Dickens the Novelist

by F. R. Leavis

  even beyond what is ordinary between author and illustrator his requirements were exacting.

  – Forster well knew this since when Dickens was abroad, as he was during the writing of Dombey and Little Dorrit, for instance, he conveyed through Forster his requirements and even angry criticisms at not getting what he wanted from ‘Phiz’ and any other of his illustrators. Dickens also knew it. He wrote to Forster:

  You know how I build up temples in my mind that are not made with hands (or expressed with pen and ink, I am afraid), and how liable I am to be disappointed in these things.

  To avoid unnecessary disappointment, Dickens himself produced by selection and admonition and the suggestion of a real man as an indication of what world Dombey belonged to, the face and appearance of Mr Dombey – he made ‘Phiz’ supply him with sheets of drawings (which Forster rightly thought worth reproducing in his Life) of types of faces for Mr Dombey for himself to choose from, before the artist even started on the book’s illustrations, knowing that once fixed the appearance could not be changed, and feeling the importance of providing the readership from the start with an adequate embodiment of the most important figure in the book, the one on whom it all hinged. What was this conception that made Mr Dombey different from Mr Pecksniff or Ralph Nickleby or any comparable figure in the previous novels? Forster, who was very inward with Dickens’s state of mind about this, tells us that he had ‘a nervous dread of caricature’ in ‘Phiz’s’ interpretation of Mr Dombey; naturally, since something in the nature of caricature had hitherto been a characteristic feature of the art of both the artist and the novelist, for the same reason – it was basic in the tradition to which they both belonged as artists with roots in the Hogarth complex of visual and literary art (an art extraordinarily homogenous, where Pope’s poetry, Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, Swift’s fantasies, Hogarth’s didactic art and Gillray’s political satire, shared the same conventions and aims). In the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit, the predecessor of Dombey, Dickens wrote, defending his own method: ‘What is exaggeration to one class of minds and perceptions, is plain truth to another.’ But in Dombey, in its very opening which sets the tone of a subtler art where irony springs from the pathos of the domestic scene, we see that Dickens has given up the old easy type of satire with its fierceness and exaggeration, for a delicate and tender sympathy with ordinary people, people no longer held at arm’s length (though of course peripheral figures such as Major Bagstock and the villain Carker get the old treatment inevitably). If we think what Miss Tox, Mr Chick, the Toodles parents and the Blimber family, even Mrs Skewton, would have been in any earlier novel of Dickens, we can see how differently they are conceived in this. Yet there was enough of the old Dickens effects in Dombey for ‘Phiz’ to find plenty of congenial subjects there in his old style, and to be able to wind up with the marriage of Captain Bunsby and Mrs Mac-Stinger to which he gives the full Hogarthian treatment, very appropriately, providing a richly humorous picture packed with detail, corresponding to, and even better than, the disappointed nuptial party of Charity Pecksniff.

  Dickens’s conception of Mr Dombey was not of a caricature and not even of a man to be satirized merely or mainly: evidently this man was conceived by Dickens as a complex creature, unhappy, misguided, even tragic, stupidly proud, callous to women’s claims (here Dickens put his finger on a Victorian representative fact, and through the cases of the first and second Mrs Dombeys and Florence, explores its various aspects with real feeling). Even and while really loving his boy, Mr Dombey is yet jealous of his loving others and views him almost wholly as an extension of his own ego. Dickens went over the sheets of heads the artist had drawn for him, marked those which were on the right lines, and indicated for his benefit a certain ‘Mr A’ who better embodied what Dickens had in mind as Mr Dombey’s type – not because he wanted Mr A’s likeness used, as Forster explains:

  A nervous dread of caricature in the face of his merchant-hero had led him to indicate by a living person the type of city-gentleman he would have had the artist select.

