Serials to Graphic Novels

by Catherine J Golden

  55. Another plate depicting Pickwick in a compromising situation with a lady is Phiz’s “Mrs. Bardell Faints in Mr. Pickwick’s Arms” (Aug. 1836). Pickwick’s landlady, the Widow Bardell, faints in front of witnesses. Dickens and Phiz theatrically stage her response to an alleged marriage proposal that Pickwick never actually makes (the widow misconstrues an innocent question to be a nuptial proposal). Mrs. Bardell leans into Pickwick’s chubby arms and portly stomach while little Tommy Bardell ferociously kicks Pickwick in the shin. Philip Allingham’s The Victorian Web entry (accessed 18 Sept. 2014) entitled “Mrs. Bardell faints in Mr. Pickwick’s arms” informs my analysis.

  56. Harvey also makes this point on jollity and fatness, noting Mr. Pickwick “is the hero of the book because it is supposed to be especially funny to see a plump, prosperous, elderly man in contretemps where all his dignity is lost” (9).

  57. Jane R. Cohen includes Seymour’s image of a thin Mr. Pickwick in Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators, 44.

  58. Jane R. Cohen suggests that Seymour did not have to use Chapman’s fat friend as a model; rather, he “simply selected from his earlier work one of his stock elderly Cockneys, suitably altered him, and the ‘immortal’ Pickwick, as Dickens called him, was created” (44).

  59. Jane R. Cohen includes pictures by Seymour, Buss, and Browne to show how little Pickwick changes across these illustrators; see Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators, 44.

  60. When this serial appeared, postage, paid by the recipient, was high, except in major towns like London, which had a Twopenny Post prior to the nationwide Penny Post in 1840.

  61. What Pickwick tells the ladies anticipates his comic misadventure: “‘I should be very happy to afford you any amusement, … but I haven’t done such a thing these thirty years’” (P, Oxf. 370).

  Chapter 2. Caricature: A Theatrical Development

  1. In Reading Victorian Illustration, 1855–1875, Paul Goldman calls caricature “a vignette style, playful in line, comic even when the text was not comic and, above all, theatrical, whimsical and decorative. Gestures were grandiose, facial expressions generalized, printing was usually light and there was little psychological depth or true interaction with text” (Goldman and Cooke 28). In Caricature, E. H. Gombrich and E. Kris playfully dub caricature the “Cinderella” of graphic art, but they qualify, “if the comic artist has the great advantage of being readily understood by his contemporary public”—as George Cruikshank, Hablot Knight Browne, and Robert Seymour were—“he pays for it by being more difficult of appreciation for the generations to come” (3–4).

  2. Jonathan Hill goes into detail on the three Eastlake paintings and the two Wilkie paintings (including Rent Day [1807]) translated into these stage productions in “Cruikshank, Ainsworth, and Tableau Illustration,” 440–41.

  3. In Daily Life in Victorian England, 227–28, Sally Mitchell observes that in the later 1830s, more members of the middle class began to attend the theater.

  4. Oliver Twist came out in Bentley’s Miscellany from February 1837 until April 1839. There were three months that it did not appear—June 1837, October 1837, and September 1838—and the final issue was a double number. Jack Sheppard ran in Bentley’s from January 1839 to February 1840.

  5. These terms come from John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, 17.

  6. Oliver Twist is Newgate-like in its sympathetic treatment of prostitutes and thieves in Fagin’s criminal den. A real-life Jewish criminal named Ikey Solomon, a notorious receiver of stolen goods, is a likely model for Fagin. However, Dickens does not glamorize a life of crime as Ainsworth does in Jack Sheppard or Rookwood, which romanticizes highwayman Dick Turpin. Twist’s perversion of the middle-class home and its inclusion of hidden identities, kidnapping, and murder align Twist with sensation fiction, a popular novel form that thrilled and shocked its Victorian audiences with the above subject matter as well as adultery, bigamy, illegitimacy, and madness. See Mirella Billi, “Dickens as Sensation Novelist,” where she calls Dickens “the father of sensation fiction” (178).

