SOURCE: Steig, Michael. “Dickens, Hablôt Browne, and the Tradition of English Caricature.” Criticism 11 (1969): 219-33.

[In the following essay, Steig argues that Dickens's novels provide an overall model for observing the development of literary illustration, focusing his discussion on the novels illustrated by Hablôt Browne.]

Since the word “caricature” has so often been applied to Dickens' literary methods, Dickens' own attitude toward caricature is of considerable interest. Writing in 1848, Dickens called his friend and contemporary, John Leech, “the very first English caricaturist (we use the word for want of a better) who has considered beauty as being perfectly compatible with his art,” and contrasted him with earlier English graphic humorists:

If we turn back to … the works of Rowlandson or Gillray, we shall find, in spite of the great humour displayed in many of them, that they are rendered wearisome and unpleasant by a vast amount of personal ugliness. Now, besides that it is a poor device to represent what is satirised as being necessarily ugly … it serves no purpose but to produce a disagreeable result. There is no reason why the farmer's daughter in the old caricature [no doubt Gillray's “Farmer Giles & his Wife shewing off their daughter Betty to their Neighbours …”, 1809] who is squalling at the harpsichord … should be squab and hideous. The satire on the manner of her education … would be just as good if she were pretty. Mr. Leech would have made her so.¹

Perhaps without realizing it, Dickens was echoing the denigration of caricature in Hogarth's engraving, “Characters & Caricaturas” (1743), and that artist's insistence in his Anecdotes that his own works belong to the category of comedy, “that intermediate species of subjects which may be placed between the sublime and the grotesque,” while caricature is defined as excessive, “grotesque” distortion.² Although, as Frances K. Barasch has pointed out, Hogarth's works were not nearly so free of the grotesque and fantastic as he claimed,³ Dickens at times found Hogarth a useful touchstone, as when he contrasted the balanced presentation of the causes of crime in “Gin Lane” with Cruikshank's monomaniacal temperance vision in The Bottle and The Drunkard's Children.⁴ Dickens was thus, in mid-career, unconsciously rejecting the tradition of extreme caricature exemplified by Gillray and Rowlandson, and somewhat modified by Cruikshank, in favor of what he saw as the more realistic productions of Hogarth and Leech.

Dickens' interest in, and strong opinions about graphic humor are of particular importance because of the prominent place of graphic art in his own novels—it is by now well known that Dickens took great pains over the illustrations to his works, and that they must be considered essential to a full reading.⁵ It is worth remarking as well that the historical predecessors of Dickens' novels are works in which the letterpress was subordinate to the engravings or etchings—for example the Cruikshanks' and Egan's Life in London (1821), and earlier, the Rowlandson-Combe collaborations—for of course The Pickwick Papers was originally conceived with the illustrator, Seymour, in the dominant role. What has not been fully recognized is the extent to which the illustrations to Dickens' novels parallel developments in his literary art, both stylistic and conceptual, apart from their relevance for specific passages in the text. In a general sense, these developments may be said to parallel as well the progress Dickens believed to exist in English graphic humor, culminating with Leech.

