by F. R. Leavis
It seems to me that this is where Cruikshank was lacking. He was too independent and much too egotistical – it is significant that in his old age he claimed to have originated the plot and incidents of Oliver Twist and alleged that he gave Dickens all his ideas for that novel, an absurd delusion; overflowing with invention and fantasies, Cruikshank had an impish sense of humour which was quite undisciplined. It does not matter that Fagin’s hook nose, whiskers, oval face, short figure and glaring eyes were Cruikshank’s own characteristics which his sardonic sense of humour must have enjoyed copying from his mirror for the villain. But his habit of putting recognizable people into his illustrations necessarily interfered with the proper purpose of the novelist’s art: in his ‘Public Dinners’ in Sketches by Boz the second man in the procession is recognizably the young Dickens and the fourth unmistakably himself, so that it is not surprising that the two complacent figures leading the procession should have been traditionally said to be Chapman and Hall the publishers (though Mr Arthur Waugh has since declared this to be a myth). This is Cruikshank’s sense of humour, but he does not show the right kind for Dickens’s work, and there is no humour, as distinct from an interest in the grotesque, in his illustrations for Oliver Twist. While this might have been largely not inappropriate for the Dickens phase that ended with Chuzzlewit, after that Gillray’s style of caricaturist’s wit was no longer suitable, so Cruikshank could never have been the ideal illustrator for the tender and idealistic side to Dickens’s novels such as is present as early as The Old Curiosity Shop – Cruikshank’s children are drawn in that curious earlier 19th-century convention which makes them appear dwarfed adults, with large heavy heads, unchildlike faces and minute feet. Though one would have liked to have seen Gillray’s and Cruikshank’s idea of the Pecksniff clan gathered in Mr Pecksniff’s ‘best parlour’ in chapter IV,8 this style would not have done for the humorous side of Dombey and Copperfield, which though humorous is yet tender, domestic and poignant. ‘Phiz’ was not only more pliable, more educable and more suitable in his wider range of feeling and his freedom from an assertive ego; in spite of what the art critics have said, it seems to me he is even, for Dickens’s purposes, the better artist. Mr Ruari McLean, who also prefers Cruikshank, writes:
A comparison of Cruikshank with ‘Phiz’ – thumbing through Sketches by Boz together with, say, Martin Chuzzlewit – shows how much greater an artist Cruikshank was, with ten times more personality in his character and life in his scenes – and with an infinitely greater sense of making a picture.
Yet it still seems to me that if we take up this challenge and compare Cruikshank’s illustration for Sketches by Boz of ‘The Pawnbroker’s Shop’ with ‘Phiz’s’ very similar scene which illustrates young Martin’s encounter with Tigg in the pawnbroker’s, we feel and see that though admirable as a composition and an etching Cruikshank’s pawnbroker’s interior is too tidy, unimaginative and static to be interesting, and there is no sense of the essentially painful element, the sordid and degrading, inherent in the situation and in the relation between customers and pawnbroker, which ‘Phiz’ captures and makes us aware of. Nor is there the humour that is necessary for a Dickensian treatment of the text. It is ‘Phiz’s’ that has the vivid dramatic quality, the feeling and the humour, and we see in the stance of both men behind the pawnbroker’s counter, in the expression of the one on the tilted chair, in the woman with the baby at the breast, the Hogarthian use of the pictures on the wall, the expressive attitudes and faces of all the other characters, the whole mise en scène and its dramatic lighting, that ‘Phiz’ has immersed himself imaginatively in the life of the novel and found a corresponding visual art for expressing it – not as an independent picture but as an illuminating contribution to the novel. This is what the readership needed, and Lynton Lamb implicitly admits ‘Phiz’s’ value to the reader, even to the modern reader, when he says that in spite of what he feels to be ‘Phiz’s’ general inferiority to Cruikshank aesthetically, ‘But, touch by touch, our knowledge of the visible world in which Dickens’s characters moved and had their being, is extended and consolidated’ (by ‘Phiz’).
There is a well-known woodcut by Cruikshank called ‘Our Library Table’ which shows Harrison Ainsworth the novelist conferring with Cruikshank ‘his pictorial coadjutor’ on Ainsworth’s Magazine, ‘Cruikshank’, it has been observed, ‘characteristically laying down the law’. Now Dickens was not an author who would submit to this, though, also characteristically, he delighted in Cruikshank’s society and maintained a convivial friendship with him after dropping him as an illustrator. For ‘Phiz’ there was no question of independence: Dickens seems to have given out the subjects as well as criticized the drawings for alteration before they went to press. Thus in the course of Pickwick, when they were newly working together, Dickens writes to him, of the drawing submitted for his approval:
I think the Sergeant should look younger, and a great deal more sly, and knowing – he should be looking at Pickwick too, smiling compassionately at his innocence. The other fellows are noble.
