by F. R. Leavis
This and the other major illustrations to Dombey represent a great enlargement of the powers of an artist who had hitherto been most at home in Hogarthian satire and in figuring the mean, the ridiculous, the pretentious, the contemptible and the depraved. ‘Phiz’ has now shown himself equal to the demand for something other than that he should establish the characters memorably in order to hold together the instalments for unintelligent readers and to make clear to them who is being satirized and who is to be taken seriously; more delicate distinctions are being required in Dombey and a greater range of feelings than merely to chronicle fierce and violent actions or comic overthrows as he had mostly done hitherto. He must now, in Dombey, and in spite of Dickens’s assertion that he can’t read effectively, have done so almost too intelligently in order to make the striking picture called (ironically) ‘Mr Carker in the hour of triumph’, where Dickens must have got more than he bargained for from his illustrator. ‘Phiz’ has either been wicked, his sense of fun having got the better of him, or has over-responded with unconscious sympathy to the text of Carker’s meeting with Edith Dombey at Dijon, where she undeceives him – refusing to become his mistress – in the hotel room where there is, symbolically, a choice meal spread untouched. The writing of this chapter is excited and theatrical, and the dialogue is conducted in the language of melodrama; ‘Phiz’ has accordingly drawn what is unmistakably a stage performance with an actor and actress taking the parts of villain (baulked) and tragic heroine (vindicating herself and denouncing him), in conventional melodramatic postures with the appropriately exaggerated expressions and the larger-than-life gestures of those treading the boards; there is even a tragedy-queen fold to Edith’s draperies. (This is quite a different thing from ‘Phiz’s’ general fondness for setting his drawings in stage dispositions, a way of achieving a composition suited to the stylized comedy of Dickens’s early novels.) Even the Hogarthian adjuncts – the picture on the wall of Judith beheading Holofernes and the statue of the Amazon on horseback charging with raised lance – are dramatic as well as related to the situation of Edith cutting down Mr Carker, and so appropriate to the dynamic theatrical performance taking place in the foreground. This illustration inevitably stresses the artificiality of the written scene – did Dickens notice, one wonders? But of course the readership was accustomed to the idiom of melodrama, the popular art – in fiction, on the stage and in pictorial forms; so this illustration would not seem risible at that date and to those readers, nor perhaps to ‘Phiz’ himself (though to Cruikshank, who belonged to a tougher age, we can be sure it would have been a piece of deliberate caricature). But, with the very different illustrations to Dombey that I’ve already described, it shows ‘Phiz’ in perfect sympathy with the spirit of the novel at every point.
‘Phiz’s’ amiable desire to oblige in Dombey and his attempts to extend himself to answer adequately the new demands the text made on him, are the cause of such a very surprising effort as ‘On the Dark Road’, the first of what are known as ‘the dark plates’ where ‘Phiz’ tried out a new technique for an element in Dickens’s work that he seemed to feel needed another medium than that which he had hitherto found adequate. This etching certainly conveys a terrible vitality in its dark brightness and impression of speed. ‘Phiz’ found only one situation in the next novel, David Copperfield, that this new technique suited, while as might be expected Bleak House and Little Dorrit abounded with such opportunities. He therefore provided ten dark plates for the former and eight for the latter. Those in Bleak House are mostly successful and some really very beautiful.
The wider range and purpose of the illustrations to Dombey must have helped the readers to keep up with the new direction that Dickens’s genius had set itself on, and tactfully helped it to bridge the gap between the old and known, and the new and puzzling. Yet it is undeniable, even on such evidence as we have15 at present, that it was the novelist’s own devoted care that took ‘Phiz’ along with him in Dombey. The relation of novelist to artist is shown in the letter to ‘Phiz’ of 10 March, 1847, when he writes:
The first subject which I am now going to give you is very important to the book. I should like to see your sketch of it, if possible. (Dickens’s italics.)
He then goes on to describe in detail how this subject is to be executed, ending: ‘Lettering: Major Bagstock is delighted to have that opportunity.’ The subject is Mr Dombey’s introduction to Edith and Mrs Skewton by the Major, and Dickens’s title is of course double-edged. Dickens also gave instructions as to the faces, expressions, postures, and described for ‘Phiz’s’ benefit the characters, of the people he wanted in this picture. He did not hesitate to have such sketches redrawn to his taste, making such criticisms as ‘Florence too old, particularly about the mouth’, ‘Edith something too long and flat in the face’. He proposes to take ‘Phiz’ down to Leamington solely to get the atmosphere and show him the Pump-room where he wanted a scene set. By 1853 he is writing to ‘Phiz’ as a matter of course:
I send the subjects for the next No.: will you let me see the sketches here, by post. Thirdly, I am now ready with all four subjects for the concluding double No. and will post them to you tomorrow or next day.