In the interest of simplicity, I shall limit my discussion to one artist, Hablôt K. Browne (“Phiz”), who illustrated ten of the fifteen novels; and I shall stop with Little Dorrit, since A Tale of Two Cities is rather perfunctorily illustrated. It is necessary, first of all, to try and define the relationship between artist and author; unfortunately our evidence is skimpy, since Browne in 1859 burned most of his correspondence with the novelists he illustrated,⁶ but what there is allows us to make certain tentative generalizations. It appears that the subjects of the illustrations were always specified by Dickens, often in great detail, and the author frequently reviewed the drawing before it was etched—in one case where this was impossible, the depiction of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul in Plate 5 of Dombey and Son, Dickens became quite irritated because Browne's picture didn't match his own conception of the character, and he remarked that Browne worked best not from the text, but from a “short description” of the subject, for then “he can't help taking it in.”⁷ His normal practice was to forward either the text or a description, and to specify the subject, while he was at work on the forthcoming monthly part. There is evidence of Dickens' having specified subjects for eight of the nineteen parts of Dombey and Son;⁸ for the later novels such evidence is scarcer, but what there is, suggests that Dickens' practice hardly varied,⁹ and that Browne's long association with Dickens never earned him the author's confidence to the extent that he was allowed the freedom of choosing his own subjects. Dickens' remarks about Browne's limitations in connection with Dombey (when their association already exceeded a decade), and his dismissal of Browne as illustrator after A Tale of Two Cities (the new illustrator, Marcus Stone, appears to have been given much more freedom¹⁰) further increases the probability that Dickens never ceased to specify the subjects, since he seems to have become increasingly dissatisfied with Browne's work. Yet Browne did have some opportunity to exercise originality, not only in the rendering of specified details, but in the introduction of details of his own, as when he added six urchins variously enjoying themselves to contrast with the solemnity of Dr. Blimber's young gentlemen, in Plate 7 of Dombey and Son (Dickens' very detailed instructions make no mention of these urchins).¹¹ A previously overlooked example of such independence is the allegorical frontispiece to Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens' instructions to Browne, preserved in the Huntington Library,¹² specify only that the artist shall show “any little indications of his history rising out of” Tom Pinch's organ, “and floating around it, that you please”; and the plate is evidence that Browne exercised his imagination freely, producing as perhaps the most intriguing details among many, a fantastic flock of little Pecksniffs, with varying masks and faces. Since direct evidence of the extent of Dickens' control is lacking more often than not, in general we must consider the illustrations an amalgam of author's and artist's intentions, with the main subject and more central details most likely to be of Dickens' devising—it is clear that Arthur Waugh's description of “the author throned in the chair of authority, with his hand guiding the pencil of the artist at his own free will,”¹³ is an exaggeration of the facts.

The question of the relation between author and artist becomes more complex if we turn from particular details to more general matters of style and conception. But there is clearly a radical change in Browne's style of character-portrayal between the novels from Pickwick through Barnaby Rudge, and those from Martin Chuzzlewit onwards, a change which almost seems to illustrate Dickens' distinction between caricature in the usual sense and “refined” and “elevated” caricature as practiced by Leech, and which can further be seen to parallel Dickens' own development as a creator of grotesque characters. In the plates to Pickwick and Nicholas Nickleby one is aware primarily of a profusion of small figures; backgrounds are handled skillfully, but they are subordinate to the human figures, who almost seem to swarm in the more crowded plates. In his handling of physiognomy Browne relies upon numerous strong lines that give each face the appearance of a grimace. The characters in the illustration to Pickwick's trial, for example, all have their faces twisted into some extreme expression, whether of anger, amusement, boredom, or astonishment. And in “Mr. Winkle's Situation when the Door Blew To,” we have a similar assortment of facial attitudes—numerous grimace-lines on the faces of Winkle, the two chair-men and Mr. Dowler, and a melodramatic-comic gape on Mrs. Dowler's face. In the Nickleby plates the exaggerated distortion of countenance is if anything more pronounced. The look on the face of Squeers when he is being thrashed by Nicholas is barely distinguishable from that of Sir Mulberry Hawk when he has quarelled with Sir Frederick—both are extreme, contorted and melodramatic. The woodcuts in The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge do less than justice to Browne's talent, but one may conclude that in them he did not deviate from his tendency to distort comic and villainous characters' faces into a limited variety of stagy expressions.

