Figure 20. “Mr. Jorrocks (loq)—‘Come hup! I say—You ugly Beast.’” Illustration by John Leech for Robert Smith Surtees’s Handley Cross; or, Mr. Jorrocks’s Hunt, 1854. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
Well rendered stage sets even surface in broadly comic caricature plates, such as Robert Cruikshank’s “A Piece of China” for Matthew H. Barker’s The Old Sailor’s Jolly Boat (1844). In this particular yarn, which is politically incorrect today (for example, Barker refers to all the natives as “John Chinaman” [343]), a native has attempted to steal iron from the invading British seamen. Barker directs the reader-viewer to a visual climax—“the contortions of [the native’s] face and body, that he was suffering great agony from the burning, and which our friend Robert Cruikshank has so well depictured” (344). In the accompanying plate entitled “Hot Work in China” (see fig. 21), Cruikshank stereotypes the natives in their appearance and dress: the local inhabitants wear coolie hats and have Fu Manchu moustaches, and the queues of some of the natives are visible.44 The setting is decidedly exotic with Pagoda-style structures, flying birds, rice fields, and trees strikingly different than those Leech pictures in the English landscape (for example, some have dripping fronds, and others appear to be in the shape of Chinese pine trees). The plate preserves the repugnance of British imperialism distasteful to readers today, but to the Victorians, Robert Cruikshank guided his audience to a distant land by creating a convincing stage set.
Figure 21. “Hot Work in China.” Illustration by Robert Cruikshank for Matthew H. Barker’s The Old Sailor’s Jolly Boat, Laden with Tales, Yarns, Scraps, Fragments, etc., to Please All Hands, 1844. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
Limitations, Problems, and Scandals
Even the most enthusiastic fans recognize the limitations of the caricaturists, who, unlike Sixties artists (for example, John Everett Millais, Marcus Stone, and Du Maurier), were largely unschooled. “Cruikshank’s pretty woman leaves no very delightful impression on the mind” (2: 371–72), observes Du Maurier in “The Illustrating of Books.” In An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank, Thackeray, for example, concedes that the eyes of Jack Sheppard’s mother are “much caricatured” in “Mr. Wood Offers to Adopt Little Jack Sheppard” and admits further that this is “not an uncommon fault with our artist” (55). Thackeray also pinpoints Cruikshank’s difficulty drawing women—noting, for example, how the plate “‘May I be cursed,’ muttered Jack Sheppard, ‘if ever I try to be honest again’” is marred by the “disagreeable and unrefined” (56) depiction of Mrs. Wood, wife of the gentleman who apprentices Jack Sheppard. In The Dickens Picture-Book, J. A. Hammerton likewise calls attention to the “atrocious features of Nancy, as delineated by Cruikshank” (4). George Cruikshank simply could not draw an attractive woman, and this fault, as I have argued elsewhere, often compromised the accompanying text.45
In Oliver Twist, Cruikshank could not satisfactorily depict the saintly prostitute who assuages Dickens’s middle-class readers with her love for and loyalty to Oliver Twist. Dickens describes Nancy as “not exactly pretty, perhaps” but “hearty” and “agreeable” (OT, Oxf. 1982 57); Cruikshank pictures her not exactly ugly, perhaps, but slovenly and unattractive, which was of consequence in an era that aligned external appearance with inner worth. Although Nancy initially helps Sikes to kidnap Oliver, she risks her life to return him to his rightful class station by seeking out Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow and disclosing information about Oliver’s rightful parentage. Nancy, through Dickens’s pen, exhibits morality and goodness, qualities that reassured Dickens’s middle-class readers that Nancy is a character worth caring about. Dickens conceived of Nancy and Rose as a pair; “Two Sister-Women” is the first descriptive headline for chapter 40.46 Cruikshank’s illustrations compromise the text’s capacity to show Nancy to be like her angelic sister, Rose Maylie.
In “The Meeting” (see fig. 22), a well-staged illustration, Nancy stands across from Rose Maylie and Mr. Brownlow while Morris Bolter (aka Noah Claypole) hides in the shadows and overhears Nancy’s plan to help Oliver. Passably pleasant, Rose has a slender build and refined features that match Oliver’s own, but squat Nancy, in contrast, has a coarse face and looks prematurely old. Rose’s bonnet is trimmed, her shawl appears neat, and her gown is full-length and respectable; in contrast, Nancy’s bonnet seems frumpy, her shawl looks ragged, and her dress is too short—it exposes her ankles and suggests her dubious profession. In this plate and in “Oliver Claimed by His Affectionate Friends,” Nancy does not look the sympathetic, conscientious character who risks her life for Oliver, but rather like a low-class London type.