  7. Newgate or Old Bailey novels were popular from the 1820s to the 1840s.

  8. The real Jack Sheppard sustained notoriety well after his death because of The Newgate Calendar, a monthly publication that began in the mid-eighteenth century to report Newgate Prison executions of notorious criminals. The Calendar appeared in various forms including a standard five-volume edition published in 1774 and a popular four-volume collection published in 1824–28. The Newgate Calendar—one of three top books found in a typical early Victorian middle-class home, along with the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress—sermonized against the life of crime that Newgate fiction glamorized.

  9. When Sheppard was hanged at Tyburn in 1724, an estimated 200,000 were in attendance (a third of London’s population at the time). Ainsworth patterns his fictional hero after the real-life Sheppard, but embellishes his romantic and criminal exploits. Some critics feared that Ainsworth, in transforming a thief into a dashing fictional hero, might induce readers to emulate Sheppard’s drinking, womanizing, and thieving. The original audience recognized the influence of Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747) on both Ainsworth’s novel and Cruikshank’s accompanying illustrations (Meisel 268).

  10. Twist also has elements of realism since Dickens aimed to “draw a knot of such associates in crime as really do exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness … to shew them as they really are, … which would be a service to society,” as he notes in his 1841 preface to the third edition (OT, Oxf. 1982 xxvi). Oliver Twist might best be seen as a combination novel, as Archibald argues: “Oliver Twist defies categorization. It is and is not a Newgate novel. It is and is not sensation fiction. It is and is not realism…. it is a hybrid of or bridge between these genres” (“‘Of All the Horrors’” 53).

  11. J. Pattie and J. Turner produced Oliver Twiss, by “Poz” in 1838; it came out in penny parts with Dickensian characters humorously renamed—Mr. Bumble is Fumble, and Mr. Sowerberry is Merrberry. “Poz” also wrote a Pickwick imitation entitled Posthumous Papers of the Wonderful Discovery Club, also published in 1838.

  12. See Meisel, Realizations, 255–57, for detailed discussion of these adaptations.

  13. The commercialization that Jack Sheppard stimulated was not surpassed until the publication of George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894).

  14. The most successful adaptation of Jack Sheppard staged at the Adelphi Theatre by John Baldwin Buckstone—a production that earned the endorsement of both illustrator and author (Meisel 271)—is a testimony to the importance of Cruikshank’s illustrations.

  15. Thackeray anticipates a claim Cruikshank himself made thirty years later in “The Artist and the Author.” Newgate fiction is known for poor prose as well as an exciting plot. In the introduction to Rookwood, Ainsworth humbly declares the inferiority of his “slight sketches” to the “admirable” renderings of this “inimitable artist”: “It were needless to say a word in commendation of the admirable designs by GEORGE CRUIKSHANK which accompany this edition. They will speak (and eloquently) for themselves. But I may be allowed to express the gratification I feel at the graphic manner in which my own slight sketches have been worked out by this inimitable artist” (xxviii).

  16. “There are no less than ten of Jack’s feats so described by Mr Cruikshank” (57), Thackeray adds. The verb “described” suggests the stroke of the artist, not the author, delineated Sheppard for its original readership.

  17. Sheppard met Edgeworth Bess at Haynes Tavern and quickly grew addicted to her affections and drink; stealing supplemented his meager wages as a carpenter’s apprentice, skills that made him an escape artist extraordinaire.

  18. Jack files off his fetters in under an hour, then saws through two iron bars, and after the file breaks, uses a gimlet to pierce an oaken beam nine inches in thickness.

  19. Ainsworth changes the facts in Jack Sheppard. Lyon and another criminal named Poll Maggott visited Sheppard
at Newgate and distracted the guards, and the two criminal associates dressed Sheppard in women’s clothing and led him to safety. In contrast, in Ainsworth’s fiction, a different criminal, Sheppard’s partner Joseph “Blueskin” Blake, disguises himself as an old man and smuggles in escape tools—a file, giblets, a chisel, and a piercer.

  20. Richard Vogler calls “Oliver Asking for More” “the most famous illustration ever done to accompany a novel. The concept of an orphaned child asking for more when forced to live on a legally fixed diet insufficient to sustain life somehow caught the fancy of Englishmen of all classes, and the theme of ‘asking for more’ was used repeatedly in later decades of the last [nineteenth] century in Punch cartoons” (149). The theme of “asking for more,” parodied in Punch, has resonated in political cartoons on topics as diverse as Watergate to soliciting donations for starving African children.