None of this is to say that Browne is capable of either the bawdiness or the fantasy of Gillray and Rowlandson, any more than Dickens merely reproduces the crudities of Smollett or the brilliant absurdity of Sterne; but in fact, Browne's early illustrations are much closer to the grotesqueries of Cruikshank than to the more subtle humor of Leech. It can be argued, however, that these illustrations, though they may never reach the heights of Cruikshank's for Oliver Twist, are appropriate to Dickens' early style. For in the early novels Dickens creates characters whose grotesqueness lies primarily in externals—appearance, gestures, actions, and simple quirks of language, like Jingle's telegraphic speech. The Pickwickians are essentially humor characters, who can be adequately portrayed in the illustrations with limited and extreme kinds of facial expression; Ralph Nickleby, Arthur Gride and Daniel Quilp may serve as examples of the grotesque villain whose villainy is pictorially expressible in the grimace and the stunted shape. Thus the shift in Browne's style beginning with Martin Chuzzlewit underlines with startling clarity the shift in Dickens' own conception of character. The Chuzzlewit characters as etched by Browne generally seem more realistic than the earlier ones; their figures are taller and better proportioned, grimace-lines are few, and even the faces of such clearly grotesque characters as Pecksniff, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Scadder, Diver and Brick are portrayed in repose. Only Mrs. Gamp continually grimaces, and this is a direct reflection of her appearance in the text (“with innumerable leers, winks, coughs, nods, smiles”—Ch. XXVI¹⁴). Browne's new style remains constant right through to A Tale of Two Cities with, if anything, a progressive “refinement” discernible. Compare, for example, Browne's versions of Uriah Heep and Mr. Tulkinghorn with such early counterparts as Quilp and Sergeant Buzfuz.

The corresponding change in Dickens' methods can best be illustrated with two of the triumphs of his middle period, Pecksniff and Dombey. Unlike the earlier villains, Pecksniff, whose face in Browne's etchings is as smooth as that of Ralph Nickleby is wrinkled, is grotesque in his inner being, and monstrous not simply because he is a hypocrite who says one thing and does another, but because the connection between his surface and his depths is indeterminate and unfathomable. We sense only a vast blankness within the man, we are ignorant of what is mask and what is face, or even if such terms are applicable. Pecksniff, it is true, constantly “performs” his own nature,¹⁵ but he is given a resonance greater than that of pure theatricality by the fact that the human dimension of the performance is left mysterious, and he becomes simultaneously comic and sinister—incidentally, one possible definition of the grotesque.¹⁶ And so it is fitting that Pecksniff's illustrated face should lack the theatrically masklike qualities of the earlier etchings, and that he should appear rather as the soul of bourgeois respectability.

With Mr. Dombey, Dickens further develops the possibilities of grotesque portrayal. Unlike Pecksniff, Mr. Dombey lacks any comic dimension, though he is an equally pointed satire of a social type. Lacking any demonism, he disturbs us through what might be called his world-view, a total solipsism unredeemed by any of the Falstaffian qualities of a Pecksniff or a Mrs. Gamp:

The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre.

(Ch. I)

This egocentricity leads to mental atrocities against his daughter Florence, but it is also expressed in physical characteristics; Dickens everywhere stresses Dombey's rigidity, and the chilling qualities of his presence. It is a part of Dickens' new concern with a kind of realism that Dombey shall be, in the conventional view, a handsome man; unlike Pecksniff, who is frequently described in terms that make him sound rather low and greasy, Dombey is impeccable in appearance and demeanor. This contrast recalls Dickens' reflections upon the consistent ugliness of the figures in Gillray and Rowlandson, and the way Leech manages to combine “beauty” with his satire. Browne's etchings for Dombey and Son seem to mirror this attitude, and although Dombey's rigidity is stressed in the illustrations, it is rarely so to the point of gross exaggeration. For instance, in the plate in which Dombey introduces Edith to Florence, a shade more uplift to the nose or eyebrow, a bit more curl to the lip, would make Dombey a caricature of rigidity and pride; but Browne manages to remain just this side of caricature. Distortions are reserved for such comic grotesques as Captain Cuttle, Mrs. Skewton and Major Bagstock, and except for the latter, even they are less grimacing and more natural than figures in the early novels. This trend to a more conventionally realistic kind of character-portrayal in Dickens and his illustrator does not mean that these characters are less alien or frightening than the earlier ones; in fact the contrary appears to be true, for the decrease in outward distortion emphasizes their grotesque effect by taking these characters out of the realms of melodrama and the quasi-supernatural into a world closer to common reality, and hence more immediately threatening. One may recall in this connection Freud's and Wolfgang Kayser's respective remarks on the uncanny and the grotesque: both say that the disturbing effect is more pronounced when we sense points of contact between the fictive world and our own, when the author, as Freud says, “pretends to move in the world of common reality.”¹⁷