Much debated, too, is the artistic merit of illustrations by Thackeray and Carroll. Often cited is Dickens’s rejection of Thackeray as a possible illustrator for The Pickwick Papers following Seymour’s suicide. On the other hand, Thackeray earned the praise of Charlotte Brontë and Du Maurier47 and received glowing reviews well after Vanity Fair’s serial publication; one 1865 commentator in the North American Review proclaims: “The designs with which Thackeray illustrated his works, which are, so to speak, his own commentary upon them, and without which the story loses half its point,—which illustrate Thackeray’s character scarcely less than his pages,—are admirably reproduced” (626). Other reviews are mixed. For example, John Harvey recognizes Thackeray’s “art of versatile visual irony, learnt from the caricatures, that he carried into his novels as illustration” (76), but he laments that “[t]he inadequacy of Thackeray’s draughtsmanship frequently poses problems at just those places where an illustration is most appropriate” (79).48
Harvey’s critique of Thackeray’s draughtsmanship easily applies to Carroll’s amateur, caricature-style illustrations.49 Carroll skillfully stages Alice’s bodily distortions, but at times it appears as if a different character is growing and shrinking. Alice is presumably seven in this story, but she looks like a dreamy-eyed teenager when she first meets the White Rabbit (UG 13); a few scenes later when Alice is talking to the Caterpillar, she looks about six years old (49). Many of Carroll’s talking beasts, such as the Caterpillar, are riddled with anatomical inaccuracy. As I explore in the next chapter, Tenniel, a recognized Sixties artist, redrew Carroll’s caricature sketches with naturalism and ensured the success of Alice for an 1860s audience and successive generations.
Figure 22. “The Meeting.” Illustration by George Cruikshank for Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” in Bentley’s Miscellany, December 1838. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
Browne’s artistry,50 too, came under attack by, for instance, Sacheverell Sitwell, who insists that “If [Phiz’s] engravings are compared with those by Cruikshank for Oliver Twist the inferiority of ‘Phiz’ is to be seen at the first glance” (21–22). Anthony Trollope was displeased with Browne’s mundane illustrations for the first half of Can You Forgive Her? (1864); he replaced Browne with E. Taylor as illustrator for the second half of the novel. Attuned to the changing taste in book illustration, Dickens did not employ Browne after 1859. Rather, Dickens chose Stone, a Royal Academy-trained artist, to illustrate Our Mutual Friend (1865) and Luke Fildes, another Academy-trained painter, to illustrate his final unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870).
Undeniably, visual clichés from melodrama and theater manuals of the day recur throughout caricature-style illustrations.51 Browne uses a stock pose of raised arms to indicate Pickwick’s surprise in stumbling upon Alfred Jingle in “The Discovery of Jingle in the Fleet” (see fig. 23B). Likewise, in Oliver Twist, Cruikshank positions Oliver with both arms raised and his mouth open wide in “Oliver Amazed at the Dodger’s Mode of ‘Going to Work’” (see fig. 23A) to show Oliver’s alarm upon realizing the Artful Dodger is actually a pickpocket. Thackeray, too, uses this same stock pose in Vanity Fair to depict Jemima Pinkerton’s astonishment when Becky Sharp flings the parting gift of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary out the ca
rriage window in “Rebecca’s Farewell.” These predictable expressions, poses, and gestures made illustrations understandable and popular with their Victorian reader-viewers, but they may well have readied the public for a fresher style of illustration by Academy-trained artists beginning in the 1850s.
