SOURCE: "Pre-Raphaelitism in Charles Reade's Early Fiction" in PMLA, Vol. 60, December, 1945, pp. 1149-64.

[In the following excerpt, Burns considers Reade's theories of art and the influence of those theories on his novel Christie Johnstone.]

That Charles Reade was interested in art, along with Cremona violins, Scottish herring fisheries, and other such hobbies, has long been known. Coleman listed some of the paintings in Reade's private collection and declared him a connoisseur;¹ Elwin pointed out that he had a genuine taste in art and was the best sort of collector;² and Rives added still further information of much the same type.³ One of Rives' quotations is particularly interesting.

1. There is a woman stooping in rather an absurd attitude with her hand touching her foot. Insert at her foot a rose which I could do so that Etty could not tell it from Etty and put a curtain in her left hand, and the absurdity vanishes. We have a woman stealing from behind a curtain, and picking up a gage d'amour which one has thrown at her feet…

6. Diana waiting for Endymion. Paint out her night cap. Confine her hair by a band glittering in the moonlight, and let this band be surmounted by a crescent as in the picture you sold Mr. Hart…⁴

Reade, it would seem, was quite sure of himself when it came to matters of art; and he spoke thus in 1850, at the very time he was writing Christie Johnstone.⁵

Yet, despite Reade's pretensions as an art critic, no one (so far as I know)⁶ has examined closely what he has to say about art and artists in Christie Johnstone. This I propose to do, and by establishing the proper relationship between Reade's theories of painting and those of his contemporaries, I hope to clarify the nature, intent, and originality of the art criticism in Christie Johnstone, and thereby give new meaning to the novel itself. Finally, and perhaps most important, I intend to show that Reade's study of Pre-Raphaelite doctrine influenced the development of his "matter-of-fact" theory of fiction.⁷

I

Although Charles Reade dealt with art and artists in other novels, notably Peg Woffington,⁸ it was only in Christie Johnstone that he made full use of his knowledge of painting. The novel is primarily a love idyll,⁹ but woven into each of the two parallel romances is a polemic—one dealing with Carlylism, the other with conditions in the art world, more specifically with Pre-Raphaelitism.¹⁰

Both these are introduced early in the novel. Charles Gatty's first appearance is as a defender of his artistic faith:

With the little band of printers was a young Englishman, the leader of the expedition—Charles Gatty.

His step was elastic, and his manner wonderfully animated, without loudness.

'A bright day,' said he. 'The sun forgot where he was, and shone; everything was in favor of art.'

'Oh dear, no,' replied old Groove, 'not where I was.'

'Why, what was the matter?'

'The flies kept buzzing and biting, and sticking in the work—that's the worst of out o'doors!'

'The flies! is that all? Swear the spiders in special constables next time,' cried Gatty. 'We shall win the day:' and light shot into his hazel eye.

'The world will not always put up with the humbugs of the brush, who, to imitate Nature, turn their back on her. Paint an out-o'-door scene in-doors! I swear by the sun it's a lie! the one stupid, impudent lie, that glitters amongst the lies of vulgar art, like Satan amongst Belial, Mammon, and all those beggars.

'Now look here; the barren outlines of a scene must be looked at, to be done; hence the sketching system slop-sellers of the Academy! but the million delicacies of light, shade, and color, can be trusted to memory, can they?'

'It's a lie big enough to shake the earth out of her course; if any part of the work could be trusted to memory or imagination, it happens to be the bare outlines, and they can't. The million subtleties of light and color; learn them by heart, and say them off on canvas! the highest angel in the sky must have his eye upon them, and look devilish sharp, too, or he shan't paint them: I give him Charles Gatty's word for that … '

'Very well,' said Gatty. 'Then I'll say but one word more, and it is this. The artifice of painting is old enough to die; it is time the art was born. Whenever it does come into the world, you will see no more dead corpses of trees, grass, and water, robbed of their life, the sunlight, and flung upon canvas in a studio, by the light of a cigar, and a lie—and'—

'How much do you expect for your picture?' interrupted Jones.

'What has that to do with it? With these little swords (waving his brush), we'll fight for nature-light, truth-light, and sun-light, against'a world in arms,—no, worse, in swaddling-clothes.'

'With these little swerrds,' replied poor old Groove, 'we shall cut our own throats if we go against people's prejudices.'