  With regard to Dombey and Son in particular Forster says, reproducing these attempts of ‘Phiz’s’ to satisfy his master:

  In itself amusing, it has now the important use of showing, once for all, in regard to Dickens’s intercourse with his artists, that they certainly had not an easy time with him; that even beyond what is ordinary between author and illustrator, his requirements were exacting; that he was apt, as he has said himself, to build up temples in his mind not always makeable with hands; that in the results he had rarely anything but disappointment; and that of all notions to connect with him the most preposterous would be that which directly reversed these relations, and depicted him as receiving from any artist the inspiration he was always vainly striving to give.

  ‘In the results he had rarely anything but disappointment’; ‘the inspiration he was always vainly striving to give’ – what a revelation! And undoubtedly reliable, coming from the confidant and intermediary.

  After the initial trouble about getting the appearance of Mr Dombey fixed, Dickens settled down it seems into hopeful resignation about the illustrations, writing: ‘Browne (‘Phiz’) is certainly interesting himself, and taking pains. I think the cover very good: perhaps with a little too much in it, but that is an ungrateful objection.’ What is important is that ‘Phiz’ was able to rise to Dickens’s demands for a quite new kind of illustration, which the new art of Dombey needed if Dickens’s readership was to be kept (in fact, the sales soared). The first example comes early on, and would alert the readers accustomed to pondering the pictures that a complicated effect of pathos with probably a tragic outcome was to be the keynote of the new novel, and it has besides the function of lending point to the climax of chapter III, ‘In which Mr Dombey, as a man and a father, is seen at the head of the home-department’. This illustration has the cross-page title of ‘A Slighted Child’. Mr Dombey is seated centrally, but turned to the left, where the nurse holds up for his delectation the infant Dombey of the right sex, while the wrong one hovers on the right, outside the frame of the picture, marking her exclusion from the family piece; with her mourning frock and her hands wrung with anguish little Florence is a pathetic sight. She casts a longing look towards her father’s chair, whose back, together with a leaf of the folding-door, bars her off. Yet though Mr Dombey has his back almost to her the tormented expression on his face shows his consciousness of the presence, or existence, of his unwanted daughter; his stiff posture and frozen yet divided gaze show he is an unhappy man, and his eyes, instead of being fixed on the baby Paul, as his position directs, are slewed round against his will because of the hovering, timid, resented presence of Florence. The nurse Polly has on her comfortable round face an obviously unnatural expression of distress and alarm – she knows there is something wrong about the situation, which is new to her. Above her head and looking as though about to fall on the baby and crush him, is the chandelier which is described in the text as being, like all those in the mourning house, ‘muffled in holland’ and which ‘looked like a monstrous tear depending from the ceiling’s eye’ – the artist has chosen to make it not a symbolic tear but an ominous bundle in its felt weight and threatening position in the picture: the whole illustration is emblematic therefore. Even the tiny baby is sat up in a precocious way with an unchildish look, adding to the sense of discomfort and something tragically wrong conveyed in every detail of the picture. This is an immense advance on Cattermole’s deathbed of Little Nell, which was an unconvincing concoction of commonplaces. Yet, though ‘Phiz’s’ picture here is original, it is simple and direct enough in execution to convey some at least of its import to even the unsophisticated reader or illiterate listener and viewer. And it is recalled in a similar, really a companion, piece towards the end of Dombey, ‘Let him remember it in that room, years to come!’ where the adult Florence stands in the same relation to her back-turned father, but herself facing away from him and evidently
about to leave him forever, he thinks. Thus Dickens and ‘Phiz’ together had already arrived at the solution to the problem of illustration as exemplified ideally here in a French critic’s comment on Chagall’s illustrations to an edition of La Fontaine’s Fables:

  Look carefully at one of these engravings, and the engraving all by itself will start telling you the fable. Chagall has managed to capture the very seed of the fable. As you look, the whole thing will germinate, grow, flower. The fable will step out of the picture.

  Yet the Dickens-‘Phiz’ solution was still a form of popular art, accessible to all.