Other significant developments in Dickens' art from Martin Chuzzlewit through Little Dorrit are also reflected in the illustrations; perhaps the two most important are Dickens' growing concern with thematic unity and his increasing emphasis upon setting and environment as crucial and active factors in the world of his novels. Thus, Dickens consciously attempted to organize Martin Chuzzlewit around the theme of selfishness and Dombey and Son around that of pride, while David Copperfield sets out to explore the problem of maturity, particularly in love and marriage. But the growing emphasis on external environment is closely related to the problem of thematic unity, as we can see from the use of the railroad and the sea in Dombey and Son, court, slum, fog, and disease in Bleak House, and the prison in Little Dorrit. In the illustrations, two general developments are notable: the heavy use of what I shall call contextual allegorical details in the three novels of Dickens' middle period, and the large number of “dark” plates in Bleak House and Little Dorrit. I use the term “contextual allegorical details” to distinguish a particular kind of detail from the purely allegorical kind that foreshadows or summarizes a novel's themes. Butt and Tillotson have shown convincingly how the engraved wrappers to the original monthly parts of Dombey and Dorrit embody details suggesting the main themes, and thus provide evidence of Dickens' care in planning and organization; Robert L. Patten has suggested, somewhat more speculatively, that various allegorical details in the frontispiece to The Pickwick Papers sum up that novel's “aesthetic.”¹⁸ The details I am concerned with differ from these in that they provide a commentary on the particular events depicted in individual illustrations; in general, they are details in the setting, such as paintings, sculpture, posters or book-titles. I have retained the word “allegorical” to describe them because the commentary they provide is oblique, does not derive from any object directly pertaining to characters or plot; I call them “contextual” because they comment most directly on the immediate context of the passages the illustrations correspond to. The distribution of such details in the various novels is quite remarkable: I have found one plate with this kind of detail in The Pickwick Papers, one clear instance and two possible ones in Nicholas Nickleby, three in The Old Curiosity Shop and one in Barnaby Rudge, while I count nine in Martin Chuzzlewit, eleven in Dombey and Son, and eighteen in David Copperfield (these counts exclude allegorical frontispieces and wrappers, as well as a few doubtful cases in each of these last three novels); there are six (plus one doubtful) in Bleak House, and only three in Little Dorrit. Since a few cases are disputable, this count cannot be considered absolute, but it is the relative distribution in the various novels of different periods that I am most concerned with.