The young artist laughed the old daubster a merry defiance, and then sepaated from the party, for his lodgings were down the street.¹¹

The nature of Gatty's allegiance is transparent. It is as though Holman Hunt or the young Millais were speaking;¹² every word fits the Pre-Raphaelite pattern—from the arguments concerning an "out-o'door scene" to the criticism of the Academy and the necessity for reform.¹³ To cite further passages and more parallels would be to labor the obvious. One of Ipsden's remarks to Charles Gatty establishes the identification beyond a doubt:

'You, sir,' he went on, 'appear to hang on the skirts of a certain clique, who handle the brush well, but draw ill, and look at nature through the spectacles of certain ignorant painters who spoiled canvas four hundred years ago.'¹⁴

Reade, it would seem, wanted his readers to know that Gatty was a follower of the P.R.B., just as he wanted them to know that Lady Barbara was a disciple of Carlyle. Both the Pre-Raphaelites and Carlylists were the subject of much controversy in the early fifties, and apparently Reade felt that such topical themes stimulated the interest of readers and helped sell books.¹⁵ Thus, at the very outset of his career Reade began to strive for topicality—one aspect of sensationalism that was to become a staple of his later works.

It would be incorrect, however, to consider Reade's topicality as wholly commercial. He wanted success, to be sure, but he also had other aims:

This story was written three years ago, and one or two topics in it are not treated exactly as they would be if written by the same hand to-day. But if the author had retouched those pages with his colors of 1853, he would (he thinks) have destroyed the only merit they have, viz., that of containing genuine contemporaneous verdicts upon a cant that was flourishing like a peony, and a truth that was struggling for bare life, in the year of truth 1850.

He prefers to deal fairly with the public, and, with this explanation and apology, to lay at its feet a faulty but genuine piece of work.¹⁶

Since the "truth that was struggling for bare life" was almost certainly the "one great truth" which Reade ascribed to the Pre-Raphaelites,¹⁷ Charles Gatty, as an accredited follower of the P.R.B., assumes a new importance in the novel. To understand Reade's second aim, one must understand his attitude towards Gatty, and the cause he represents.

At first reading, one may be inclined to consider Gatty a weak person, and hence infer that Reade had little sympathy for him or his ideas. But closer scrutiny will reveal that Reade made a distinction between Gatty the lover, and Gatty the struggling young artist—the vacillating lover he treated harshly (Elwin says mercilessly);¹⁸ the artist he treated sympathetically, as in the following passages:

In short, he [Gatty] never left off till he had crushed the non-buyers with eloquence and satire; but he could not crush them into buyers,—they beat him at the passive retort.

Poor Gatty, when the momentary excitement of argument had subsided, drank the bitter cup all must drink awhile, whose bark is alive and strong enough to stem the current down which the dead, weak things of the world are drifting, many of them into safe harbors.¹⁹

These lines call to mind Reade's own struggles and disappointments. He, too, felt that he was surrounded by stupidity, that he and other original writers and artists had to fight against unfair odds.²⁰ In 1852, he jotted down the following entry in his Diary:

Wait till I get to London, and organize a little society of painters, actors, and writers, all lovers of truth, and sworn to stand or fall together. Why not a Truth Company as well as a Gala Company? L'un vaut bien l'autre. Now 1 think of it, there is, I believe, a company and a steam-engine for everything but truth.²¹

With sentiments like these, he must have felt a keen sympathy for Gatty, and presumably for his Pre-Raphaelite prototypes. At least, it is certain that he later sympathized with Millais, when he was being attacked by what his son called "the rotten criticisms of the period." In 1856 Millais wrote as follows:

I dined at the Garrick with Reade, the author of It Is Never too Late to Mend. He is delighted with my pictures, and regards all criticism as worthless. He has never been reviewed at all in the Times, although his book has passed through more editions than most of the first-class novels…²²

And in The Eighth Commandment Reade explained himself thus:

I can bow to the public when it is right; but I never bow to error and false judgment.

I have purchased Mr. Millais's chef-d'æuvre in the teeth of all the babblers about pictures….²³

Therefore Elwin was at least partly correct when he said.—

His [Reade's] own contempt for conventional criticism, his passionate sympathy with the underdog, and his delight in dressing up as a truculent crusader, inspired his espousal of Millais' cause.²⁴

But Elwin was unaware of the novelist's intimate acquaintance with Pre-Raphaelite doctrine, and the extent of his sympathy for it. Reade was not more concerned with Gatty's professional battles than with his ideas on art, which are aptly summarized in the following passage:

'I have one finished picture, sir,' said the poor boy, 'but the price is high.'

He brought it, in a faint-hearted way, for he had shown it to five picture-dealers, and all five agreed it was hard.

He had painted a lime-tree, distant fifty yards, and so painted it that it looked something like a limetree fifty yards off.

'That was mesquin,' said his judges; 'the poetry of painting required abstract trees at metaphysical distance, not the various trees of nature as they appear under positive accidents.'

On this Mr. Gatty had deluged them with words.

