Other new inventions in papermaking and printing carried Pickwick into the lives and homes of countless Victorians. These include the facing of copper plates with steel and duplicate plates to ensure quality printing for major print runs and the newer printing processes of electrotyping, lithography, and glyphography.35 Although photographic methods became part of the illustrative process as early as 1826, techniques used in halftone and photogravure did not widely come into use until the second half of the nineteenth century because they were too costly. Nonetheless, in the first half of the nineteenth century, alternatives arose to woodblock engraving, itself a variation on traditional woodcutting used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by, most famously, Albrecht Dürer. Thomas Bewick excelled in woodblock engraving, a technique that integrated illustration into commercial printing. Copperplate engraving became common in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; however, with this technique, the quality of reproduction suffered with mass production. Steel engraving came into commercial use in the 1820s; compared to copper, steel improved the quality of printing for a far larger print run, but even steel plates required duplication to keep up with growing demand for Dickens’s works (Patten, CDP 68).
In this age of information and industrialization, printers were reproducing better and cheaper images. The market for illustrated fiction, particularly illustrated serials, was steadily growing, attaining previously impossible heights. The publishing industry was also becoming specialized—there were printers, binders, advertisers, and booksellers, et cetera. Specialization stimulated the growth of the publishing industry since it cut the financial risk for any one party. This move toward specialization eroded the art of the handmade book, which the Arts and Crafts movement revived at the fin de siècle. At the time of Pickwick’s creation, however, expensive handcrafted books were giving way to machine-made books and serials, a development Walter Benjamin famously laments in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”36
Pickwick was selling record numbers and attracting a mass audience in an age of mechanical reproduction. England was shifting from a two-tiered agrarian society to a three-tiered, industrial new class society, and literacy was rising.37 In 1837, about 15 percent of the population was middle class, but in 1901, approximately 25 percent of the population was middle class (Mitchell, Daily 20). In 1841, four years after the final installment of The Pickwick Papers appeared, the number of inhabitants in England and Wales was 15,914,148. By 1901, the year of Queen Victoria’s death, the population of England and Wales had more than doubled, reaching a figure of 32,527,843.38 Of equal importance is the distribution of the British population. Pickwick took off with the growth of urbanism. In the early years of the nineteenth century, approximately 75 percent of the populace lived in small rural villages and towns. This percentage essentially reversed by the end of the nineteenth century; historians estimate that by 1901, 75 to 80 percent of the population lived in large cities mainly in the north of England.39 The serial appealed to this growing and increasingly literate urban middle-class population and the enterprising working class eager for self-improvement.
Literacy was steadily on the rise in Victorian England (even if all factions did not endorse universal literacy). Pickwick appeared three decades after King George III’s 1803 pronouncement that all the members of his kingdom should be able to read the Bible. When Queen Victoria took the throne, about half the population could read and write although children under ten labored over ten hours a day in coalmines and factories. “By the time Queen Victoria died in 1901,” notes Sally Mitchell in Daily Life in Victorian England, public education was compulsory, 97 percent of the population of England and Wales was literate,40 and “the modern world had taken shape” (xiv). In The English Common Reader, Richard Altick aligns the rise of literacy to the production of attractive and affordable reading material following the coming of the Penny Post in 1840. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and Mechanics Institutes, which also impacted the growth of literacy, predate this 1840 measure. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1826 and associated with the publisher Charles Knight, printed the popular The Penny Magazine and The Penny Cyclopaedia to promote literacy and provide cheap reading material to members of the working class and lower middle class who were eager to improve themselves but did not have ready access to education.41 Mechanics Institutes with an emphasis on technical subjects geared for working-class men also sprang up in England in the 1820s, offering adult education to members of the working class.