He is seen thoroughly in command of the medium as well as the artist:
My dear Browne, Don’t have Lord Decimus’s hand put out, because that looks condescending; and I want him to be upright, stiff, unmixable with mere mortality. Mrs Plornish is too old, and Cavaletto a leetle bit too furious and wanting in stealthiness. (6 Dec. 1856)
I hope the Frontispiece and Vignette16 will come out thoroughly well from the plate, and make a handsome opening to the book. (Little Dorrit).
The doll’s dressmaker is immensely better than she was! I think she should come out extremely well. A weird sharpness not without beauty is the thing I want (to Marcus Stone, who succeeded ‘Phiz’).
Yet ‘Phiz’ was really happiest in the crowded Hogarthian satiric scenes that Dombey still offered him for illustration, such as the christening of Paul, the second marriage, and the dinner-party given to the friends of each side of that marriage.
But with the next novel, David Copperfield, there were no such opportunities, for the scene here is completely domestic with scarcely any perceptible degree of caricature or satire, other than Uriah Heep’s incongruous presence and Mr Creakle’s brief appearances; a new style of drawing altogether would therefore seem to be indicated. This ‘Phiz’ found, and the delicacy with which he adapted the Hogarthian formula, where pictures, statues, domestic animals, furnishings, and so on are all used to make a satiric or moral comment – adapted this so that it became a quite different pointing to a subtler kind of meaning altogether, is proof of his intelligence as well as of his docility, for Dickens couldn’t have suggested this to him. I have already given some indication of what he has achieved by these means in illustrating David Copperfield in my essay on that novel, but it must be further noted that ‘Phiz’ has managed to make every plate a complete picture on its own as well, and put in abundant detail to furnish it imaginatively without spoiling the composition,17 and with real feeling as well as, sometimes, wit. For instance, in the plate ‘Changes at Home’ where, as I’ve described in my essay on Copperfield, David has opened the door on the unexpected scene of his mother nursing a new baby, the baby’s robes, the mother’s skirts and the draperies of the cot beside her, correspond to the curves of her bowed head, and of the baby’s head and body reaching up to the breast, in a touching rhythm, and both mother and child look so delicate and solemn that the expression on David’s face might be suspicion of an impending loss.18 It is remarkable how ‘Phiz’ has modified his usual satiric tendencies to suit the subtler tone of this novel, as in the Sunday church service, the scene in Creakle’s school where Steer-forth, obviously seen through David’s eyes as heroic, is exaggerated preposterously as such as he defies Mr Mell, or where David and his friend sit in the Misses Spenlow’s drawing-room pleading for Dora, with the sympathetic picture
s of romantic courtship on the wall. His success in keeping the reader in mind of the ideas on which the book is constructed I have shown already.
Though ‘Phiz’ had done so well by Dickens up to now, his work for Bleak House is – not wrong, for there is nothing inappropriate or sentimental or vulgar, but disappointing. He does nothing to actualize the Chancery fog, and the frontispiece, which attempts an impression of Chesney Wold when the waters are out in Lincolnshire, is ineffectual. Though the principal characters are well established and drawn larger than previously, there is little in the way of background and almost no interesting detail,19 none of the atmosphere that is special to each Dickens novel and which makes Bleak House so different from the other novels and akin only to Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. ‘Phiz’s’ imagination seems to be failing – he gets little of the horror that is in the text into his drawing of Lady Dedlock and Jo looking into the ‘Consecrated Ground’ at her lover’s grave. Excellent as are the groupings of characters in the Bleak House pictures, as always, the bareness around and between them suggests a drying up or exhaustion of the artist’s faculties and interests. He had collaborated with Dickens for twenty-three years altogether, up to 1859 when Dickens dropped him, feeling either that ‘Phiz’ had failed him, or that he had, outgrown ‘Phiz’, or, more likely, that he no longer needed an illustrator at all. Indeed, Great Expectations was printed in instalments without any illustrations, and Marcus Stone was only engaged to do some wood-engravings (a small number) for it when published in book form in order to provide the orphaned son of Dickens’s old friend with a job; he was kept on for Our Mutual Friend mainly for the same reason one feels, but did little good for that, as he had done none for Great Expectations. The last novel, Edwin Drood, was another matter altogether, and an illustrator was at least necessary to give definition to the course of such a multiple mystery tale and a tantalizing cover suggesting but not revealing the whole plot was essential.