  21. Parish records confirm that children died from malnourishment and suffered greatly from dysentery and ringworm.

  22. Dombey and Son came out in monthly parts between October 1846 and April 1848.

  23. Cruikshank caricatures the facial features of the old couple. For example, the old lady has decidedly masculine features that jar with the bow on her nightcap; her unladylike jaw drops open so wide that it nearly swallows her chin.

  24. Thackeray calls this character the Marquis of Farintosh in the text, but the description of this suitor matches the drawing entitled “The Marquis ‘en Montagnard.’” There is no direct mention of the “Marquis ‘en Montagnard’” in the text, and the use of the quotation marks in the title of the illustration suggests it is a nickname for this particular suitor.

  25. Dickens describes the setting at great length, noting tea preparations, Mrs. Corney’s romping cats, wine bottles, and the round table where Corney and Bumble sit—all details which Cruikshank accurately renders.

  26. A shipwreck scene based on Clarkson Stanfield’s The Abandoned (1856) tellingly appears to the right of the mantle above a portrait of the betrayed husband.

  27. Thackeray places The Good Samaritan painting in the backdrop of illustrations for Vanity Fair (1848) and Pendennis (1850) and features it as a pictorial capital for ch. 2, vol. II of The Virginians (1859).

  28. Meisel discusses how the novel’s theatricality converges in the character of Becky Sharp in Realizations, 330. His analysis of Vanity Fair and tableau vivant, 332–37, informs this discussion.

  29. Charades was a favorite Victorian parlor game and is still played at parties today. Participants in the Victorian age acted out words in a phrase well known to the audience. Speaking was against the rules, but clues were allowed, and the players could divide words into syllables. Many Victorian novels include charade scenes, most famously Jane Eyre (1847) and Vanity Fair.

  30. See, for example, Deborah A. Thomas’s “Thackeray, Capital Punishment, and the Demise of Jos Sedley,” where she argues that the public execution of François Benjamin Courvoisier impacted Thackeray’s treatment of Jos Sedley’s demise; to Thackeray, “executions, if they occur, should take place away from public view” (9).

  31. John Sutherland raises the names of Becky’s solicitors and other evidence to convict and clear Becky of murder in his essay, “Does Becky Kill Jos?” in Is Heathcliff a Murderer?

  32. John Buchanan-Brown elaborates this point in The Book Illustrations of George Cruikshank, 43–44. Cruikshank also uses lighting most skillfully in Ainsworth’s The Miser’s Daughter (1842) in “Abel Beechcroft Discovering the Body of the Miser in the Cellar.” The final plate in The Drunkard’s Children (1848) depicting the drunkard’s daughter—now a prostitute and “gin mad” in the process of committing suicide—has led critics to compare Cruikshank to Rembrandt.

  33. In George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, vol. 2, 87, Patten, for example, notes Cruikshank simply did not heed Dickens’s caution that the artist could not capture this chase scene.

  34. In George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, vol. 2, Patten claims, “The whole plate is bravura pictorial narration, fully in accord with Dickens’s vivid prose yet independent and supplementary, a similar story told by different means” (87–88).

  35. Likewise, Patten states in George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, “It is arguably the most celebrated etching Cruikshank ever made and among the most famous book illustrations of all time” (2: 88–89). He adds, “What makes the illustration so immeasurably powerful is not only the physiognomy of the figure but also its evocation of Fagin’s psychic terror” (91).

  36. Those invested in Sixties illustration often make the claim that the caricaturists were not capable of showing psychological depth; see, for example, Paul Goldman’s “Defining Illustration Studies,” 28.

  37. See ch. 4 where I discuss in more depth the anti-Semitic depiction of Fagin and reference the work of Deborah Heller, Susan Meyer, and Lauriat Lane.

  38. To create the plate, Cruikshank posed in front of the mirror, crouching and gnawing at his knuckles and tossing his hair about; in doing so, Cruikshank transformed himself into a desperate Fagin, and that is what he drew. For a fuller account of Cruikshank’s creation of this plate, see Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times, and Art, 2: 91.