'When it is art, truth, or sense, to fuse a cow, a horse, and a critic, into one undistinguishable quadruped, with six legs, then it will be art to melt an ash, an elm, and a lime, things that differ more than quadrupeds, into what you call abstract trees, that any man who has seen a tree, as well as looked at one, would call drunken stingingnettles. You, who never look at nature, how can you judge the arts, which are all but copies of nature? At two hundred yards distance, full-grown trees are more distinguishable than the animal tribe. Paint me an abstract human being, neither man nor a woman,' said he, 'and then I will agree to paint a tree that shall be no tree; and if no man will buy it, perhaps the father of lies will take it off my hands, and hang it in the only place it would not disgrace."²⁵

Even though the last paragraph is obviously derived from Modern Painters,,²⁶ these lines indicate that Reade understood and sanctioned the central aim of the P.R.B.—"to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature."²⁷ Furthermore, when read in context, these lines also indicate that Reade extended his approval to the Pre-Raphaelite method, which, as Gaunt summarized it, was this: " … they fitted real people and real backgrounds to imaginary scenes or vice versa, painting these imaginary scenes from nature with the most scrupulous fidelity of detail and pure and vivid colour."²⁸

Despite his approval of basic principles and methods, however, Reade was severely critical of Gatty's ancillary doctrines (which were those popularly attributed to the P.R.B.)—as the following quotation illustrates:

The new-comer [Ipsden] soon showed Mr. Charles Gatty his ignorance of facts.

This man had sat quietly before a multitude of great pictures, new and old, in Europe.

He cooled down Charles Gatty, Esq., monopolist of nature and truth.

He quoted to him thirty painters in Germany, who paint every stroke of a landscape in the open air, and forty in various nations who had done it in times past.

'You, sir' he went on, 'appear to hang on the skirts of a certain clique, who handle the brush well, but draw ill, and look at nature through the spectacles of certain ignorant painters who spoiled canvas four hundred years ago.'

'Go no farther in that direction.

'Those boys, like all quacks, have one great truth which they disfigure with more than one falsehood.

'Hold fast their truth, which is a truth the world has always possessed, though its practice has been confined to the honest and laborious few.

'Eschew their want of mind and taste.

'Shrink with horror from that profane culte de laideur, that "love of the lopsided," they have recovered from the foul receptacles of decayed art.'

He reminded him further, that 'Art is not imitation, but illusion; that a plumber and glazier of our day and a mediaeval painter are more alike than any two representatives of general styles that can be found; and for the same reason, namely, that with each of these, art is in its infancy; these two sets of bunglers have not learned how to produce the illusions of art.'²⁹

This is Charles Reade speaking, albeit not very originally. The last paragraph probably came from The Times' answer to Ruskin's letter in defence of the P.R.B.;³⁰ but the exact source is not important, since this and all the other arguments represent the" conventional staples of newspaper opinion,³¹ for the most part written by critics who failed to understand the aims, methods, and accomplishments of the group they condemned….

But if Reade was unoriginal in his adverse criticism, and failed to understand some of the aims and doctrines of the P.R.B.,³⁶ the fact remains that he was more perceptive and more courageous than most of his contemporaries—for he did understand and defend "the one great truth" which Gatty and "those boys" held so dear. More specifically, he gave unstinted praise to Gatty's picture,³⁷ and jokingly said that he had always recognized its merits.³⁸ And later (in real life) he ran counter to prevailing opinion and paid Millais' "Sir Isumbras" an even higher tribute. I quote Millais' son:

About the sale of this work my mother had a good tale to tell. One evening in 1858, when they were living in London, she was standing outside the house, waiting for the door to be opened, when she was accosted by a grey-haired man in shabby garments, who said he, too, wished to come in. The observation startled her, for she had never seen the man before; and, mistaking him in the darkness for a tramp, she told him to go away. 'But,' pleaded the stranger, with a merry twinkle in his eye, 'I want "The Knight Crossing the Ford," and I must have it!' The idea now dawned upon her that he was a harmless lunatic, to be got rid of by a little quiet persuasion. This, therefore, she tried, but in vain. The only reply she got was, 'Oh, beautiful dragon! I am Charles Reade, who wrote Never Too Late to Mend, and I simply must have that picture, though I am but a poor man. I would write a whole three-volume novel on it, and then have sentiment enough to spare. I only wish I had someone like you to guard my house!'

And he got the picture! For, though a stranger to my mother, my father knew him well, and was pleased to find on his return home that it had fallen into his hands. Reade was, in fact, an intimate friend of Millais, and when in town they met together almost daily at the Garrick Club.

That he was proud of his purchase the following letter to Millais attests:—

From Charles Reade

'Garrick Club.