Unfortunately we have few of the memoranda that Dickens supplied to ‘Phiz’ for his use or that ‘Phiz’ made for himself at Dickens’s coaching sessions, which indicate the nature of the instructions Dickens gave, and not very many of his criticisms remain either as given by letter direct to ‘Phiz’ or indirectly through Forster – with Forster Dickens evidently felt freer to express the exasperation or disappointment that he frequently felt, it seems, at his artists’ efforts. We shall never know how much of ‘Phiz’s’ success was due to empathy and how much to Dickens’s patient explanations of what he wanted. A great part of these explanations must have been verbal, as we can see from such accidental evidence as this in a letter from Dickens to Forster: ‘Of course she hates Carker in the most deadly degree. I have not elaborated that now, because (as I was explaining to Browne the other day …)’. It is to ‘Phiz’s’ credit that whereas Cruikshank was weak in those respects where Dickens’s growth was taking place, ‘Phiz’, a whole generation younger than Cruikshank, was amenable to the new influences enough to be carried out of the limitations of the tradition of the grotesque, the satiric and the moralistic, that he, like Cruikshank, had inherited as an illustrator, though, very intelligently, he kept to the Hogarthian tradition wherever it was most suited to the text – and, as we have seen, Dickens long continued to see and feel in this tradition at times himself.
How Dickens and ‘Phiz’ together tackled the problem of carrying along a mixed and incompetent readership in the train of the Inimitable’s progress from the concocter of hand-to-mouth entertainment to the serious and responsible artist who could and did risk alienating important sections of his public, is worth examining. As I have already said, it seems to me there is no question that Dickens rightly chose ‘Phiz’ as the most suitable artist he was likely to get for his purposes in the period between Pickwick and Bleak House when Dickens was developing as an artist and had to reach and conquer the higher levels of his society, which at first were strongly resistant to what was felt to be, compared with Thackeray’s, a vulgar form of fiction and later, compared with George Eliot’s, an unintellectual one.9 Dickens was still experimenting for The Old Curiosity Shop, for which both Cattermole and ‘Phiz’ were employed, Cattermole doing the ‘Gothic’ interiors of the curiosity shop, the churches and tombs and of the vaulted chambers in the ruins, and also the sentimental scenes, ‘Phiz’, much more satisfactorily, the satiric and humorous illustrations.
Actually, ‘Phiz’ shows himself here better able than Cattermole even to bring out the potentialities of Gothic architecture (which to Cattermole are only antiquarian) in playing off its sinister antiquity and symbolic suggestions against the youthful innocence of Little Nell. ‘Phiz’ successfully shows it as embodying the threat to Nell represented by Quilp and his malignity. This can be seen in ‘Phiz’s’ illustration ‘Nell Hides from Quilp’, where the dwarf is shown as an inhuman bestial figure in exactly the same
tradition of heraldic monster as the two stone ones above which flank the archway and which stand, threatening in posture, beside the niches which are empty of their guardian saints – as are likewise the niches below the monsters, against one of which niches Nell crouches from Quilp with his uplifted stick (he repeats the attitude of the monsters above who raise banners) – crouches against the empty niche for the protection that is not forthcoming. In the shadow of the archway is a sinister figure with a sack or burden on its back. All this is either mentioned or implied in the text – for instance, Quilp is described when raising his stick (actually, to direct forward the boy with Quilp’s trunk on his back) as ‘looking up at the old gateway, and showing in the moonlight like some monstrous image that had come down from its niche and was casting a backward glance at its old house.’ Whether by Dickens’s direction or by his own sympathetic comprehension of the text supplied him here, ‘Phiz’ has supplied the visual equivalent not merely of an episode in the story but of its meaning in the novel as a whole, and much more successfully than Cattermole’s sentimental picture of Nell on her death-bed, ‘At Rest’, with its very obvious and trite appurtenances of the Madonna and Child above her bed-head, the open window for the departing soul, the hourglass and the song-bird on the window-sill, the prayer-book in the dead girl’s hand, the contrast between her youthful simplicity and the decayed Gothic magnificence of her surroundings – all easily taken in (because conventional and hackneyed) even by the illiterate who could only listen to instalments read aloud.10