  39. In ch. 51, Dickens devotes only the final paragraph to Fagin’s imminent hanging and the spectacle of Victorian execution:

  Day was dawning when they again emerged. A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, and joking. Everything told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects in the very centre of all—the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and all the hideous apparatus of death. (OT, Oxf. 1982 347)

  Fagin’s hanging occurs offstage, although the rowdy populace anticipates it with “a peal of joy” (340).

  40. Plates like “Fagin in the Condemned Cell” brought Cruikshank critical acclaim. Charles Baudelaire believed Cruikshank’s strength as an artist lay in his mastery of the grotesque. John Ruskin recognizes in Modern Painters that Cruikshank’s “tragic power, though rarely developed, and warped by habits of caricature, is, in reality, as great as his grotesque power” (Elements 341). Ruskin ranks Cruikshank foremost among etchers and compares him to Rembrandt, Albrecht Dürer, and William Hogarth.

  41. Tenniel’s illustrations made Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a success, and they are still reproduced today in editions like The Annotated Alice, edited by Martin Gardner; references to the text of Alice in Wonderland come from The Annotated Alice and are cited parenthetically in the text as AA followed by the page number. Translated into more than seventy languages and never out of print, Alice in Wonderland has become a cultural icon, sparking collectible commodities—for example, clothing, games, bed linens, porcelain figurines and plates—as well as films, graphic novels, and stage adaptations (as early as 1876 in London).

  42. Although little known today, Surtees was a popular nineteenth-century author and an avid sportsman and hunter, activities which provided him with plenty of material for his series. Surtees did write two society novels, “Ask Mama” (1858) and “Plain or Ringlets?” (1860).

  43. Surtees, a country gentleman with his own pack of hounds, began his books as a series of loosely related adventures published in the New Sporting Magazine between 1831–34, which led to serial publication of Handley Cross, published in that magazine between 1838–39. The novel version, illustrated by John Leech and published in 1854, has merited critical attention.

  44. This same stereotype appears in William Mulready’s 1840 design for the first prepaid envelope accompanying the Penny Post as well as numerous political cartoons about the first and second Opium Wars between England and China in, respectively, 1839–42 and 1856–60.

  45. In The Dickens Picture-Book, Hammerton more generally states of Cruikshank: “He could not draw a pleasing female figure” (4). In my article “Cruikshank’s Illustrative Wrinkle in Oliver Twist’s Misreprese
ntation of Class” in Book Illustrated, I analyze the consequences to Dickens’s text of Cruikshank’s inability to draw an attractive woman.

  46. See Kathleen Tillotson’s introduction to the Clarendon Press edition of Oliver Twist, xxxvi; Tillotson suggests that Dickens would have likely criticized Cruikshank for his portrayal of Nancy had the author conceived of the women as a pair sooner.

  47. Thackeray had supporters like Charlotte Brontë, who called Thackeray a “wizard of a draughtsman” (qtd. in Richard Dunn’s essay “Out of the Picture?” in The Brontës in the World of the Arts, 40). Du Maurier also praises Thackeray in “The Illustrating of Books,” 2: 371. For criticism of Thackeray, see, for example, Graham Everitt, The Illustrated Book, and Donald Hannah, “The Author’s Own Candles.”

  48. Harvey hands Thackeray a backward compliment, noting that the artist “consistently succeeds” in small designs like pictorial capitals. In “Thackeray’s Pictorial Capitals,” 136–37, Joan Stevens applauds the pictorial capitals for previewing a chapter or commenting on the narrator.

  49. Many critics gloss over Carroll’s illustrations to promote subsequent illustrators of Alice. See, for example, The Tenniel Illustrations to the “Alice” Books where Michael Hancher refers to faults in Carroll’s “naïve” (32) drawings. Richard Kelly also criticizes Carroll’s illustrations in “‘If You Don’t Know What a Gryphon Is.’”

  50. Browne worked consistently into the 1850s whereas Cruikshank found his employment drying up by the end of the 1840s. Nonetheless, Phiz, like Cruikshank, could not “make the transition to the new kind of illustration” (Steig, Dickens and Phiz 11).

  51. As Meisel notes in Realizations, “That there were conventions for the representation of character and emotion or the embodiment of a situation in the nineteenth century we know from old movies and the crude relics that survive even today as mock melodrama” (5).