'Il Maestro,—The picture is come, and shall be hung in the drawing-room. I cannot pretend to point out exactly what you have done to it, but this I know—it looks admirably well. I hope you will call on me and talk it over. I am very proud to possess it. Either I am an idiot, or it is an immortal work.

Yours sincerely,
Charles Reade.

In another letter he says:—'It is the only picture admitted into the room, and has every justice I can tender it. As I have bought to keep, and have no sordid interest in crying it up, you must allow me to write it up a little. It is infamous that a great work of Art should be libelled as this was some time ago.'³⁹

In the light of the evidence adduced thus far, one can readily see that those sections of Christie Johnstone dealing with art and artists have not always been fully understood. It was not mere chance that caused Reade to make Gatty a painter. Nor was it chance that led the novelist to indulge in whole pages of art criticism. Reade was not an amateur, but a competent art critic—or so he felt at least; and his intention was to write a polemic on art, a polemic of and for his day. In more specific terms his aim was to give a serious criticism of the Pre-Raphaelites: to disabuse them on certain points, to encourage them in their struggle, to aid them in establishing their "one great truth"—in brief, to take upon himself the type of role which Ruskin was later to establish as his own. These aims he fulfilled only indifferently well: his knowledge was incomplete, measured by Ruskin's; his conclusions were often unoriginal and shallow—sometimes nothing more than stale repetition of current fallacies and prejudices; and yet, whether profound or not, his qualified advocacy of Pre-Raphaelite theory and his enthusiastic attempts to defend and encourage Gatty and Millais speak well for his honesty and courage. These facts and conclusions, if sound, clarify the nature and intent of certain passages in the novel, and by so doing give fresh meaning to the novel as a whole.

II

The elucidation of Reade's relationship to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art also throws new light on still another aspect of his fiction; namely, the development of his theories of documentary realism.

The evidence cited earlier shows that Reade had studied the theories of the P.R.B. as early as 1850—that he had accepted their approach to nature from the very beginning, and continued to embrace this one aspect of their credo throughout the years between 1850 and 1853. Thus, during the very years in which he was formulating his own fictional technique, he was exposed to the influence of Pre-Raphaelite method, which, it may be recalled, was essentially this:

They [the P.R.B.] fitted real people and real backgrounds to imaginary scenes or vice versa, painting these imaginary scenes from nature with the most scrupulous fidelity of detail and pure and vivid colour…. There was no limit to the pains taken to secure accuracy. At Ewell in Surrey, obliging countrymen shot water rats for Millais and held down sheep for Hunt to copy with the requisite care; and the strawberries in the young aristocrat's hand in Millais' The Woodman's Daughter cost five and sixpence at Covent Garden.⁴⁰

In 1853, exactly three days after he had mentioned that he was "busy correcting proofs of Christie Johnstone,"⁴¹ Reade described his own proposed method thus:

June 20—The plan I propose to myself in writing stories will, I see, cost me undeniable labor. I propose never to guess where I can know. For instance, Tom Robinson is in gaol. I have therefore been to Oxford Gaol and visited every inch, and shall do the same at Reading. Having also collected material in Durham Gaol, whatever I write about Tom Robinson's gaol will therefore carry (I hope) a physical exterior of truth….⁴²

The unmistakable similarities in method are made even more striking by one of Gatty's disquisitions:

'So I shall go to jail … ' [Gatty was faced with imprisonment for debt.]

Then he took a turn, and began to fall into the artistic, or true view of matters…

'Look here, Christie,' said he, 'I am sick of conventional assassins, humbugging models, with dirty beards, that knit their brows, and try to look murder; they never murdered so much as a tomcat: I always go in for the real thing, and here I shall find it….

Then I shall find the accessories of a picture I have in my head … '⁴³

Gatty never painted his picture, but Reade wrote It Is Never Too Late To Mend.

Nor do similarities in method constitute the only points of agreement: other similarities (though not so close) go deeper—to the basic conceptions which underlie both techniques. F. G. Stephens (alias John Seward), writing in The Germ, explained the "why" of Pre-Raphaelite method in this way:

That the system of study to which this "entire adherence to the simplicity of nature" would necessarily lead requires a somewhat longer and more devoted course of observation than any other is undoubted; but that it has a reward in a greater effect produced, and more delight in the searching, is, the writer thinks, equally certain. We shall find a greater pleasure in proportion to our closer communion with nature, and by a more exact adherence to all her details, (for nature has no peculiarities or excentricities) in whatsoever direction her study may conduct….

The modern artist does not retire to monasteries, or practice discipline; but he may show his participation in the same high feeling by a firm attachment to truth in every point of representation, which is the most just method. For how can good be sought by evil means, or by falsehood, or by slight in any degree? By a determination to represent the thing and the whole of the thing, by training himself to the deepest observation of its fact and detail, enabling himself to reproduce, as far as is possible, nature herself, the painter will best evince his share of faith.