Figure 23. A: “Oliver Amazed at the Dodger’s Mode of ‘Going to Work.’” Illustration by George Cruikshank for Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” in Bentley’s Miscellany, July 1837;
Figure 23. B: “The Discovery of Jingle in the Fleet.” Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne for Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1837. Both plates come from the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
Scandal, disagreement, and tension between authors and illustrators also riddle the legacy of the caricaturists. Was Dickens to blame that Robert Seymour went into his garden on Liverpool Road in Islington late at night on 20 April 1836 and shot himself with a fowling piece? An exacting author, Dickens did not like the figures in the initial sketch of “The Dying Clown”; the strolling actor’s anguished wife looked too old and the clown too despondent to be sympathetic. Seymour and Dickens met at Furnival’s Inn just days prior to Seymour’s suicide. Dickens ultimately approved the revised sketch (see fig. 4, ch. 1, 42), but the incident rattled Seymour, who was working on revisions of “The Dying Clown” to accommodate Dickens’s instructions late into the very night that Seymour committed self-murder, as the Victorians called suicide.52 Dickens was never an easy collaborator; he had a total of eighteen illustrators over his prolific literary career. But to some critics like A. N. Wilson, Seymour was “an unhappy man, of illegitimate birth and depressive temperament” (18). Two years before Seymour shot himself, Gilbert à Beckett, who had lavished praise on Seymour’s front-page caricatures for Figaro in London (a forerunner of Punch), publicly smeared Seymour in a November 1834 issue of Figaro after the illustrator quit. Seymour left because the Figaro editor could not pay him; Beckett had squandered his money on poor theatrical speculations. In turn, Beckett hired Robert Cruikshank to replace Seymour and insulted and libeled Seymour in Figaro in a column entitled “To Correspondents”: “It is not true that Seymour has gone out of his mind because he never had any to go out of” (184), notes Beckett. Worse, Beckett insists, “the ideas for the caricatures in Figaro were always supplied to him by the Editor, [Seymour] being a perfect dolt, except in the mechanical use of his pencil” (184). Even Seymour’s wife believed that her husband’s public humiliation in Figaro contributed to the suicide.53
For a time, the public deeply mourned Seymour; The Satirist proclaimed his death a “public loss” and remarked that with “the exception of Cruikshank, he had no rival ‘near his throne’” (“Posthumous” 138). But Seymour’s fans soon forgot him, and sales of The Pickwick Papers soared without him. From Seymour’s widow’s vantage point, her husband was the true originator of Pickwick. In 1840, Seymour’s widow and son appealed to Dickens, well known for his philanthropy, to help their family as their resources diminished, but Dickens refused. Again in 1849, Jane Seymour appealed to Dickens as debt and illness plagued her family, but Dickens rebuffed her appeals for money and asserted her claim of her husband’s authorship was false. The controversy flared again in 1866, four years before Dickens’s death.
Shortly after Dickens died, a new controversy arose with a different illustrator. George Cruikshank claimed to be the creator of Oliver Twist. Cruikshank took many Londoners by surprise when more than three decades after the publication of Oliver Twist, and two years after Dickens’s death, he published a pamphlet entitled The Artist and the Author (1872) in which he claimed to be the “originator” of Dickens’s Twist and several of Ainsworth’s novels, including The Miser’s Daughter (1842) and The Tower of London (1840). The controversy found its way into the periodical press and “potboiler” biographies of Dickens.54 Critics variously view Cruikshank’s statements as “absurd” (Ainsworth), “deserving of sympathy” (Harvey), or “not without some basis” (J. R. Cohen).55 “One thing … these foolish claims of Cruikshank’s and of Seymour’s widow do emphasise,” observes Hammerton in The Dickens Picture-Book, “is the importance of the illustrator in book-production at the time when Dickens first came before the public” (4). To Martin Meisel, the importance of Cruikshank’s illustrations for dramatizing Dickens’s and Ainsworth’s works “did reinforce the practices and attitudes that led Cruikshank to think of himself in some of his collaborations as more auteur than illustrator” (279).
When Cruikshank made these claims in 1872, there was a new aesthetic in Victorian illustration. Nonetheless, for many Victorians, the caricaturists left a lasting impression of characters and iconic scenes that they staged in their book illustrations. Robert Surtees declares in his preface to Handley Cross: “Mr. Jorrocks, having for many years maintained his popularity, it is hoped that, with the aid of the illustrations, he is now destined for longevity” (n. pag.). Oftquoted is Henry James’s admission in A Small Boy and Others (1914) that Oliver Twist “perhaps even seemed to me more Cruikshank’s than Dickens’s” (120). Cruikshank immortalized Fagin, Leech “maintained [Jorrocks’s] popularity,” and Phiz brought to life countless Dickensian characters. The evolution of the Victorian illustrated book demonstrates how the indelible designs of the caricaturists set the stage for subsequent professional artists who returned to these very illustrations and revised them.
