewis Carroll’s illustrations of Alice’s bodily distortions in Alice’s Adventures Under Ground turn the first version of Alice into a dark comedy, a quality that subsequent illustrators like Barry Moser have likewise accentuated. Carroll elongates, truncates, twists, distorts, shrinks, and expands Alice’s form. Her head reaches above the treetops when she is taken for a serpent, and then her head bangs into her feet when she nibbles on a mushroom stalk. Only after nearly drowning in her own tears and outgrowing a house does Alice learn to regulate her own growth. In “‘Alice’ in Time,” Gillian Beer sees the disruption of “the time the body takes to grow” as “the most profound disturbance of the [Alice] books” (xxxvi). Carroll dramatizes Alice’s fast paced growing and shrinking through the technique of comic comparison. Placing Alice next to smaller and larger creatures and objects, Carroll makes Alice appear, in turn, taller and bigger or smaller and narrower.
Figure 17. Pictorial capital to chapter 4. Illustration by William Makepeace Thackeray for his Vanity Fair, 1848.
Alice’s neck truly looks like a telescope in the illustration for chapter 1 that accompanies the scene where Alice nibbles on a cake marked “EAT ME” and exclaims, “‘Curiouser and curiouser! … now I’m opening up like the largest telescope that ever was! Goodbye, feet!’” (UG 11). While Alice stands 5 ¼ inches tall on the hand-written page, her neck alone is 1 ⅛ inches long. In this scene, Alice’s hair, which reaches her shoulders in the other illustrations, falls midway down her giraffe-like neck. Carroll positions Alice next to a column of handwritten text comprised of twenty-five lines; the lines of text per page, which remain relatively constant throughout the handwritten manuscript, function as a ruler, a prop to measure Alice’s growth. In this illustration, Alice’s feet reach just below the text, and her head extends just above it, giving the allusion that she is outgrowing the page.
In chapter 2, Alice nearly outgrows the White Rabbit’s house, which Carroll delineates as a simple stage set, a rectangular box (see fig. 18). Alice’s imposing head (UG 37) crowds into the upper-right corner of this full-page illustration, and her elbow rubs against a door that is not pictured. Michael Hancher calls this setting a “‘naïve’ substitution of the picture frame for the physical structure of the room” (31), but he applauds Carroll “for more powerfully evoking fetal claustrophobia” (31) than John Tenniel, who redeploys this very scene for Alice in Wonderland (see fig. 39B, ch. 3, 145). In Carroll’s original, Alice’s head is growing faster than the rest of her body, so the illustration looks like a caricature of Alice, who curls into a fetal position to fit into the confining box/room. Carroll leaves only a very small margin of space in the far right corner of the illustrative box; Alice’s head strains against the top of the picture frame, suggesting her head will soon burst through the ceiling.
Figure 18. “Alice Outgrowing the White Rabbit’s House.” Illustration by Lewis Carroll for his Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, 1864.
The White Rabbit’s house cannot contain Alice, who “went on growing, and as a last resource she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney” (UG 36). The next illustration (UG 40) shows Alice’s outstretched arm reaching toward the frightened White Rabbit, who is falling into a cucumber frame. Alice’s gigantic arm is a visual synecdoche for her enormous size that Carroll implies but does not stage. Just before the White Rabbit and Bill the Lizard attempt to burn down the house, Alice luckily shrinks. In a vignette introducing chapter 3 of Under Ground, Alice is smaller than a puppy with fluffy fur, who looks “down at her with large, round eyes” (46).
The darkest comedy occurs when Alice eats a mushroom stalk, and her body shrinks so quickly that “the next moment she felt a violent blow on her chin: it had struck her foot!” (UG 61; see fig. 19). Carroll draws Alice with a dreamy-like acceptance of this extremely destructive breakdown of her body and identity. Alice’s large head balances precariously on her disproportionately small feet and hands. She literally has no body in this curious caricature that anticipates how the Cheshire Cat (a character Carroll added for the Wonderland version of Alice) appears without its body and fades into a grin. This illustration fills a 2½ inch square space in the left-hand corner of the handwritten page. Alice’s hair, which falls mid-neck in the “telescope” illustration, now drapes the ground. The accompanying text facilitates Alice’s distortion—twelve lines of text form a column alongside her that boxes her in while sixteen lines of text above her graze the top of her head and function as a wide, horizontal ceiling, seemingly pushing her head even closer to her chin. When Alice in Wonderland made its public debut in 1865 with Tenniel’s illustrations,41 Tenniel elected not to illustrate this disturbing scene or that of Alice’s head rising well above the trees.
Figure 19. “She Felt a Violent Blow on Her Chin.” Illustration by Lewis Carroll for his Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, 1864.
Stage Sets
The backdrops of caricature-style illustrations approximate stage sets, moving the reader-viewer from the filth of Jacob’s Island and Newgate Prison in Oliver Twist, to a graveyard in A Christmas Carol, genteel drawing rooms in Vanity Fair, and the stormy Thames in Jack Sheppard. The natural world features keenly in the backdrops of John Leech’s illustrations for Robert Smith Surtees’s hunting novels about country life and provincial towns.42 Surtees’s series features Mr. John Jorrocks, a good-natured Cockney grocer turned master of the hounds, who—like Jos Sedley and Samuel Pickwick—is fat and funny. Jorrocks experiences Pickwick-like indignities
, like getting lost, losing his hounds, and being bitten in the seat of his pants by one of his own hunting dogs. However, in Leech’s illustrations, comedy unfolds within beautifully rendered stage sets.43 For example, in Surtees’s Handley Cross; or, Mr. Jorrocks’s Hunt (1843), one full-page illustration entitled “Mr. Jorrocks (loq)—‘Come hup! I say—You ugly Beast’” (see fig. 20) combines humor and naturalism. Jorrocks, much too plump for his sprightly horse but eager to keep apace with the other riders and hounds, has dismounted to avoid leaping over a ditch on horseback. Leech pictures Jorrocks as he pulls on the horse’s reins “much in the style of a school-boy who catches a log of wood in fishing” (106). The horse, Arterxerxes, will not listen to this grown up “school-boy”; Arterxerxes flatly refuses to leap over the ditch to continue the hunt. Leech illustrates a pregnant moment—just before the horse “flew back, pulling Jorrocks downwards in the muddy ditch. Arterxerxes then threw up his heels and ran away, whip and all” (106). As the narrative continues, Jorrocks, who finally retrieves his horse and hounds, becomes the “object of unmerited ridicule by the fair but rather unfeeling portion of the populace” (107), including the barber’s pretty wife, who exclaims loudly, “‘old Fatty’s had a fall!’” (107).
This plate anticipates “old Fatty’s” fall. Jorrocks stands perilously close to the muddy ditch. His black boots and plump belly, bursting from his ill-fitting bright red riding jacket, lead the viewer’s gaze toward the mud that will soon splatter all over him. Jorrocks locks eyes with Arterxerxes as the horse digs in its powerful legs and refuses to jump the ditch. Comically, the horse is in command of the Master of Hounds. Leech lingers over the powerful haunches and strong neck of a beast that pulls Jorrocks toward the ditch, anticipating a comic climax. But Leech stages humor amid the beauty of the countryside and the thrill of the hunt. Verdant grass on either side of the ditch and bare trees and bushes suggest it is a clear, crisp fall day. In the backdrop, horses and canines with powerful legs are dashing across the ditch and after a fox, beyond the frame of the picture.
Serials to Graphic Novels Page 11