It is by this attachment to truth in its most severe form that the followers of the Arts have to show that they share in the peculiar character of the present age,—a humility of knowledge, a diffidence of attainment; for, as Emerson has well observed,

"The time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness
Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Is this so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee Nature and God, and drink truth dry?

… Nothing can be more humble than the pretension to the observation of facts alone, and the truthful rendering of them….⁴⁴

Such notions remind one of the art criticism in Christie Johnstone; and Reade spoke much the same way in his own person, about his own fiction. The following pronouncement is typical:

Fiction is not lying … Let any man look into fiction scientifically, for a change, and he will find all fiction worth a button is founded on fact…

Some things, sir, can never be judged without their alternatives. Suppose I had not used that photograph of an Irish lady's life, what trash should I have written out of the depths of my inner consciousness? It was Swift or lies; for that phase of Irish life he photographs has left no other trace…. [Reade had been accused of plagiarizing Swift's Journal of a Modern Lady.]

I tell you this union of fact and imagination is a kind of intellectual copulation, and has procreated the best fiction in every age, by a law of nature.⁴⁵

And again, in "The Autobiography of a Thief," Reade explained:

You have seen Thomas Robinson, alias Hic, alias Ille, alias Iste, tinted in water-colors by me: now see him painted in oils by himself…

Add then this autobiography to his [Thomas Robinson's] character as drawn by me in the novel, and you possess the whole portrait: and now it will be for you to judge whether for once we have taken a character that exists on a large scale in nature, and added it to fiction, or, here too, have printed a shadow, and called it a man.⁴⁶

Reade's criteria were "nature" and "truth"—in essence the same "nature" and "truth" to which Stephens had appealed; in fact the analogy extends to the philosophy underlying both conceptions. Stephens wrote:

It has been said that there is presumption in this movement of the modern school, a want of deference to established authorities, a removing of ancient landmarks…. If we are not to depart from established principles, how are we to advance at all?…

The sciences have become almost exact within the present century. Geology and chemistry are almost re-instituted. The first has been nearly created; the second expanded so widely that it now searches and measures the creation. And how has this been done but by bringing greater knowledge to bear upon a wider range of experiment; by being precise in the search after truth? If this adherence to fact, to experiment and not theory,—to begin at the beginning and not fly to the end,—has added so much to the knowledge of man in science; why may it not greatly assist the moral purposes of the Arts? It cannot be well to degrade a lesson by falsehood….⁴⁷

Reade was even more explicit: "I will just premise," he said, "that there is, 'me judice,' but one road to truth in literature, or any human thing; viz., the method of the Naturalist and the Jurist…,"⁴⁸—a statement he enlarged upon several times, but nowhere more unequivocally than in the following explanatory "note":

There is a little unlicked anonymuncule going scribbling about, whose creed seems to be that a little camel to be known must be examined and compared with other quadrupeds; but that the great arts can be judged out of the depths of a penny-a-liner's inner consciouness, and to be rated and ranked need not be compared inter se. Applying the method of the novelist, and diverting the glass from the learned historian's method in history, and the daily chronicler's method in dressing res gestae for a journal, this little addle-pate has jumped to a comparative estimate not based on comparison: so that all his blindfold vituperation of a noble art is chimera, not reasoning: it is, in fact, a retrograde step in science and logic. This is to evade the Baconian method, humble and wise, and crawl back to the lazy and self-confident system of the ancients that kept the world dark so many centuries…. Avoid this sordid dreamer: and follow in letters as in science the Baconian method….⁴⁹

In revolting against established authority and transcendental thinking, both Reade and the Pre-Raphaelites were espousing an inductive method based on "science." Their indebtedness to empirical philosophy is patent.⁵⁰

Finally, Reade, like the Pre-Raphaelites, used all this paraphernalia to create "romance." His was not the romanticism of the Brotherhood in every respect: for one thing, he could never abide the "Middle Ages"; but on many points there was full agreement, as one can see after reading Gatty's valedictory oration (which is Reade to the core).⁵¹

"Ay," he burst out again, "the resources of our art are still unfathomed! Pictures are yet to be painted that shall refresh men's inner souls, and help their hearts against the artificial world, and charm the fiend away, like David's harp! The world, after centuries of lies, will give nature and truth a trial. What a paradise art will be when truths, instead of lies, shall be told on paper, on marble, on canvas, and on the boards!"⁵²

Romantic certainly, and something else besides; for the last line is a more concrete version of earlier dicta—notably "… there is, me judice, but one road to truth in literature, or any human thing…" To Reade apparently there was but one "road," one "nature," and one "truth" for both literature and art—an attitude (Pre-Raphaelite in itself) which helps to account for the nature and closeness of the parallels already established; and which materially strengthens the probability of influence.