Everyone feels the impoverishment of ‘Phiz’s’ work in the two last novels he did for Dickens, but there are different explanations. Noting the decline Lynton Lamb remarks:
The story of Dickens and his illustrators is that as his prestige grew the quality of the illustrating declined. We lose the sense of setting: the character of interior, street, or landscape … the larger the figures become in the picture, the less important they seem.
This may have been because ‘Phiz’ was overworked; his degeneration seems most likely to have been due to physical strain, which resulted in paralysis at last, and the speed required to get the drawings to press now that very much larger editions had to be published with Dickens’s enormously increased popularity and the much greater reading public anyway. In keeping with this explanation is what has generally been noticed, that the etching of many plates is poor; Johannseň says they lack atmosphere and ‘the printing of the backgrounds are as heavy as the foregrounds. … Perhaps Browne left the etching more and more to his assistants, as he certainly did the printing. This let-down in the plates is more noticeable in the succeeding novels.’ Lynton Lamb has a related comment:
Editions were small enough to allow the early Dickens illustrators such as George Cruikshank or Hablôt K. Browne (‘Phiz’) to draw with an etching needle on the actual copper plate from which such a masterpiece as ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’ was printed. It was a method that perfectly suited Cruikshank’s talent. But, for the larger editions of the mid-nineteenth century, etching was too slow: text and illustration had to be printed together. Other craftsmen had to engrave from the illustrator’s drawings blocks of the same nature as the letterpress type. Sometimes he drew his illustration on the surface of the block; sometimes the engraver copied it; or, later, it was photographed on to the surface before it was engraved. But in all three cases the engraver had to interpret the illustrator’s work … Cruikshank had drawn naturally with the etching needle: his illustrations are true originals, not interpretations of something drawn in another way.
In fact, illustrations to the novels from Bleak Home onwards would have been unnecessary but for the habit of having illustrations, that had become less and less necessary as the Victorian reading-public had become educated up to a more subtle kind of reading, and had become accustomed to Dickens’s mature art. Perhaps it was a perception of this that made Dickens not only drop ‘Phiz’ but risk publishing Great Expectations without any pictures. He must have sensed that he had dragged his reading world into his mature art which, in Little Dorrit, Bleak House and Great Expectations, needed no illustrator if only the reader could now carry in his memory the characters and the themes without visual aids. Yet the few wood-engravings Marcus Stone did for Great Expectations could not have been much help in this respect even if they had accompanied the original instalments, and they did nothing else for the text – in fact, less than nothing. Can we imagine satisfactory illustrations to this novel? The answer makes us aware that it is a quite different art from even Little Dorrit, or any other of its predecessors. ‘Phiz’ could have done well enough by the few residues of satire such as the Pocket household, Barnard’s Inn and the Wemmick-Jaggers office with its squalid clients, at any rate better than Marcus Stone, predestined to Academy art; the Doré who was inspired to do his best work by London’s slums, docks and poorer residential quarters and by Dante’s Inferno could have furnished splendid visual accompaniments to the most striking parts of Great Expectations – to its Newgate London, the world of Miss Havisham in the ruined brewery, the purgatorial fires suffered by Miss Havisham in Satis House and Pip’s ordeal in the sluice-house on the marshes; but who then except Arthur Hughes (and not even he adequately) could have furnished the innocent eye and the imagination combined with the technique to convey visually Pip’s childhood experiences? To see that such a variety of artists as ‘Phiz’, Doré and Hughes at least would have had to be invoked to illustrate adequately Dickens’s last great novel (admitting Our Mutual Friend’s inferiority) is to realize its complexity, range and unique greatness.