In this new industrialized society, Dickens’s fiction readily appealed across the social classes, and serialization lowered the cost of book production. Savvy publishers could increase or decrease the number of copies in a print run according to the popularity of a given work.42 For serials published within monthly and weekly periodicals, publishers commonly featured a new serial alongside a popular one to persuade audiences to continue buying that same periodical.43 A successful serial published either independently in parts or within periodical publication kept Victorian consumers in a stream of continuous buying over a period of years and “put the ownership of novels within the means of the middle class” (Patten, CDP 60). Moreover, Pickwick appeared in an era when members of the middle and working classes had time for leisure. With England’s shift from an agrarian to an urban society and the growth of industry, Sunday, the Sabbath day, allowed some time for relaxation—including reading. Dickens’s serial numbers found their way into pubs, a common leisure pastime for the working class. Most Victorians who were illiterate knew at least one person in a circle of friends who could read; “You did not need to be literate to enjoy literature” (43), as Simon Eliot reminds us in “The Business of Victorian Publishing.”44
“Dickens was the first English novelist really to belong to the people of England,” Patten notes, “and they loved him all the more because he was, so to speak, a resident in their homes” (CDP 60). Dickens was not a resident in the homes of all his admirers, however. One could pay one shilling a month for an installment of Pickwick or use that same shilling to buy a family of seven at least one week’s supply of candles and soap (Mitchell, Daily 38).45 A shilling was still a considerable sum in 1837, especially for entertainment, and hardback books were luxury items in the economic reality of early Victorian times. A three-volume novel produced at the time of Pickwick cost £1. 11s. and 6d. (A. N. Wilson 19); for the same price as a novel, one could purchase a used bicycle or a low-cost women’s dress (Mitchell, Daily 32). When Pickwick was completed, it cost a total of 20 shillings, which was approximately two-thirds of a hardback book and nearly the price of a yearly subscription to a lending library. However, the payments were spread over one-and-a-half to two years or longer since the consumer bought the serial as it was being produced.46 In this economic climate, savvy publishers produced multiple editions of a particular work, including cheap editions with roughly cut edges and bindings made of boards (as opposed to cloth or leather), and also pitched serial publications for an increasingly literate urban population with augmented buying power and leisure time to read.
The Appeal of Illustration: Social Commentary and, Quintessentially, Humor
Today it may seem surprising that Seymour’s black-and-white illustrations “had called Pickwick into existence” (J. R. Cohen 46). Illustrations captivated early nineteenth-century viewers and provided a peak form of entertainment. Today, we easily succumb to media overstimulation, but the early Victorians lived in an age that was, in comparison, visually sparse. In 1837, there were no computers, movies, television, radio, public art museums, or even free circulating libraries. Following the reduction of the Stamp Tax on newspapers in 1836 and postal reform enacted in 1840, newspapers and letters could, respectively, travel anywhere in the United Kingdom for only a penny.47 These measures led to an increase in pictorial material passing through the post. The Victorians savored pictures in broadsides, valentines, seed catalogues, pattern books, f
ashion magazines, and newspapers. Inaugurated in 1842, The Illustrated London News was the first illustrated weekly newspaper in the world. The first issue has only sixteen pages of text, but thirty-two wood engravings. Circulation of The Illustrated London News soared in England after the magazine published designs for the Crystal Palace, the crowning landmark of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and tintypes of the Crimean War (1853–56). The inauguration of The Illustrated London News and its unprecedented popularity demonstrate the importance of the picture in a range of material forms valued by the early Victorian consumer.
By the mid-nineteenth century, works not originally published with illustrations, such as Shakespeare’s plays and many of Scott’s Waverley novels, were reissued with illustrations alongside newly published illustrated fiction in serial form. By then, there was a financial advantage for publishers to bring forth new fiction serially with illustration: advertisers, savvy to the marketing incentive of illustrated periodicals, paid publishers to include their advertisements, which guaranteed a large audience if the serial became as popular as Pickwick. Also, Pickwick and successive serials had “extra illustrations,” additional scenes not included in the serial that had prime market value. The front window of a print seller’s shop was a powerful marketing tool. Shrewd publishers and print sellers recognized that with a month lapsing between parts, illustrations refreshed readers about a serial’s plot, characters, and themes, bringing them up to date before they resumed reading the latest installment. Pictures often enticed a new reader to purchase a serial or reminded potential buyers that it was time to buy the latest part issue. Bystanders gathered to read prints and book illustrations displayed in shop windows. Illustrations engaged marginally literate readers in an unfolding storyline; if the words eluded this population of readers, the barely literate could read the pictures while they listened to the text. Simultaneously, a cultured and sophisticated audience read beyond the lines of the text; illustrative cues both delineated and foreshadowed developments in plot, theme, and characterization and in some cases introduced material not present in the text. In this climate, illustrations, integral to Dickens’s serials, brought him popular acclaim and commercial success.