At this point I shall rest my case. I could cite still further similarities,⁵³ but it is not my purpose to suggest that Reade's theories and methods parallel the Pre-Raphaelite credo in every respect. Nor is it my purpose, at the moment, to suggest that Reade borrowed any significant part of his documentary realism directly from the works or writings of the Brotherhood. Since the ideas expressed and practiced by both Reade and the Pre-Raphaelites were in the air, so to speak, some few of the similarities I have listed were undoubtedly fortuitous:⁵⁴ other forces, every bit as immediate and powerful as Pre-Raphaelitism, were pushing Reade towards some form of documentary fiction. Consequently, a case for direct and extended influence cannot be established, or even argued, until all the other factors which might have affected the novelist's technique have been given close consideration—a task beyond the scope of the present study.⁵⁵

My aim here is simply to establish the fact of influence, whether great or small, particularly in regard to "method"; and if one accepts the evidence I have mustered, the fact is established. Reade could not have studied the Pre-Rephaelite paintings and writings, at the time he studied them, without absorbing some part of their message—the parallels are too close; the circumstantial evidence too convincing. A method so congenial in every way must, at the very least, have tended to reinforce Reade's own tentative gropings towards the "matter-of-fact romance." And so Pre-Raphaelitism, itself a revolutionary movement in art, played its part in the development of a technique in fiction that, as some critics would have it, "burst the bonds of traditional English realism and 'definitely foreshadowed the modern realistic movement in fiction'."⁵⁶

Notes

¹ John Coleman, Charles Reade As I Knew Him (New York, 1903), p. 227.

² Malcolm Elwin, Charles Reade (London, 1931), pp. 118-120.

³ Léone Rives, Charles Reade Sa Vie, Ses Romans (Toulouse, 1940), pp. 61-62.

⁴ Rives identifies her quotation as a "fragment de lettre du 23 mai 1850, addressée à Mr. Gillott … communiquée [to Miss Rives] par Mr. Bernard Gillott, Birmingham." Therefore the man to whom Reade gave advice so freely was the famous collector, Mr. Joseph Gillott. See A. G. Temple, Painting In The Queen's Reign (London, 1897), p. 16.

⁵ Two earlier documents indicate that Reade had long been interested in painting. See Charles L. Reade and Compton Reade, Charles Reade A Memoir (New York, 1887), p. 104; and also Malcolm Elwin, op. cit., pp. 63-64.

⁶ Mrs. E. V. Smith, in the North American Review, criticized Christie Johnstone at some length, with due emphasis on the novelist's art criticism, but seemed unaware that Charles Gatty was a follower of the Pre-Raphaelites. Cf. Mrs. E. V. Smith, "Reade's Novels," North American Review, LXXXII (1856), 368-388.

⁷ Although Professor E. G. Sutcliffe ("The Stage in Reade's Novels," Studies in Philology, XXVII [1930], 669-672), has dealt trenchantly with the general influence of paintings, "plates," and "pictures" on Reade's fictional technique, his study is brief, and should be supplemented by a more exhaustive analysis—one similar to Leland Schubert's Hawthorne, the Artist (Chapel Hill, 1944). As time permits I hope to make such a study, but in this paper I am concerned only with the early artistic theories of Reade and the Pre-Raphaelites.

⁸ Soaper and Snarl, conventional art critics, were made to appear completely ridiculous. See Charles Reade, Peg Woffington (Grolier ed.), pp. 147-154. I attach little importance to the novelist's remarks, however, even though they agree with Pre-Raphaelite theory in some respects; for the novel and most of the art criticism that it includes were developed from the play Masks and Faces, which is as much Tom Taylor's as Reade's. And Taylor, it will be recalled, was a professional art critic:

"During his [Tom Taylor's] lifetime laymen regarded him as an art critic whose authority was second only to that of Ruskin…. Toward the more moderate pre-Raphaelites Taylor displayed tolerance." See Winton Tolles, Tom Taylor and the Victorian Drama (New York, 1940), pp. 258-266.

⁹ Briefly, the plot of the novel is this: Lord Ipsden, cultured and intelligent, but lackadaisical and bored, is refused by Lady Barbara (a disciple of Carlyle); where-upon he lapses into even greater listlessness than before. At this point an eccentric doctor advises him to acquaint himself with the "lower classes" and see what can be done for them. In following this advice, Ipsden goes to Scotland, does his duty by the lower classes, and even becomes something of a hero when he effects a daring rescue in a storm at sea. In the meantime, Lady Barbara appears in Scotland, becomes disillusioned by the unheroic actions of her Carlylean suitor, and eventually learns the true worth of a modern man—nay, a modern hero! They live happily ever after.