3
Realism, Victorian Material Culture, and the Enduring Caricature Tradition
The many drawings [Fred Barnard] made for the Household Edition, as well as some larger pictures, illustrating the works of the great author [Dickens], all possess a certain peculiarity: while the drawings are strictly in his own style, there is just enough resemblance to the figures created by H. K. Browne to save you a shock.
George and Edward Dalziel, The Brothers Dalziel, 1901
By the mid-nineteenth century, the aesthetics of the Victorian illustrated book were changing. The new style of illustration did not simply replace the popular designs of the 1820s–1840s. Caricature-style illustration remained in circulation through Punch and reprints of George Cruikshank’s and Robert Seymour’s publications; Cruikshank’s Illustrations of Time (1827) and My Sketch Book (1834) were reprinted, respectively, into the 1870s and 1880s, and reprints of Robert Seymour’s Sketches by Seymour (1835) were reproduced into the 1880s.1 Publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic—Chapman and Hall, and Macmillan in England; Lippincott and Company, and Scribner’s in America—reissued editions of Charles Dickens’s novels with the original illustrations,2 even as Chapman and Hall produced the Household Edition (1871–79) with Fred Barnard as lead illustrator.
In the 1850s came the new art of photography, the Great Exhibition, and a different style of book illustration. Sixties illustration arose during a decade where pioneering photographers were capturing the horrors of war (for example, the Crimean War [1855] and the Indian Mutinies [1857–60]), and famous personages were sitting for photographic portraits (such as Napoleon III in 1859 and Queen Victoria in 1860). Lewis Carroll, the well-known author of the Alice books, gained acclaim in the 1860s as an amateur photographer using his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson; the author-illustrated hand-written Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (UG, 1864)—the original manuscript version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AA, 1865) with Carroll’s own caricature-style illustrations—includes a photograph Dodgson took of the real Alice Liddell to signal the end of the heroine’s curious dream.3 Realistic illustration simulates the lifelike quality of photography. This style, commonly referred to as “Sixties” illustration, began in the mid-1850s and extended into the 1870s.4 In its commitment to observation and its aim to render figures, domestic interiors, and landscape with accuracy, Sixties illustration—also referred to as naturalism, representational realism, or simply realism—is foremost a representational style.5
Whereas the first generation of caricature-style illustrators
was relatively unschooled, the second generation of accomplished painters turned illustrators was Royal Academy–trained. As Paul Goldman and Simon Cooke note in Reading Victorian Illustration, the “‘new art’” emphasized “academic standards, importing the conventions of painting into the small domain of the printed page” (1). While an eminent caricaturist like Cruikshank could engrave his own work, Sixties illustrators relied on engravers (foremost the Dalziel Brothers) to transform a tasteful drawing into a reproducible illustration to be marketed on a vast, industrial scale for a growing middle-class audience. The Pre-Raphaelites and eminent genre, portrait, and landscape painters increasingly entered the field of magazine and book illustration because they were “attracted to the idea of reaching a wider audience and eager to supplement their income while working on their submissions for the annual Royal Academy summer shows” (Meyrick 180).6
This chapter demonstrates that the Sixties style is multifaceted, “By turns lyrical and dramatic, journalistic and psychologically penetrating,” but always “a means of representing deep feeling which was still rooted in observation of the ‘real’ world” (Goldman and Cooke 2, 1). Representative illustrations by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, George Du Maurier, Helen Paterson, and Marcus Stone for the literature of William Allingham, Christina Rossetti, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, and Charles Dickens demonstrate a commitment to naturalism and feeling, a privileging of close-ups over panoramic views, and an attention to figures over backgrounds. This chapter frames the changing aesthetics in book illustration with a major development in Victorian material culture—the Great Exhibition of 1851. This unprecedented exhibition stimulated production of beautiful objects, including books with decorative bindings, and culminated in a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue in the representational style that came into vogue in the Sixties. D. G. Rossetti, featured in this chapter, viewed bookmaking as part of a Pre-Raphaelite commitment to design artful objects for the Victorian home.
Serials to Graphic Novels Page 12