  That Dickens was intimately concerned in all the Dombey illustrations we know from his involvement with the other principle ones of the kind. For ‘Paul and Mrs Pipchin’ Dickens had great expectations (not unconnected with his own childhood experience of the original of Mrs Pipchin – he was evidently recapturing in Paul’s bewitched attraction to the alarming figure his own at about that age),13 and he expressed a violence of disgust and anger proportionately when they were disappointed. Artists have consistently argued that Dickens ought to have been pleased with this plate, and grateful to ‘Phiz’ instead of abusing him, since it is remarkably successful in itself and what more could Dickens have wanted? We know what he wanted for this subject that he had given out himself, since he wrote to Forster of ‘Phiz’s’ version of it:

  It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark. Good Heaven! in the commonest and most literal construction of the text, it is all wrong … I can’t say what pain and vexation it is to be so utterly misrepresented. I would cheerfully have given a hundred pounds to have kept this illustration out of the book. He never could have got that idea of Mrs Pipchin if he had attended to the text. Indeed, I think he does it better without the text; for then the notion is made easy to him in short description, and he can’t help taking it in.

  Lynton Lamb quoting this and reproducing the etching alongside in his text-book on illustration for artists, comments: ‘we cannot help feeling that he (Dickens) was wrong. It is a lesson to us all’, a conclusion that all artists and art-critics seem to agree on (at least, I have not found a dissenter). But, as a novelist employing an artist for his own specific purpose, Dickens was not wrong, and on examining the novel, the etching, and Dickens’s statement of his grievances, one feels for the author. The lesson is to all who undertake illustration, not to make a picture which, however successful on its own, does not represent the spirit of the text from which it arose. Dickens specified some of the reasons for his pain and vexation, such as that Paul ought to have been down low in the shadow of the old lady’s draperies, as he tells the reader in the novel – ‘in a nook between Mrs Pipchin and the fender, with all the light of his little face absorbed into the black bombazeen drapery’, whereas ‘Phiz’ has seated Paul up on a high chair with the light full on his face (no doubt the novelist’s distribution of light was impracticable, but the seating wasn’t). We can see also that the cat in the picture is not a witch’s cat, that the interior of Mrs Pipchin’s parlour as depicted is not sinister but cheerful and cosy with the kettle comfortably singing on the fire, nor is Mrs Pipchin the well-fed old dragon with the stooping figure and the hard eye as created for us in the text – she is here gaunt, towering, youngish and not uncanny. ‘Phiz’s’ attempt to indicate the threatening, clutching nature of her plants which figure powerfully in the text, is perfunctory and hardly noticeable, and there is nothing ‘necromantic’ in ‘the three volumes – Mrs Pipchin, the cat and the fire’, which is their stipulated effect on little Paul. Dickens’s anger at the artist’s ignoring what he had taken so much trouble to build up for the reader visually with words and which ‘Phiz’ has replaced or rather supplanted by a quite other visual picture, one which for the purposes of the novel is wrong (and the worse the more memorable it is as a picture), is understandable then. And the more the novelist believed the illustrations were important to the success of the novel with its public, the worse the artist’s treachery seemed. Dickens ultimately realized that he could dispense with illustrators, but that was because Dickens had by then become an institution, and moreover the character of his creative art had again changed; Dombey however was early days.

  Dickens’s bitter conclusion about his artist, that it is better to withhold the text from him and coach him as to what is wanted, for then ‘he can’t help taking it in’, is the familiar exasperation of the creative literary genius at having to work with an uncomprehending visual talent that is deaf to the written word or else heedless of it, wanting to work out its own idea.14 But ‘Phiz’ did do better when on subsequent occasions Dickens carefully described what was wanted – gone for ever were the days when a Cruikshank was allowed to send drawings for Oliver Twist direct to the press without Dickens’s being able to stop them on the way. And equally a matter of a dead past was the enthusiasm Dickens had expressed and apparently genuinely felt for Cattermole’s olde-tyme architectural, and distressingly sentimental, illustrations of Little Nell, as to which he had written to Cattermole in 1841:

  Believe me that this is the very first time any designs for what I have written have touched and moved me, and caused me to feel that they expressed the idea I had in mind. I am most sincerely and affectionately grateful to you, and am full of pleasure and delight.