Critics align the illustrations for The Pickwick Papers with the eighteenth-century tradition of graphic satire and caricature associated with William Hogarth.48 A multifaceted artist, Hogarth was a portrait painter, political satirist, printmaker, and social critic who could paint with realism as well as exaggeration. Robert Seymour and Phiz produced comic prints and illustrations that use caricature techniques of exaggeration and distortion, theatricality, and Hogarthian realism to make a point and alternately to amuse—to present social commentary as well as to entertain with broad farce. Seymour and, in turn, Phiz drew Samuel Pickwick as a big-hearted, comical character in full motion. Pickwick has misadventures with horses, drinks too much, falls asleep and awakes in an animal pound, plays “peeping tom,” finds himself the unwelcome object of his landlady’s affection, and falls through the ice. “Character and situation had to be seen to be funny,” notes Harvey in Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators, “and it is evident that for some readers they had to be drawn to be seen” (8). Visual humor as witnessed in plates like “Mr. Pickwick in Chase of His Hat” helped to make Pickwick a resounding international success. The serial’s comic appeal has overshadowed its ability to make piercing pleas for philanthropy and to promote Christian charity, traits that did not go undetected by Dickens’s contemporaries. An 1838 reviewer named T. H. Lister comments in Edinburgh Review:
One of the qualities we most admire in [Dickens] is his comprehensive spirit of humanity. The tendency of his writings is to make us practically benevolent—to excite our sympathy in behalf of the aggrieved and the suffering in all classes; and especially in those who are most removed from observation. (139)
Samuel Pickwick acts with moral responsibility and, as early as the second number, shows empathy for those less fortunate in the oft-criticized “The Stroller’s Tale.”
“The Dying Clown,” which accompanies the “The Stroller’s Tale,” is one of the most contentious plates that Seymour created for Pickwick before his untimely death. Dickens harshly criticized Seymour’s first sketch and demanded another drawing of “The Dying Clown,” which Seymour completed just hours before he took his own life. Dickens later asked Phiz to re-etch the drawing, but Browne did not substantially alter Seymour’s design. The scene as Seymour created it—and Browne essentially redrew to make it more aesthetically pleasing to Dickens—is melodrama with a humanitarian purpose. This plate drips with melodrama, but it also turns the Victorian viewer’s attention to “those who are most removed from observation” to recall the words of the 1838 Edinburgh reviewer. Seymour resented the inclusion of Dickens’s lengthy episode in a comedy allegedly about sporting gentleman. Dickens admits that this tale tells of “‘Want and sickness … too common in many stations of life’” (P, Oxf. 32). It is a story within a story: a struggling “strolling actor” named Jem Hutley (40), known as “Dismal Jemmy,” tells Samuel Pickwick and Augustus Snodgrass about a dying clown, a “‘low pantomime actor; and, like many people of his class, an habitual drunkard’” (33). The clown and his wife and child live in poverty and experience slow starvation. “The Dying Clown” as conceived by Seymour and redrawn by Browne (see fig. 4) pictures the actor just before his death: wandering in his mad delirium to happier days in the theater, the dying clown raises himself up and melodramatically extends one arm toward his wife and child, who look on with horror.49 With the other hand, the dying man grabs hold of Hutley’s shoulder, attempting to speak, just before he “‘fell back—dead!’” (38).
Perhaps in an attempt to provide letterpress for Seymour’s original illustration as he was contracted to do, Dickens prepares us for the death scene, poignantly commenting on the clown’s “bloated body and shrunken legs,” “glassy eyes,” “grotesquely-ornamented head, trembling with paralysis,” and “hollow and tremulous” voice (P, Oxf. 34). Earlier in the scene, Hutley takes pity upon the dying clown, who, Dickens tells us, looks more “ghastly” than the figures in the late medieval allegory Dance of Death (34). Hutley gives the stroller a few shillings and twice comes to the dying man’s lodging in a “comfortless” (35) wind-riddled coal shed. The emaciated actor in Browne’s version is still “frightful to behold,” for “the dry hard skin glowed with a burning heat, and there was an almost unearthly air of wild anxiety in the man’s face, indicating even more strongly the ravages of the disease” (36). The stroller’s large wild eyes and ribs, visible through his partially open nightshirt, illustrate starvation. We can almost hear the death rattle in the poverty-stricken clown’s gaunt throat as he takes his last breath. The gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyed wife looks miserable, no doubt fearing the uncertain future awaiting herself and the babe she desperately clutches to her chest. The starving family in such cramped quarters expresses dire poverty to move the viewer to pity and charity.