Such details range in kind from the posters behind Mark Tapley (Martin Chuzzlewit) as he takes leave of the Blue Dragon to seek a place where he may be jolly with credit—they read, “Last [Ap]pearance,” “Every Man [in his] Humour,” and “Lost, Stolen, Strayed, Reward”—to the statuette of Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia at the foot of the stairs on which Florence Dombey encounters Edith shortly before Florence is struck by her father (Dombey), and the picture of Gretchen and Faust in the scene in which Miss Mowcher quizzes David about Emily while dressing Steerforth's hair (Copperfield—there are two other significant paintings on the walls in this plate). In most cases it is impossible to be certain whether the details are of Dickens' or Browne's invention, but three different kinds of evidence suggest that they may frequently, if not always, be the artist's. First of all, the technique itself is not original with Browne, but is a standard practice of earlier English graphic artists. Hogarth's engravings abound with inscriptions and symbols that support his satirical point, but closer to Browne's practice is the use of such details by Gillray in some of his non-topical prints. For example, in the pair of etchings, “Harmony before Matrimony” and “Matrimonial-Harmonics” (1805), there are many such details: in the first of the pair there is a painting on the wall of Cupid discharging a cannon at a pair of lovebirds, while in the second, a real pair of caged lovebirds quarrel, and Cupid appears sleeping in a bas-relief whose motto is “Requiescat in Pace.” The device also occurred in Victorian narrative paintings, such as Augustus Egg's “Past and Present: III.”¹⁹ The fact of an artistic tradition of contextual allegorical details would lead one to think that it is the artist's, rather than the author's idea to introduce them into Dickens' novels; Browne's occasional use of such details in his work for other novelists (a point I shall return to later) would seem to strengthen this line of reasoning. Furthermore, the one instance in The Pickwick Papers occurs only in the 1838 etching for Plate 12 (“Mrs. Bardell faints in Mr. Pickwick's arms”—the detail is a painting of Cupid aiming an arrow at a reclining woman) and not in the previous edition,²⁰ and it is extremely unlikely that Dickens gave Browne instructions for any of these redone plates, since the novelist was busily engaged on both Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby during 1838. Finally, Dickens' instructions for [two plates] of Martin Chuzzlewit indicate clearly that Browne invented the contextual allegorical details in those two etchings. The first of these plates, in which Pecksniff is floored by old Martin, shows two books with titles in evidence—Tartuffe and Paradise Lost; the second, showing Charity Pecksniff in a swoon at the news that she has been jilted, contains a picture of a fisherman whose line has been broken by a fish, with the caption, “GONE!” and another of Aesop's dog about to lose his bone out of envy of his reflection (a comment upon Charity's envy of her sister). Dickens' directions for these plates specify the placement of furniture and characters, the characters' expressions, and so on, but there is no mention of the book titles or the paintings. In view of these clear cases of the details being Browne's contributions, and in the absence of a single case surviving of Dickens instructing Browne to include details of this kind in other illustrations, the inference is reasonable that Browne usually invented them himself.

The concentration of such details in the novels of Dickens' middle period suggests that Browne was responding to Dickens' attempt to create a unified moral framework in each of these novels; the heavy moralizing of the details in the illustrations appears to mirror Dickens' new intentions. But another new tendency of the novels, that of emphasizing setting and physical environment, may also be reflected in these graphic details. Dorothy Van Ghent has pointed out that Martin Chuzzlewit represents a new departure in the extent to which Dickens endows the non-human world with life and meaning;²¹ the description of the wind in Chapter II and the long passage on Todgers's in Chapter IX are but two examples. In Dombey and Son the emphasis on physical environment is heavy, and I have already mentioned the central symbols of railroad and sea. In David Copperfield there is the storm that unites Steerforth and Ham in death, and the novel is full of a kind of allegorization or vivification of environment that derives from the child's point of view—Mr. Murdstone's dog as a symbolic equivalent of its owner, Jane Murdstone's bracelet of “fetters” as an extension of her personality. As Dickens endows the external world with significance, so Browne's contextual allegorical details suggest that there are meanings in ostensibly indifferent, usually inanimate objects.

But it is in Bleak House that Dickens may be said to give the heaviest weight of moral significance to external surroundings. As independent, threatening entities, the Court of Chancery, the fog and mud which are its emblems, and the slum, Tom-all-Alone's, have virtually the status of characters. In this novel more than in any of those preceding, the external world, social conditions, and institutions are presented as forces actively hostile to individual human beings. And yet there are no more than seven instances of allegorical details in the illustrations, compared with eighteen in David Copperfield (though there is one in the text—the Roman on the ceiling of Tulkinghorn's room that points at him in his death); as indicators of Dickens' anthropomorphic vision of the external world such details give way to a new element, the “dark” plate (an etching whose background is mechanically ruled to give various shades of dark tint before the subject is bitten in). Dombey and Son and David Copperfield each have one such etching, but Bleak House has ten, and though their darkness reflects the dominant tone of the novel, another aspect is equally important. Of the four dark plates having to do with Lady Dedlock's flight and death, two, “The Lonely Figure,” and “The Night,” each have a single, barely discernible human figure; a third, “The Morning” shows Lady Dedlock's corpse virtually dwarfed by the massive gate of the public cemetery upon whose steps she is stretched; of this series, only “Shadow” has a bright and clear human figure as its central focus (it is also the only dark plate in Dickens' novels that also has contextual allegorical details). The remaining six dark plates are remarkable for the absence of any human figure whatever. Except for a few woodcuts by Cattermole in the two novels included in Master Humphrey's Clock, apparently intended to display the artist's skill in drawing buildings, this is wholly unprecedented in Dickens illustrations, and it can be seen as yet a further break with the tradition of English caricature. That the lack of human figures is not a necessary consequence of the “dark” technique can easily be seen from the numerous plates in Browne's work for other novelists, for example Ainsworth's Crichton (1853), Lever's Roland Cashel (1851), or Augustus Mayhew's Paved with Gold (1858), in which this technique is used, but human figures are treated much as usual.

