Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  While Phiz does not depict these two scenes at all, in other cases, Barnard chooses a related, more pregnant moment in an episode Phiz does depict, such as Dora’s deathbed scene. For example, Phiz features Agnes coming downstairs to tell David that Dora has died in “My Child-Wife’s Old Companion” whereas Barnard in “It is Much Better as It Is!” moves us into the bedchamber just before David’s “child-wife” departs from this world. Background details almost overwhelm Phiz’s plate: a guitar and sheet music, Jip and his Pagoda house, a mantel filled with ornaments, and a large portrait of Dora (which later hangs on the wall of David and Agnes’s home in “A Stranger Calls to See Me”) (see fig. 34A). In contrast, David’s grief takes center stage in Barnard’s tender deathbed scene that foregrounds two figures—David and Dora. A despondent David covers his face to hide his tears as he grasps the hands of “the first mistaken impulse of [his] undisciplined heart” (DC, Norton 558). Barnard invites us to linger over Dora’s beautiful curls fanning behind her on the pillow—curls that once attracted a boyish David who exclaims upon meeting Dora, “I never saw such curls—how could I, for there never were such curls!” (336). Barnard expertly renders the bed curtains and sheets, as Stone does in “Eugene’s Bedside,” but Barnard’s two realistically rendered figures—one distraught and the other dying—command the reader-viewer’s attention.

  Whereas Phiz depicts Daniel Peggotty holding his fallen niece after Rosa Dartle berates her in “Mr. Peggotty’s Dream Come True,” Barnard illustrates a prior moment when an enraged, jealous Rosa lashes out at Emily in “Rosa Dartle Sprang up from her Seat; Recoiled; and in Recoiling Struck at Her, with a Face of Such Malignity, So Darkened and Discolored by Passion, that I Had Almost Thrown Myself Between Them.” Barnard realistically renders the cheap lodging house with its few pieces of furniture and scattered clothes and a mirror, but the setting does not take attention away from the two figures divided by social class and virtue. Fallen Emily is on her knees reaching her arms toward imperious Rosa, who glares down at Emily and raises her left hand as if to strike her.

  Barnard’s illustrations for The Household Edition of Copperfield move us from Finsbury Square to this run-down darkened room in gritty London where fallen Emily temporarily takes shelter to the wet and wild storm scape in Yarmouth and into Dora’s bedchamber where we glimpse her before she dies. The background of the final illustration resembles Robert Buss’s painting Dickens’s Dream (ca. 1875),51 which shows Dickens dozing in his study surrounded by a dream cloud of Dickens’s most memorable characters. In this final Barnard plate, David and Agnes gaze at a cloud that includes all the memorable Copperfield characters; clearly recognizable are Micawber, young David, and Heep, all rendered with just a few brush strokes from the hands of an artist who embodies Dickens’s characters with a naturalism desired by the mid-to-late Victorian public.

  One year prior to the re-illustration of David Copperfield, James Mahoney, an Irish painter sometimes referred to as J. Mahoney, re-illustrated Oliver Twist, published in 1871 as the first title in the Household Edition series. Mahoney, who moved to London in 1859, exhibited watercolors at the Royal Academy and, like Barnard, worked for the Illustrated London News where he earned acclaim for his illustrations of the Irish famine based on firsthand observation. As part of the team of illustrators for the Household Edition, Mahoney also illustrated Little Dorrit (1873) and Our Mutual Friend (1875). Whereas Cruikshank provided twenty-four illustrations for the original version of Twist, Mahoney in this reillustration provided twenty-eight illustrations including many scenes that Cruikshank did not illustrate. However, Mahoney refashioned the most important Cruikshank plates—for example “Oliver Asking for More” and “Fagin in the Condemned Cell”—and his imitative reworking reveals the indelible mark of the caricaturist.