Figure 4. “The Dying Clown.” Illustration by Hablot Knight Browne (based on Robert Seymour’s 1836 illustration) for Charles Dickens’s The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1837. From the Norman M. Fox Collection, Scribner Library, Skidmore College.
This philanthropically minded Pickwick plate is not an isolated case. Likewise, in “The Discovery of Jingle in the Fleet” (see fig. 23B, ch. 2, 89), one of four prison plates, Browne ushers us into Fleet Prison to witness the miserable poverty of those forced to live in the poor area of debtors’ prison. In “Discovery,” Pickwick encounters the now impoverished Alfred Jingle, a strolling actor and trickster reduced to the common side of the Fleet. In the plate, Pickwick and Jingle are posed melodramatically, although the staging directions seemingly come from Dickens’s “hand,” adorned by Phiz’s “glove.” Pickwick has his arms aloft to indicate his “amazement” (P, Oxf. 535) at discovering Jingle, “his head resting upon his hand, his eyes fixed upon the fire, and his whole appearance denoting misery and deje
ction!” (534). The exclamation mark invites pictorial exaggeration. Indeed, upon seeing Pickwick, Jingle as Browne pictures him covers his face with his hands and “sobbed like a child” (537). Mr. Pickwick can afford a private apartment in the Fleet, but here he enters the poor side of Fleet Prison to find someone to run his errands. Jingle’s servant, Job Trotter, who is free to leave the prison, is just returning with food for the starving Jingle, who has pawned his clothes for a meal. Goodhearted Pickwick will eventually bail Jingle out of prison, helping him to settle in the West Indies and begin life anew.50
Like “The Dying Clown,” this plate, which closely matches Dickens’s text, presents caricature for a social purpose.51 The poorest inmates of the Fleet—young and old, male and female, human and canine—are locked up because they cannot pay their debts. In “The Discovery of Jingle in the Fleet,” Browne fills this small dreary prison stage with eleven figures, objects scattered on the floor, clothing hanging to dry, and a few crude pieces of furniture. We see a crazed countryman holding a worn-out whip that he flicks against his boot since he is “riding, in imagination” (P, Oxf. 534); a diminutive fireplace; men conversing by a window; a prisoner’s “haggard” (534) wife tending a dying plant; and an elderly, diseased grandfather unaware of his granddaughter’s “voice that had been music to him” (534).52
But Browne also adds details not mentioned in the text—posters, an alcoholic woman, and a dog. The poster on the left wall spells out the rules of the prison, an ironic feature given the unruliness of the place; Cruikshank likewise uses this caricature technique in The Drunkard’s Children (1848), posting rules that the inhabitants of the gin room blatantly ignore. Browne’s antislavery poster on the right wall, not mentioned in the text, comments on the inmates’ situation at the Fleet. Attributing this stage prop to Browne’s ingenuity, Michael Steig suggests the poster is a famous antislavery design entitled “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” that “has made the imprisoned hero suddenly conscious of his common humanity with [Jingle and Trotter]” (Dickens and Phiz 14). An alcoholic hag, rendered as a grotesque caricature, looms ominously behind and above Trotter. The old woman raises her wrists in fury because Trotter is blocking the doorway, but the cramped common area makes ironic her mad urgency to enter the small closed prison space. Also in a fury, the small dog, skillfully rendered, barks at the huntsman, who is so engaged in his imaginative steeplechase that he does not notice the canine at all.53 The woman, dog, and granddaughter project rage, frustration, and sadness, respectively, vibrant emotions trapped in the immobility of prison.
Serials to Graphic Novels Page 7