by F. R. Leavis
Further documentation of the arguments advanced above can be found in the life of Luke Fildes by his son, where we learn that when Dickens had dropped Marcus Stone and had asked Millais to find him a new artist to illustrate his next novel, Edwin Drood, Millais arrived with the first number of The Graphic to show Dickens the masterly drawing in it of ‘Houseless and Hungry’ as evidence that young Luke Fildes was the right man. His son tells us that ‘Dickens, for all his friendliness towards his new illustrator, was not easy to work for.’ Fildes wisely did not wish to compete with the novelist by illustrating, as requested, the scenes which in his opinion the novelist had illustrated in words, and Dickens ‘somewhat reluctantly’ agreed to let Fildes choose his own subjects, but they had to be passed by the author and in fact Dickens kept the upper hand since Fildes had to visit him to discuss the illustrations and was to be (only Dickens died) taken round the ‘Cloisterham’ country and to visit Maidstone Jail to provide the artist with the last scene, Jasper in his cell before being hanged for his nephew’s murder, which Dickens said ‘must outvie Cruikshank’s one of “Fagin in the condemned cell”’. In evidence of the trend away from ‘unpleasant’ realism, we learn that the painting Fildes exhibited at the Academy in 1874, ‘The Casuals’, which he had made from his famous drawing ‘Houseless and Hungry’ (both done from life without using professional models) and which had earned Fildes the sobriquet of ‘Hogarth’s successor’, was the cause of some uneasiness to George Augustus Sala, for instance. This critic and connoisseur wrote to Fildes: ‘Don’t let your triumph in this picture lead you to cultivate exclusively this class of subjects … the real bent of your genius will be to cultivate the beautiful in form and spirit’, advice which, the spirit of the age being behind it, Fildes took. Fildes however had none of the later feeling that illustration is an inferior branch of art but took the opportunity in making a speech at a dinner for the coming of age of The Graphic (1891) to attack this fallacy. He chose to speak on ‘The influence of the Art of Illustration upon the Art of the Painter’, specified Hogarth as ‘the great Father of the English Illustrators’ and Illustration as a peculiarly English branch of Art and one of its glories, and insisted that if young artists ‘neglect the study that would qualify them to excel as Designers and Illustrators, it will not be a good day for English Art’, warning against the new snobbishness that ‘said scoffingly that the Art of Illustration is but the Art of the Multitude’. Here is the voice of the earlier generation of English artists, of one who had decided to go in for ‘black-and-white’ when he first went to study at South Kensington in 1863 and stood by the English tradition.
In support of my arguments above that it must have been Dickens’s coaching and directing of ‘Phiz’ that made the illustrations to his novels uniquely successful (and moreover it is noticeable that the same artist’s illustrations for other novelists, e.g. Charles Lever, are very different from those he did for Dickens), I see that Trollope in his letters makes a similar complaint to Dickens’s against ‘Phiz’. And this is not because Trollope was prejudiced against the older style of illustration, for he was dissatisfied also with some of the illustrations by Millais for Framley Parsonage, which represented the new school. Trollope wrote to his publisher on 12 August 1864 that he had decided to drop ‘Phiz’ in the middle of Can You Forgive Her? and replace him by an artist of his own choice, giving as reasons his own experience with ‘Phiz’: ‘I think you would possibly find no worse illustrator than H. Browne; and I think he is almost as bad in one kind as another. He will take no pains to ascertain the thing to be illustrated. I cannot think that his work can add any value at all to any book … I can never express satisfaction at being illustrated in any way by H. Browne.’ Obviously, Trollope had not Dickens’s power of knowing what he wanted the illustrations to his novels to do combined with the ability to force an illustrator to carry out his conceptions.
1. George Cruikshank by Ruari McLean (Art and Technics, 1948) has a representative selection from Cruikshank’s enormous output of etchings.
2. Lynton Lamb should be consulted for an appreciation in aesthetic terms by a fellow-craftsman of the ‘Morning Streets’ and ‘Public Dinners’ illustrations in the Sketches by Boz and of ‘Oliver asking for More’ and ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’ in Oliver Twist.