  Mahoney’s plates carry Cruikshank’s theatrical staging and the look of many of the original characters, particularly of Oliver and Fagin, whose appearance still resembles that of the stage Jew. Cruikshank’s “Oliver Asking for More” is foremost a theatrical moment where Dickens makes a social statement about the starvation of the workhouse children. As discussed in chapter 2, this scene is also one that the text quickly moves beyond—the master strikes a blow at Oliver, restrains him, and calls for Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle, who, in turn, rushes into the board room where the gentleman in the white waistcoat declares: “‘That boy will be hung,’ … ‘I know that boy will be hung’” (OT, Oxf. 1982 13). Mahoney’s untitled illustration (see fig. 35B), which serves as the headpiece to chapter 1, approximates Cruikshank’s tableau-style illustration (see fig. 35A). Mahoney likewise freezes the climactic moment where an underfed Oliver asks for an additional helping from the well-fed master, dressed in an apron to dispense the daily dietary allotment of “one porringer, and no more” (9). Mahoney keeps Cruikshank’s dramatic staging but reverses the orientation of the plate—the cook is positioned at the right side as opposed to the left side of the plate as in Cruikshank’s original, and the workhouse children, who look more pathetic than emaciated, appear to the left of Oliver as opposed to his right. Mahoney’s realistically rendered boys look thin and ravenous, but they do not have the dripping eyes and shaved heads as in Cruikshank’s original caricature. Mahoney positions Oliver in three-quarter view and dresses him in clothes that are too large for his form while in the original Cruikshank places Oliver in profile in skimpy clothes, magnifying his thinness.

  As is characteristic of Sixties illustrators, Mahoney zeroes in on the interaction between the master and Oliver. Of note, the master looks even more directly at Oliver in Mahoney’s version—the viewer can barely see the eyes of the master, positioned in profile, that seem to bore into Oliver’s head. The pauper assistant, now appearing in the far back middle of the picture plane in Mahoney’s version, looks less famished and shocked by Oliver’s request than in the original, and a small grated window in the background likens the workhouse to a prison cell. Nonetheless, the plate overall “is derivative rather than original,” as Philip Allingham notes, “relying for its full meaning not merely on a textual passage in the next chapter, but on the reader’s knowledge of the original illustration” (“Illustrations by James Mahoney”).

  Figure 35. A: “Oliver Asking for More.” Illustration by George Cruikshank for Charles Dickens’s “Oliver Twist” in Bentley’s Miscellany, February 1837. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College;

  Figure 35. B: headpiece to ch. 1. Illustration by James Mahoney for Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Household Edition, 1871.

  Cruikshank’s “Oliver Plucks Up a Spirit” also provides a working model for Mahoney’s “Oliver Rather Astonishes Noah.” In this scene, orphan Oliver rises up against the abuse of charity-boy Noah Claypole, who insults Oliver’s dead mother’s honor. Mahoney makes some changes, but the staging of Oliver and Noah imitates the original. Mahoney turns this plate into a close-up of three of the original four figures—Oliver, Noah, and Charlotte. In Cruikshank’s original, Mrs. Sowerberry, the undertaker’s wife, stands open-jawed and outraged in the open doorway while Charlotte, the Sowerberry’s maid, grabs Oliver with one hand and raises her fist to restrain Noah. The backdrop, important to Cruikshank’s plate, is filled with props—an overturned table, broken crockery, a sideboard Noah hides under—that confirm a confrontation has just transpired between Oliver and Noah, positioned on the floor in defeat. Cruikshank stages the fight somewhat comically: Oliver’s fist is so disproportionately large in relation to the rest of his slight body that Charlotte may not be able to stop Oliver from punching Noah again.

  In refashioning this plate, Mahoney retains some props, planting an overturned chair as opposed to a table in the original and broken crockery to convey a physical struggle, but the Sixties artist privileges figure over background and makes the characters more lifelike. In contrast to Cruikshank, Mahoney shows Oliver to be simply victorious over Noah as Oliver glares down upon his much larger tormenter and shakes a clenched
fist that matches the proportions of Oliver’s frame. In Mahoney’s re-illustration, Charlotte is just entering through the doorway, but Oliver remains out of her arm’s reach. Oliver stands upright with a tall sideboard behind him, giving him the illusion of strength. With the new orientation of this illustration, there is no sideboard available for Noah to crawl under. Noah cowers at Oliver’s feet and raises his left arm protectively to cover his face in a posture of fear and defeat.

  Mahoney’s final plate in the Household Edition, “He Sat Down on a Stone Bench Opposite the Door” (see fig. 36B), also carries the indelible imprint of Cruikshank’s iconic “Fagin in the Condemned Cell” (see fig. 36A). Mahoney illustrates a slightly earlier moment in the text where Fagin has just received his death sentence. Mahoney’s focus on Fagin is immediate and close up, which matches the approach that Cruikshank takes in depicting Fagin in his final hours. In his artistically rendered depiction of the thief contemplating his deserved demise, Mahoney makes Fagin less caricatured, although the artist retains his large nose and chin, features that liken Fagin to a stage Jew and make him immediately recognizable to the viewer familiar with the original Oliver Twist plates.52 However, in accentuating naturalism over theatricality, “He Sat Down on a Stone Bench Opposite the Door” regrettably loses the psychological intensity that distinguishes Cruikshank’s original.