  Yet he had not apparently felt so, as he might have with more reason, about Cruikshank’s contributions to Oliver Twist and Sketches by Boz, or ‘Phiz’s’ to The Old Curiosity Shop itself. But no doubt Cattermole’s idea of illustration would not have satisfied him by the time of Dombey or even Chuzzlewit. Mr Arthur Waugh, in his little paper on ‘Charles Dickens and his Illustrators’ for the Nonesuch Press, says of Dickens’s profuse directions to Cattermole for Master Humphrey’s Clock (which included Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop) – rather exaggerating – that they show ‘the author throned in the chair of authority, with his hand guiding the pencil of the artist at his own free will. “The Inimitable” has now become “the Indominatable” as well.’ He considers that Dickens was ‘absolute dictator’ as regards A Christmas Carol, but this can’t mean more than that Dickens gave out the subjects and criticized the drawings before passing them; Dickens can’t have been responsible for Leech’s excellent artistry and sympathetic response to the spirit of the story. Mr Waugh, remarking on the change Dickens shows in his concentration on getting the illustrations to Dombey right, describes him on the accepted lines as ‘edgy’ and ‘querulous’ about them, but this is unjust, for it seems to me that Dickens, conscious that he was breaking new ground for which the old style of illustration wouldn’t do, and that he needed the right illustrations to enable his public to follow him, was trying to educate his artist on these lines. We can see that Dickens was not simply fussy or arbitrary by comparing what he complained about with what he let pass because though incorrect it didn’t matter, such as ‘Phiz’s’ turning Mr Peggotty’s boat-home upside down, which made a better picture, though Dickens had described it as standing right way up and roofed in, like a Noah’s Ark.

  Dickens provided ‘Phiz’ with instructions, which survive, for an important picture that, not answering to any particular part of the text, incorporates the whole spirit and ethos of Dr Blimber’s educational practice along with a detailed criticism of it, not too refined to be understood of the many and essential for the briefing of that part of the audience incapable of understanding Dickens’s points about the traditional Classical education – a very different thing from understanding the humanitarian case against Yorkshire schools and a barbarous Squeers family. Dickens writes that the subject is to be ‘Doctor Blimber’s young gentlemen as they appear when enjoying themselves’; gives details of the ages of the boys to be shown in addition to Paul, their expressions, and dress, where the Doctor and Paul were to be in the procession, with the additional hint that ‘Mrs Blimber is proud of the boys not being like boys, and of their wearing collars and neck-kerchiefs.’ Dickens explains that the young gentlemen wer
e to be ‘out walking dismally and formally’, evidently having envisaged the excursion for himself. ‘Phiz’ certainly worked this out with intelligence, humour and suitable supporting detail, unless Dickens also suggested the details verbally, for there is a whole symbolic background (‘Phiz’s’ backgrounds to his street scenes and outdoors with crowds of characters in the foreground standing out, are generally very good). This background to the dismal procession is nowhere described in the novel, nor is the humorous detail with its critical point in the foreground figures of low boys jeering at the young gentlemen who, as Dickens desiderated, are uncomfortably dressed like adults and with every expression on their faces from the stuck-up, through misery, blankness and boredom down to the outright imbecility of Toots, while Paul’s innocent surprise is set off against them all and contrasts comically with his companion, the self-satisfied Dr Blimber. Two Huckleberry Finn figures in the foreground turn rude somersaults in mockery of the genteel enslaved boys, while far back in the picture common children disport themselves on sand, cliffs and by the sea, flying kites, riding donkeys, and enjoying themselves in ways proper to youth, the whole forecasting the Blake-like lyrical coda that Dickens contrived as a separate ending to the novel, to round off his theme, where we are shown a new Paul and Florence roaming free along the sea shore followed humbly by a now repentant and loving Mr Dombey: this could have provided, and really needed to drive home the theme of Dombey’, a final and wholly different kind of illustration from anything known to Dickens’s artists – one from the artist-poet of Songs of Innocence. If Dickens never read Blake, then it is an extraordinary coincidence how wonderfully his novels incarnate the Songs of Innocence and Experience; he is indeed the Blake as well as the Shakespeare of the novel.