3. I have always been struck by how Hogarthian is Pope’s history of Sir Balaam in the third Moral Epistle (the first one on the use of riches), which in its four parts reads like a poetic narrative of a series of Hogarth’s moral satires on contemporary life, of the form of Marriage-à-la-mode, but whose illustrations have been lost; in fact, Pope’s story of Sir Balaam precedes Hogarth’s inventions of the kind. Pope seems there to be describing a moral series of paintings or drawings, while Hogarth seems to work from a written narrative of dramatic fiction which he is illustrating – the two arts are not parallel but overlapping.
4. Dickens had a set of Hogarth’s series hanging in his hall at Gadshill, his last home, and later removed them to the walls of his own bedroom.
5. Even as late as Little Dorrit, e.g. the account of the clever arriviste Fanny’s wedding in Rome to the moronic socialite Edmund Sparkler in chapter XIV which begins: ‘The day came, and the She-Wolf in the Capitol might have snarled with envy … the murderous-headed statues of the wicked Emperors of the Soldiery … might have come off their pedestals …’ ending ‘So the Bride had mounted into her handsome chariot, incidentally accompanied by the Bridegroom; and after rolling for a few minutes smoothly over a fair pavement, had begun to jolt through a Slough of Despond, and through a long, long avenue of wrack and ruin. Other nuptial carriages are said to have gone the same road, before and since.’ Dickens’s idea of Society marriages seems to have been formed once for all on Hogarth’s Marriage-à-la-Mode. The numerous Hogarthian scenes in Dombey (the christening, the wedding, in Dombey’s study, as well as the scene quoted above in Warwick Castle, which is very close to the first plate of Hogarth’s series) suggest to me a generally Hogarthian inspiration, that the subject of Hogarth’s Marriage-à-la-Mode was behind the drama of Mr Dombey’s second marriage, with Carker playing the part of the Lawyer-paramour – it was originally intended to end with Edith’s moral disgrace and general disaster, and with Walter Gay coming to a bad end like Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice. On reading Sketches by Boz the Regency wit Sydney Smith (b. 1771) deduced that ‘the soul of Hogarth has migrated into the body of Mr Dickens.’
6. ‘Keene … for a threepenny weekly made drawings that are on a level with the finest in the world’ – Sickert (quoted in Charles Keene by Derek Hudson). Keene, though an artist of such stature and originality that he was recognized by great French painters as their master, worked hard for forty years as a contributor to Punch and as a book illustrator. He would have been the best successor to ‘Phiz’, having the right requirements – experience in illustrating, Victorian novels, humour, dramatic feeling, and the capacity for satire and burlesque, as well as the speed of execution and the poetic feeling – for Dickens. Yet Keene, though his powers were primarily those of a great artist in his own right, was still able to earn his bread and butter happily in illustration, thanks to its status in the nineteenth century. It should be noted that Keene also was in the direct tradition, having a special admiration for and debt to Hogarth and Bewick. There is no profit in making a fundamental distinction between Keene as illustrator and his contemporaries, as did Sir Lionel Lindsay in his book on Keene, The Artists’ Artist, where he states: ‘Cruikshank, “Phiz” and Leech are publishers’ hacks; du Maurier at his best a fashionable satirist; of the English artists of the 19th century Charles Keene alone invented a world we can believe in.’ Dickens’s tribute to Leech and Henry James’s to both du Maurier and Leech bear witness to the veracity of the worlds created for them by the Victorian illustrators and their imaginative stimulus for creative writers.
7. Scott’s was essentially a continuation of this 18th century tradition and not, like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre a
nd Oliver Twist, the new novel into which the insights and experiences of the Romantic poets had been channelled.