  Figure 36. A: “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;

  Figure 36. B: “He Sat Down on a Stone Bench Opposite the Door.” Illustration by James Mahoney for Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Household Edition, 1871.

  Fagin now hangs his head and hunches over his shackled hands—he is not biting them as in the original. Fagin looks sad and defeated in Mahoney’s version more than crazed and terrified. Whereas Cruikshank exaggerates the terror in Fagin’s eyes through a stippled effect on the prison cell walls, Mahoney uses crosshatching to make the room look more lifelike and impenetrable. The room Fagin sits in is even barer in Mahoney’s version since Mahoney removes the few background details that Cruikshank offers. Gone are the Bible, the upturned hat, the two handwritten notices (presumably from the sheriff), and the barred prison window that allows some light into the cell. Mahoney places Fagin on a bench, as opposed to a cot in Cruikshank’s rendition, but retains the manacles and the linen bandage. The walls in Mahoney’s version are bare with the exception of one chilling detail: initials of previous inmates on death row scratched into the wall (at Fagin’s upper left) point to Fagin’s own fate that he anticipates as he sits alone on a cold stone bench.

  In his rendition of “The Last Chance” entitled “And Creeping over the Tiles, Looked over the Low Parapet,” Mahoney better captures Sikes’s state of mind in his final hours than he does Fagin’s. Mahoney places Sikes alone on a rooftop that is eerily out of focus and, as a result, leads the viewer’s eye to concentrate on Sikes, rendered in a close-up.53 Cruikshank’s version is foremost theatrical as described in chapter 2. Despite his powerful frame, Cruikshank’s Sikes strains against the harsh diagonal streaks of cloud and wind in a violent skyscape that lights up the terror in his eyes and the noose foreshadowing his doom. Mahoney strips away much of Cruikshank’s theatrical staging—the onlookers, the loyal canine hidden in the shadows, the howling wind, and the streaks of lightning. Rather, Mahoney looks deep into Sikes’s psyche at the moment the murderer realizes he cannot escape the mob. There is anger on the fugitive’s face, which Mahoney lights up from below. However, perhaps as a nod to the original, Mahoney retains one crucial prop from Cruikshank’s “The Last Chance”—the rope that hangs ominously like a noose and foreshadows Sikes’s accidental death by hanging.

  Mahoney consistently uses this Sixties close-up style in Oliver Twist. His backdrops do not offer as much attention to authentic Victorian life as Barnard’s do for Copperfield. Most suggestive of contemporary life is the plate that shows the aftermath of the actual pickpocketing scene that Cruikshank depicts in “Oliver Amazed at the Dodger’s Mode of ‘Going to Work.’”54 In its intermingling of Londoners of different social classes and a canine added to the mix, “Stop Thief!” recalls The General Post Office, One Minute to Six, Hicks’s painting of contemporary life, which also includes a dog in the varied crowd. Oliver is mistaken as a pickpocket, but the actual pickpockets form part of the crowd in Mahoney’s plate: Dodger with his trademark top hat accusingly points his finger at Oliver while Charley Bates, also shabbily dressed, holds onto his cap in pursuit of Oliver. Next to Fagin’s boys are respectable shopkeepers who have come out to watch and join in the chase. One woman in the background, presumably a shopkeeper, places her arm protectively around her young daughter as if to shield her from the alleged criminal. Into the mix, Mahoney draws a bourgeois gentleman. It is Mr. Brownlow, dressed in a well-fitted jacket and top hat. Brownlow raises his cane and joins Londoners of different social classes, closing in on Oliver and making palpable the danger he is facing. Mahoney offers the viewer no bookstall keeper in the shadows to assure an alibi for Oliver as Cruikshank does in “Oliver Amazed” (see fig. 23A, ch. 2, 88), and Oliver is running from the crowd, suggesting his guilt. Moreover, Brownlow in Mahoney’s plate is not Oliver’s protector, but his pursuer, and Oliver appears frantic in this illustration and out of breath.