That is one plot. The other concerns Christie Johnstone, a beautiful, intelligent, and talented Scottish fishwife, and Charles Gatty, a weak but well meaning and gifted English painter temporarily living in Scotland. They fall in love, and marriage is in the offing, even though Gatty is penniless and as yet unsuccessful in his work, until Gatty's mother appears on the scene. She dissuades him, and doesn't relent until Christie saves him from drowning. They also live happily ever after.

The two plots are rather mechanically joined. One result is that Ipsden is able to lay down the laws of art to Charles Gatty, and then send him on the way to fame and success.

¹⁰ Here and throughout this paper my intention is to use the expression "Pre-Raphaelite" in the sense originally intended by the Brotherhood. See William Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy (New York, 1942), pp. 15-27; and Percy Bate, The English Pre-Raphaelite Painters (London, 1901), pp. 7-9.

¹¹ Charles Reade, Christie Johnstone (Grolier ed.) pp. 43-44.

¹² Millais might have served as one of the originals from whom Gatty was compounded (certain resemblances do appear), but the evidence is too slight to make a convincing case. Thomas Faed, a popular painter of Reade's acquaintance, is another possibility. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (London, 1941), pp. 316-317.

¹³ Any standard work on the Pre-Raphaelites will substantiate my views. See, for example, J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, (London 1899), I, 115-120.

¹⁴Christie Johnstone, p. 111. Cf. also Christie Johnstone, p. 47.

¹⁵ Cf. A Memoir, pp. 194, 196, 201.

¹⁶Christie Johnstone, p. 191. This note is appended to all editions of the novel that I have seen.

¹⁷ See Christie Johnstone, p. 111.

¹⁸Op. cit., pp. 45-46.

¹⁹Christie Johnstone, p. 109.

²⁰ Cf. Charles Reade, The Eighth Commandment (Boston, 1860). This book contains much information about Reade's personal battle for recognition, and incidentally (on pp. 208-212) a comparison of the opportunities open to painters and writers.

²¹A Memoir, p. 194.

²² J. G. Millais, op. cit., p. 305.

²³The Eighth Commandment, p. 124.

²⁴Op. cit., p. 119.

²⁵Christie Johnstone, pp. 108-109.

²⁶ Cf. John Ruskin, Modern Painters (New York, 1866), I, xxxii-xxxiii.

²⁷The Germ, No. 1, January 1850, prospectus [not paginated]. Cf. also John Seward (F. G. Stephens), "The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art," The Germ, No. 2, February, 1850, pp. 58 ff.

²⁸Op. cit., p. 26.

²⁹Christie Johnstone, pp. 111-112.

³⁰The Times, May 30, 1851. Cf. Henry Ladd, The Victorian Morality of Art (New York, 1922), pp. 28-31; 249-254.

³¹ Compare, for example, the newspaper and periodical criticisms quoted or summarized by Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (London, 1905), I, 176-179; 204-206; 218; 244-256….

³⁶ The note Reade appended to Christie Johnstone, in which he stated that he had changed his mind about certain topics in the years between 1850 and 1853, might possibly lead one to believe that he had a fuller understanding of Pre-Raphaelitism in 1853 than when he first wrote the novel, but deliberately suppressed his new information and conclusions, in line with his stated purpose in writing the novel. However, there is no evidence to substantiate such a possibility.

³⁷ I feel sure that this picture had a real counterpart, but as yet I have been unable to identify it. The words "At present in the collection of Lord Ipsden" may indicate that Reade was describing a painting in his own collection. An article in The Pall Mall Gazette, June 20, 1884 (inaccessible to me) discusses Reade's collection of paintings, and might possibly furnish evidence to support my conjecture.

³⁸Christie Johnstone, p. 112.

³⁹The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, I, 313-314. Reade also praised Hunt: "Mr. Holman Hunt has just spent three years on a picture. The result is an immortal work." [The Eighth Commandment, p. 209.] And he undoubtedly meant to include the Pre-Raphaelities in the following panegyric:

There are now in this country more independent painters viewing nature for themselves, and interpreting her their way, than in any other nation. All the other schools in Europe are stationary; ours is striding on like a giant. In one branch of art, water colors, we are unrivalled. In the other we very soon shall be. [The Eighth Commandment, p. 209.]

⁴⁰ Gaunt, op. cit., pp. 26-27. For a fuller and more accurate statement of the Pre-Raphaelite method, see Holman Hunt, op. cit., pp. 25-26; 90-91; 132-152; 202; 262-264; etc.; and J. G. Millais' account of the evolution of his father's paintings in The Life of Sir John Everett Millais.