8. Though ‘Phiz’s’ ‘Pleasant little family party at Mr Pecksniff’s’ serves the purpose admirably.
9. Mrs Archer Clive, rich and well-born and herself a novelist, read Chuzzlewit on its appearance and notes: ‘Finished Martin Chuzzlewit, and I don’t care that one character should be hanged and one married. If they had changed situations it would have been nothing to me, nor to Archer.’ Such expressions of contempt were part of a hostile attitude to Dickens, felt to be for long a writer of novels for the vulgar only (and which G. H. Lewes continued to allege them to be to the end). The feelings of Miss Jenkins, the aristocratic Rector’s daughter in Cranford, on the subject of people of her circle’s lowering themselves by reading the parts of Pickwick (a vulgar form of publication, she held) are well known. Less so now is Miss Charlotte Yonge’s distaste (she was also County and highly educated) which is put into the mouth of the pattern young lady in The Heir of Redclyffe (1853). The invalid brother is rebuked for being ‘nearly walled up’ in ‘cheap rubbish’, which turns out to be the new fiction published in monthly parts, and he makes his sister read him ‘“the part of Dombey that hurts women’s feelings most, just to see if she would go on – the part about little Paul – and I declare, I shall think the worse of her ever after – she was so stony hearted, that to this day she does not know whether he is dead or alive”’. The superior young man in the novel says: ‘“those books (Dickens’s novels) open fields of thought; and as their principles are negative, they are not likely to hurt a person well armed with the truth”’ (meaning Miss Yonge’s, the correct, religious views – Keble’s) but adds: ‘“it would be a pity to begin with Dickens, when there is so much of a higher grade equally new to you.”’ Trollope’s skit on Dickens in his early novel The Warden is another placing of Dickens as eminently vulgar, crude and sentimental, and a demagogue. Hans Andersen mentions that Dickens, being a Radical writer, was not considered respectable socially in his earlier phase. The turning-point here was David Copperfield, for obvious reasons, Sydney Smith, who moved in the best social and intellectual circles, ‘was deterred by the vulgarity of the name’ (‘Boz’) but after reading Nickleby admitted: ‘I stood out against Mr Dickens as long as I could, but he has conquered me’; he made advances to Dickens (to Dickens’s great joy) and their friendship, valuable to both, lasted till Sydney’s death. Others such as Bagehot stood out to the end against the vulgar art.
10. V. Forster’s reported anecdote of the charwoman who was unaccountably impressed by its being a son of Dickens who lay ill in a house she worked for, and explained her knowledge of the author of Dombey, though she could not read, by the fact that ‘she lodged at a snuff-shop where there were several other lodgers; and that on the first Monday of every month there was a Tea, and the landlord read the month’s number of Dombey, those only of the lodgers who subscribed to the tea partaking of that luxury, but all having the benefit of the reading; and the impression produced on the old charwoman revealed itself in the remark with which she closed her account of it. “Lawk ma’am! I thought that three or four men must have put together Dombey!” She may well have meant that she assumed multiple authorship was needed to account for the pictures as well as the text, and would of course have been right in essence. Such readings as this were traditional in England, as we know from many sources, such as the member for Parliament who said that Pamela was read aloud in his constituency by a village blacksmith and that when the reader reached the surrender by Mr B. to Pamela’s matrimonial intentions, the villagers rang the church bells for joy.
11. Though this is almost wholly confined to Cattermole’s contributions – which include the final stages of Nell’s martyrdom and her transference to a better world in the arms of angels, something ‘Phiz’ could never have produced, one feels, and which actually make the novel seem more sentimental and religiose than the text, and are therefore doubly unfortunate though it was in fact Dickens who requested Cattermole to supply the angels. This does however make my point that the illustrations inevitably contributed an interpretation of the text and if they didn’t intelligently help the reader they could be harmful.
12. Forster, Book VI, §ii, where Dickens’s outline of his ‘immediate intentions in reference to Dombey’, which Forster says Dickens sent him with the manuscript of the first four chapters, is given. Paul was to survive until the age of ten and the situation was to be altogether more interesting, curiously suggestive of a memorandum in Henry James’s notebooks for the kind of subtle fiction we think of as his alone. Dickens wrote that Mr Dombey ‘for all his greatness, and for all his devotion to his child – will find himself at arm’s length from him even then; and will see that his love and confidence are all bestowed upon his sister, whom Mr Dombey had used – and so has the boy himself too, for that matter – as a mere convenience and handle to him’ etc. The italics are mine. Going along with the intended moral disintegration of Walter Gay and Edith, this unpleasant likeness of Paul to his father (only lightly hinted at times in the novel itself) would have made Dombey more akin to Dickens’s late novels and more substantially realistic than it is.