There seems to be a clear connection between these plates and Dickens' central emphasis in Bleak House upon non-human or institutional forces. Scenery, weather, and especially buildings figure as importantly in the dark plates as do Chancery, fog, dirt and disease in Dickens' text. The main subjects were most probably given by Dickens,²² but we cannot be sure whether the de-emphasizing of human figures was Dickens' idea or Browne's. Some earlier commentators have remarked unfavorably upon the dark plates, suggesting that although they mirror the darkness of the novel, Browne (and implicitly, Dickens) was better off dealing with lighter material;²³ one no longer has to defend the later, darker Dickens, but I would suggest that the illustrations, too, represent an important break with the past. This can best be demonstrated from an etching which is one of Browne's masterpieces, “Tom all alone's” (sic). Although we lack Dickens' instructions for this plate, there is evidence that it owes much to the author, and to his knowledge of a particular engraving of Hogarth's. Comparing Hogarth's “Gin Lane” to Cruikshank's temperance works, Dickens had suggested its relevance for his own time; the engraving emphasizes the causes of drunkenness and crime in the way it “forces on the attention of the spectator a most neglected, wretched neighborhood … an unwholesome, indecent, abject condition of life.” He quotes Lamb to the effect that “The very houses seem absolutely reeling,” but comments that this as much implies the “prominent causes of intoxication among the neglected orders of society, as any of its effects.” About the church whose steeple is seen in the distance, Dickens comments that it “is very prominent and handsome, but coldly surveys these things, in progress underneath the shadow of its tower … and is passive in the picture. We take all this to have a meaning, and to the best of our knowledge it has not grown obsolete in a century.”²⁴

This was in 1848. Some three years later, in a speech to the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, Dickens spoke of the certainty “that the air from Gin Lane will be carried, when the wind is Easterly, into May Fair,”²⁵ which recalls that the theme of the inevitable infection of all classes of society consequent upon the neglect of the lowest is central to Bleak House, which he was to begin a month later. When we look at Browne's version of the slum, the connection with Hogarth's engraving seems undeniable. Here too, but more prominently, we have a church tower passively overlooking a scene of degradation; here too, the buildings are in danger of collapsing and are held up by wooden supports. But the differences are as significant as the similarities. Whereas in Hogarth's picture human beings are central, in “Tom all alone's” they are absent; while Hogarth's composition gives a sense of chaos, Browne (or Dickens?) has chosen to make the composition as symmetrical as possible, so that the contrast between the visual repose afforded by the wooden supports in the center of the picture, and what we know to be their function, is full of irony and tension. But most startlingly of all, Browne has framed the upper edge of the picture with a horizontal brace between two houses in such a way that the very sky seems to be held up by this untrustworthy support, a brilliant way of underlining the connection between the condition of Tom-all-Alone's and that of the rest of society. If one may say that this etching represents a refinement upon an earlier tradition, it is equally true that Browne goes far beyond what Leech, the most refined caricaturist of his age, could achieve in subtlety and profundity. Just as Dickens in his later works goes far beyond the “gentler kind of humor” he “substituted for the coarse directness of his predecessors” in Pickwick,²⁶ so Browne, inspired by Dickens, introduces a new kind of power into the art of illustration.