⁴¹ See A Memoir, p. 197.

⁴²Ibid., p. 198. See also p. 199.

⁴³Christie Johnstone, p. 55. Reade probably wrote the novel Christie Johnstone soon after he had studied thieves at Durham Gaol. See A Memoir, pp. 194-197; and Charles Reade, "A Terrible Temptation" (included in Readiana, Grolier ed., p. 388).

⁴⁴ John Seward (F. G. Stephens), "The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art," The Germ, No. 2, February, 1850, pp. 58-59. I quote Stephens because his statement seems to be a fair and yet brief presentation of the views of the Brotherhood—D. G. Rosetti excepted. Cf. Holman Hunt, op. cit., pp. 132-139; 147-152; 172-179; 220-221. See also Gaunt, op. cit., pp. 22-23, 229-231; and Francis Bickley, The Pre-Raphaelite Comedy (New York, n.d.), pp. 164, 251-252

⁴⁵ Charles Reade, The Wandering Heir (Grolier ed.), pp. 195, 203.

⁴⁶ Charles Reade, "The Autobiography of a Thief (Grolier ed.), XII, 4, 6. Cf. also Rives, op. cit., pp. 189-230.

⁴⁷The Germ, No. 2, pp. 59, 61.

⁴⁸The Eighth Commandment, p. 9.

⁴⁹ Charles Reade, Love Me Little, Love Me Long (Grolier ed.), p. 201.

⁵⁰ Lewis F. Haines gives a full account of Reade's relationship to English empirical thought. See Lewis F. Haines, "Reade, Mill, and Zola: A Study of the Character and Intention of Charles Reade's Realistic Method," Studies in Philology, XL (1943), 466-475.

⁵¹ An excerpt from Henry Ladd's explanation of Ruskin's "Naturalistic principles" can be applied (in a general way) to both Reade and the P.R.B. (Ladd, op. cit., pp. 254-255): Ruskin may thus make extravagant claims for the importance of literal representation—for the Real; but it remains beyond a doubt that the Naturalistic principles arise from an emotional concern for the romance, the poetry, the ideal in the natural world. A faithfulness to the facts of appearance is seldom alien to romantic literature. It was especially common to the literary romantics of the early nineteenth century….

Cf. Holman Hunt, op. cit., p. 150; and E. G. Sutcliffe, "Fact, Realism, and Morality in Reade's Fiction," Studies in Philology, XLI (1944), 590-596.

⁵²Christie Johnstone, p. 180 (Reade's italics). See also T. Earle Welby, The Victorian Romantics 1850-1870 (London, 1929), pp. 3-33; 48-49; and W. C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins Sensation Novelists (New York, 1919), pp. 109-151. Speaking ex cathedra, Reade later explained (The Eighth Commandment, p. 251): [The fine arts] are sisters, and alike in heart though not in the face. Wherefore he who hates any one of them cannot really be in the secrets of her sister.

⁵³ For example, Reade was almost wholly in agreement with the P.R.B. in defining the "purpose of art and literature; cf. Holman Hunt, op. cit., p. 172 with Charles Reade, Put Yourself in His Place (Grolier Ed.), I, 687; and in partial agreement with them in his statements above subject matter; cf. The Germ, pp. 17-18 and 120-124, with Léone Rives, op. cit., p. 198. For comment on the articles in The Germ, see W. M. Rossetti's Preface to "A Facsimile Reprint of The Literary Organ Of The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood…" (London, 1901), pp. 16-17, 21, and passim.

⁵⁴ The development of realism in French painting and literature furnishes an interesting sidelight on the present problem: L'avènement du réalisme en peinture coïncide avec l'apparition des romans de Champfleury: L'Enterrement à Ornans est de 1851, Les Glaneuses de 1857. A la même heure, romanciers et peintres se détournent avec le même dédain des exubérances romantiques et des épisodes académiques empruntés à l'histoire et à la légende: Courbet, Millet, Daumier, répondant aux préoccupations de leur époque, peignent le paysan et l'ouvrier, le rustre et le petit bourgeois campagnard…. Édouard Maynial, L'Epoque Réaliste (Paris, 1931), pp. 22-23. See also Bernard Weinberg, French Realism: The Critical Reaction, 1830-1870, (New York, 1937), pp. 97-116; and Émile Bouver, La Bataille Réaliste (Paris, 1914), pp. 214-256.

It is to be noted, however, that Maynial was speaking of a simultaneous development in a group of writers, whereas Reade alone, among English novelists, adopted a "method" resembling that of the Pre-Raphaelites in painting.

⁵⁵ I am now preparing for publication a more comprehensive study that will consider Pre-Raphaelitism in relation to other possible influences.

⁵⁶ Haines, op. cit., p. 466.