Something different is required in the case of Little Dorrit. For much of this novel ‘Phiz’ would have been adequate in his prime, but the only illustration in which he succeeds in capturing the essence of the text is ‘The Pensioner-Entertainment’, where Mr Dorrit’s ecstatic expression of satisfied patronizing is turned on the humble old man eating off a newspaper on the window-seat, offset by the embarrassment of Clennam and Amy, while Miss Fanny flounces as far as possible from the distasteful spectacle of the pauper guest, contempt in every curve of her person and expression. Otherwise one would have thought the humour too had worn out of ‘Phiz’, he makes such a poor thing of the splendid dramatic scene Dickens has outlined in Book the Second, chapter III. Yet perhaps this very scene shows why Dickens no longer needed an illustrator and why illustrators no longer took pains with his work. It is worth quoting also to show how Dickens now thought in terms of truly dramatic humour, not stagey, and can create the spectacle so admirably in words that we conjure up the vision for ourselves inevitably. It depends for its full effect on what has gone before in the first half of the novel, where Miss Fanny was a humble dancer whom Mrs Merdle saw as a threat to her son Mr Sparkler and patronized with cheap presents before paying her off with a bank-note:
For a moment the lady, with a glass at her eye, stood transfixed and speechless before the two Miss Dorrits. At the same moment, Miss Fanny, in the foreground of a grand pictorial composition, formed by the family, the family equipages, and the family servants, held her sister tight under one arm to detain her on the spot, and with the other fanned herself with a distinguished air, and negligently surveyed the lady from head to foot. The lady, recovering herself quickly – for she was Mrs Merdle and she was not easily dashed – went on to add that she trusted, in saying this, she apologized for her boldness, and restored this well-behaved landlord to the favour that was so very valuable to him. Mr Dorrit, on the altar of whose dignity all this was incense, made a gracious reply; and said that his peop
le should – ha – countermand his horses, and he would – hum – overlook what he had at first supposed to be an affront, but now regarded as an honour. Upon this the bosom bent to him; and its owner, with a wonderful command of feature, addressed a winning smile of adieu to the two sisters, as young ladies of fortune in whose favour she was much prepossessed, and whom she had never had the gratification of seeing before. Not so, however, Mr Sparkler. This gentleman, becoming transfixed at the same moment as his lady-mother, could not by any means unfix himself again, but stood stiffly staring at the whole composition with Miss Fanny in the foreground, etc.
Dickens is here his own illustrator and any artist who tried to emulate this in his own medium, as ‘Phiz’ actually did, could only make a shot at one of its changing moments and necessarily, in fixing that, lose the rest of this inimitable film sequence.
As for Our Mutual Friend, du Maurier and Charles Keene could no doubt have done a good deal with the respectable social life – Dickens’s forecast of the fin de siècle young men, the Podsnap family, the Veneerings’ dinner-table and the Lammle circle, Bella and the Wilfer household and the Milveys – but all these come alive of themselves; it is the submerged part of that society that needed an artist’s interpretation and comment – the waterside and the world of the doll’s dressmaker, Limehouse Hole and the weir of Rogue Riderhood’s last phase, the tormented life of Bradley Headstone – all of which are right outside the ambience and beyond the talents of the Early and Mid-Victorian illustrators. When one sees how inept Marcus Stone was with ‘The Garden on the Roof’, missing all the weirdness Dickens wanted in the doll’s dressmaker, all the character and distinction of Lizzie, completely disregarding the unearthliness of the ‘Come up and be dead’ speech and not even hinting at its thematic importance; or how he throws away in his ‘Not to be shaken off’ the opportunity the text gives in the dramatic confrontation of the now criminal Bradley Headstone with his twin Rogue Riderhood; the poverty of his comprehensive cover-design, which Dickens’s other artists made a valuable accessory to the novels – then one feels Dickens had better have left the bereaved Stone family to starve. Of Marcus Stone and of Luke Fildes, one notes that their abandonment of the Hogarth–Gillray–Cruikshank tradition, which was indeed unsuitable for Dickens’s late work, left them with nothing to fall back on but Academy art and photographic naturalism; they cannot make use of caricature even when a touch of it is necessary (as for Mr Sapsea and Silas Wegg). In Luke Fildes’ groups of characters, in his young ladies of Miss Twinkleton’s academy, his scenes between young men and Jasper, the faces are not distinguished from each other, much less memorable, there is no definition and no purpose in the whole, the settings are dull and the interiors without charm or that suggestiveness that always characterizes Dickens’s descriptions of insides and outsides. The whole convention is savourless and to illustrate Dickens thus is pointless. George Eliot rightly resented having similar illustrations attached to her novels in the collected edition, though she distinguished in favour of the delightful and appropriate little vignettes on the title-pages which are views in the Bewick tradition of George Eliot country and help by feeding the readers’ imagination with the right images of the background and atmosphere of the novels. One sees how Marcus Stone threw away his opportunities in illustrating Trollope’s wide-ranging and interesting novel He Knew He Was Right (1869), Stone apparently having no conception of what illustrating a novel meant. And even Millais’s much-admired illustrations to other Trollope novels do not do more than provide distinguished visualizations of some of the characters – they don’t bring out the meanings in the novels, as du Maurier’s illustrations to fiction of the sixties and earlier seventies do, at his best. Yet Dickens could have found better illustrators for his later novels if he had been more alert to what was happening in art, which in some quarters corresponded to his own development as a novelist. It is relevant to inquire into this relation between Dickens’s change from Bleak House onwards and the development of the art of illustration, which Dickens anticipated in a sense in his own art.