‘Phiz’s’ low-life and below-stairs scenes here are also full of interesting detail giving new force to the tradition of caricaturing such (e.g. those in Miss Brass’s kitchen and wherever Dick Swiveller – a younger Micawber – is present), as well as traditional satiric representations of the Brass family. But his ‘Quilp defies the Dog’, with a telling view of Thames-side through the opening of the shed, is much more than this and emphasizes Dickens’s idea – the animal nature of Quilp’s face and body-attitude in goading the chained dog opposite him brings out the inferiority of the animal to the human in ferocity and malice, as the fearsome hatred of Quilp’s belabouring the gigantic wooden figurehead (a substitute for Kit) in ‘Revenge is sweet’ is made more frightening by Sampson Brass’s shrinking away from it in spasmodic terror. ‘Phiz’ shows he is trying to respond to the real and new elements of painful feeling in this novel which, while escaping Dickens in direct handling of Little Nell, the character deliberately chosen to embody it, Dickens successfully captured in such indirect and apparently unconnected episodes as the description of the sufferings of giants at the hands of dwarfs when the giants have been discarded as too decrepit for circus display, the rigorous disciplining of the performing dogs, the domineering of the artful Codlin over his partner the kind unselfish Short, and other symbolic aspects of the world of the fairground travellers (symbolizing the essential truth about the real world), where Dickens presents the suffering and the pathos of helpless innocence and simple goodness with complete and astonishing success, free from the sentimentality that is evoked in him by ‘the child’ here (Little Nell, whose ambiguity of age the artists uneasily reflect in various places, with unconscious appropriateness). ‘Phiz’ has not undertaken a full-page representation of the most touching and pregnant scene in the book (the end of chapter XVIII), but suggests its painful pathos in a vignette of ‘Jerry’s Dancing Dogs’, unambitious but on the right lines, in chapter XXVII. In the drawing of the giants waiting on the dwarfs, though his dwarfs are excellently spiteful and domineering, the giants are comical instead of pathetic so he loses the point – this and other signs, such as mawkishness in representing Nell11, shows the difficulty of a Gillray-type art’s being requested to do something outside its range and suggests the effort ‘Phiz’ must have made to cope successfully with Dombey’s demands on him. In the plate ‘Miss Monflathers Chides Nell’ while he has as a foundation a Hogarth-type satire (there is even an ambiguous placard on the wall of the boarding-school: ‘Take Notice! Mantraps’) yet Little Nell’s feeling of being hemmed in by scornful, hostile female presences is quite successfully established in spite of the superficial presence of the comic spirit. It was not to be expected that ‘Phiz’ could tackle satisfactorily the scenes where Nell travels through the industrial Midlands in chapter XLIV and XLV, to which only a Martin combined with a Doré could have been adequate; Dickens’s nightmare vision of the breakdown of civilization and the death of humanity in a dehumanized landscape where industrial processes dominate and poison life at its sources, and where the rhythm of machinery has replaced the movements of Nature, is more powerful than the subsequent use of it in Hard Times. Now seen to be a prophetically wise insight, this remarkable passage never deserved the cheap sneer it received in House’s The Dickens World (a sanctioned academic text for Dickens students), where it is dismissed as ‘a piece of metrical excitement … his horrible imaginings stream on in an almost hysterical rhythm’, and is described as ‘recording the ordinary Southerner’s surprise at what they see’ in ‘the industrial midlands’.
In Chuzzlewit we see ‘Phiz’ has taken pains to help the enlarged readership by establishing the characters of Pecksniff and his daughters so that their roles shall be comprehensible to the artless class of reader in spite of the deceptive irony of the early chapters, and again by responding to the changed role of Mercy Pecksniff when, upon marrying Jonas, she becomes a figure for compassion, by altering his rendering of her, taking out the satire, while Charity’s likeness to her father is stressed in contrast. The high spirits of the scene where poetic justice is achieved by Charity’s being left in the lurch by her bridegroom is as congenial to ‘Phiz’ as to the Dickens of this first phase, where a stock situation of popular humour has been appropriately invoked by the novelist and treated by the artist.
But the real test of ‘Phiz’s’ suitability for Dickens was whether he could rise to the necessary partnership in Dombey, Dickens’s first major, complex novel, and the first conceived as a serious whole, though the working out is neither so ambitious nor so realistic as the original conception to be found in Forster’s Life.12 Dickens, we have evidence, took more than ordinary pains to get his artist to supply a not adequate visual equivalent of his text which until it reached the elopement and the pursuit of Carker had the demerit, for a popular art, of being rarely dramatic, never spectacular, and where humorous, oddly indirect and devious. Dickens explained to ‘Phiz’ in detail the plates that he wanted to summarize the theme and embody ideas rather than illustrate actual episodes in the text. Forster knew that Dickens was exceptional in the demands he made on artists because he had a function for them other than just making the novels attractive visually: Forster says