13. The same situation recurs in Great Expectations in Estella’s memory of her childhood relation to Miss Havisham: ‘I who have sat on this same hearth on the little stool that is even now beside you there, learning your lessons and looking up into your face, when your face was strange and frightened me!’
14. A more intelligent and cultivated Victorian illustrator showed both in his practice and in words that he comprehended the necessity for the artist to collaborate with, not supersede, the author, declaring: ‘as with Hablôt Browne, the achievement is most successful when an author’s text has been followed to the letter, and the drawing is one with the page it illustrates, so that each is the complement of the other’ (G. du Maurier, op. cit.).
15. That is, have in the Nonesuch edition of what were then available of Dickens’s letters, until the collection of many times as many, of which only two volumes, at intervals of four years, have so far been released by the editors, and which have not yet therefore got to the interesting period which starts with the conception of Dombey. No doubt the subsequent volumes may provide more evidence of the relation of Dickens with his artists, but few of us mature Dickens critics can hope to survive to see the whole corpus of the letters at this rate of progress. But that we shall have more evidence as to Dickens’s instructions to ‘Phiz’ is unlikely, in the light of this footnote (in the original two-vol. edition only) to Fitzpatrick’s Life of Charles Lever (1879): ‘Mr Hablôt Browne in a kind letter writes: – “Some years ago when I was about to remove from Croydon, I had a bonfire to lessen the lumber, and burnt a stock of papers containing all Lever’s, Dickens’s, Ainsworth’s and other authors’ notes as they were almost solely about illustrations. I did not at the time attach any importance to them, nor did I think anyone else would; but I was blamed by several autograph collectors for wilful destruction of what they considered valuable.”’ This artless admission gives further grounding for Dickens’s grievances against ‘Phiz’ as insufficiently impressed with the importance of the work of illustration entrusted to him. It must be mentioned, however, that ‘Phiz’ resented being dropped by Dickens after A Tale of Two Cities.
16. This vignette is the Blake-like vision of Little Dorrit stepping through the prison door with shafts of light striking in with her and through her. It looks from the letter quoted here that Dickens may have ordered this vignette and frontispiece and given ‘Phiz’ his instructions for them.
17. In the convenient collection of ‘Phiz’s’ plates reproduced by A. Johannsen: Phiz. Illustrations for the novels of Charles Dickens (U. of Chicago Press, 1956) the author makes a very few brief comments on the aesthetic aspects of the plates, but in one of more general bearing on the Copperfield illustration ‘Our Housekeeping’ he says: ‘Although the illustration shows confusion
such as probably never was and more than Dickens himself described, it actually makes the appearance of the room more real’. This suggests the intelligent sympathy with which ‘Phiz’ worked in translating novel into illustration.
18. The distinction between an aesthetic judgement on the illustrations as pictures and an appreciation of their success as illustrations is to be seen in this dismissal of ‘Changes at Home’ by the authority mentioned in the previous footnote: ‘As a drawing, ‘Phiz’ failed to make it interesting. Aesthetically it lacks balance and has no centre of interest.’ The conflict of the two different points of view is shown when Mr Johannsen writes of another memorable Copperfield illustration that ‘I Make Myself Known to My Aunt’ ‘is not a successful composition artistically, although one writer considered it the best in the book.’ It is certainly one of the most memorable, which readers of David Copperfield in the illustrated edition memorize automatically, so perfect for the purpose is it.
19. Except for the tempting subject ‘Attorney and Client’ which he has handled in the old Hogarthian witty mode which, as I explain in my essay on Bleak House, is here inappropriate: ‘Phiz’ conveys nothing of the sinister ethos that emanates from Mr Vholes in the text of the novel.
About the Authors
F. R. Leavis was born in 1895 in Cambridge, where he would live and teach for most of the rest of his life. He volunteered as a stretcher-bearer in the First World War, and was badly gassed on the Western Front. Appointed Director of Studies in English at Downing College, Cambridge, in 1930, he remained there for the next thirty years, often at odds with the University establishment. In 1932 he and his wife Queenie Roth founded the hugely influential journal Scrutiny, which ran until 1953. He was one of the most important figures in the development of modern literary criticism, and in the elevation of English as a serious academic subject. He died in 1978.