  Of note, too, Mahoney illustrates murdered Nancy (see fig. 37), a scene that Cruikshank did not attempt but that Dickens acted out in his dramatic readings. This plate entitled “He Moved, Backwards, Towards the Door: Dragging the Dog with Him” is a close-up of the aftermath of Nancy’s murder, chosen perhaps so as not to offend the intended readership of the Household Edition, a family reading Dickens by the hearth. In its attention to one figure, this plate is consistent with the style of Mahoney’s other plates. However, Mahoney has staged and lit this scene theatrically in a manner that Cruikshank might have approved. Morning light filters through the window to illuminate the “worst” outcome of “all the bad deeds that, under cover of the darkness, had been committed within wide London’s bounds since night hung over it” (OT, Oxf. 1982 304). Nancy lies on the floor, her right arm cradling her head as if she were attempting to protect herself from Sikes’s fatal blow. Nancy’s left hand holds Rose’s white handkerchief, a symbolic textual detail that moves the viewer to pity the fallen Nancy and aligns her with her saintly sister-woman,55 Rose Maylie. The handkerchief looks stained, and Mahoney includes other signs of a struggle that allow the viewer to imagine the grisly murder that takes place in the previous chapter entitled “Fatal Consequences”: a toppled plant on the window ledge, blood pooling from Nancy’s head, and what appears to be a broken part of the club that Sikes uses to strike Nancy down.56

  At the far left of the plate appears Sikes, darkly shrouded, dragging his dog Bull’s-eye by the neck out of the room through the barely opened doorway. Sikes is stealthily retreating from the murder scene. Mahoney does not picture the terror of Sikes, who, according to Dickens, looks in horror on the murdered form of Nancy, who is “flesh and blood, no more—but such flesh and so much blood!” (OT, Oxf. 1982 304). Indeed, Sikes’s head is already out the doorway. Rather, Mahoney fixes our eyes on Nancy, still half covered with a rug that Dickens tells us Sikes places over Nancy’s body because “it was worse to fancy the eyes, and imagine them moving towards him, than to see them glaring upward, as if watching the reflection of the pool of gore that quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling” (304). Mahoney does not picture Nancy’s haunting eyes—her hand covers her face—or “the pool of gore” that might have offended his Victorian viewers, but he includes just enough detail to condemn Sikes of a crime, which, as Dickens preaches, is “the foulest and most cruel” (304).

  Figure 37. “He Moved, Backwards, Towards the Door: Dragging the Dog with Him.” Illustration by James Mahoney for Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Household Edition, 1871.
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br />   In this plate of murdered Nancy, the chase scene, and the close-up of Sikes in his final moment alive, Mahoney situates Twist in an urban environment and does not shy away from gritty aspects of London lowlife. But Mahoney’s illustrations are foremost re-illustrations of plates Cruikshank drew, particularly the characterizations of Oliver and Fagin. To the viewer familiar with the caricature-style illustrations that first brought Dickens’s characters to life, the imprint of Cruikshank’s original illustrations is more visible in Mahoney’s plates for Oliver Twist than Phiz’s imprint is in Barnard’s plates for David Copperfield.

  Tenniel’s Refashioning of Carroll’s Caricature-Style Illustrations

  A decade before the publication of the Household Edition of Dickens, John Tenniel used shading, crosshatching, and outlining to lend to Alice photographic realism found in natural history illustration. For Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Tenniel redrew many of Lewis Carroll’s caricature-style drawings from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.57 Like the Sixties artists who re-illustrated Dickens, Tenniel specialized in close-ups of human, animal, and mythical characters set in naturalistic landscapes that make Wonderland look believable. Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice’s dream world thus convey “the sensation that the ground beneath our feet has imperceptibly shifted” (189), notes Frankie Morris in Artist of Wonderland. The ground beneath Tenniel’s feet also seems to have imperceptibly shifted according to an 1866 reviewer for the London Review, who notes, “All these things are illustrated by Mr. Tenniel as if he had gone down the rabbit hole with Alice” (n. pag.). Carroll, who wrote and drew the story of Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole, did not publish his original drawings until 1886 at which time the Under Ground illustrations were not well received. A comparison of Tenniel’s and Carroll’s Alice illustrations that have been revaluated today58 reveals the vision of an amateur caricaturist repackaged with realism, demonstrating fluidity between two illustrative styles in the arc of the Victorian illustrated book.