Little Dorritt's opening passages, with their “staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets,” promise a continuing emphasis on the world as dehumanized—in the prison, the Circumolcution Office, the Merdle business world. There are eight dark plates, and though none is devoid of human figures, several extend the peculiar emphasis of the Bleak House etchings. In “The Birds in a Cage,” Rigaud and Cavaletto are subordinated to the overall impression of an airless, lightless prison cell, surely a visual foreshadowing of the centrality of prisons in the novel. Equally suggestive of the insignificance of human beings in the face of institutions is “Little Dorrit's Party,” in which Amy Dorrit and Maggie are only a small spot of light in the lower left-hand corner, the picture being dominated by the funereal prison, street and church; it is clear that this effect depends largely on the dark-plate technique. Of the other dark plates in Little Dorrit, [one] shows Arthur Clennam entering his father's business-room, and his figure is almost obliterated by the machine-ruling on one of the duplicate plates of this etching, less so on the other;²⁷ “Making Off” shows the “black speck” (as the text calls him) Cavaletto, running along a road dwarfed by the leafless trees; “The Ferry” is not really dark, and thus not in keeping with the somberness of the others; [the plate] showing Flora and Mrs. F.'s aunt rising from the top of the stairs into Doyce and Clennam's workshop, makes the machinery rather awesome by means of the engraved tint; “Floating Away,” again subordinates the human figure to natural surroundings; and finally, “Damocles” rather recalls “Tom all alone's,” for it shows the small figure of Rigaud-Blandois, sitting in the window of Mrs. Clennam's house, just before it is about to collapse—here again, the dark-plate technique helps give the building a sinister quality.

What is perhaps the most remarkable instance of illustrations reflecting the main themes of Little Dorrit is to be found in the title-page vignette and frontispiece, which are not dark plates, and which face one another in the final monthly part, and in subsequent bound editions. The frontispiece shows Amy and her sister Fanny entering Mr. Merdle's house; the vignette shows Amy entering the prison, and although her figure in the frontispiece is slightly larger, otherwise the two look like mirror images of one another. Surely one may see here a graphic representation of the parallel between the prison world and the great social and business world outside. Whether Dickens specified this effect to Browne we do not know, but that he was conscious of some kind of effect is indicated by his writing to Browne that the two etchings make “a handsome opening to the book.”²⁸

Browne's illustrations to Dickens' novels, then, like the novels' texts themselves, display a development from an essentially caricatural style to a more complex and realistic one, as well as a gradual development of techniques for expressing a sweeping vision of the dehumanization of man's world. And although some of the same stylistic developments can be traced in Browne's illustrations for such minor novelists as Lever and Ainsworth, this does not lessen their significance for our understanding of Dickens' works. For although there is as much difference between the characters in the illustrations to Lever's early Harry Lorrequer (1839) and those in The Dodd Family Abroad (1854), as there is between those in the early Nicholas Nickleby and the later Little Dorrit, this development does not have any parallels in Lever's works. Moreover, although the dark plate becomes ubiquitous in Browne's work from the late 1840's up to about 1860, it is frequently used mechanically and to no particular purpose (Lever's Roland Cashel is a particularly blatant example), and there is no group of dark plates that is so rigorously dehumanized as those in Bleak House. And finally, although contextual allegorical details occur in Browne's illustrations to other novelists, nowhere are they so heavily concentrated as in the novels of Dickens' middle period. One may reasonably infer that Browne was influenced most strongly by the greatest, and certainly the most demanding of his employers, but whatever the facts of influence it seems clear that we have in Dickens' novels the most perfect example of the integrity of illustrations and text—in matters of broad artistic vision as well as in specific details—short of those cases, such as Blake, Thackeray or Edward Lear, where the author and artist are one and the same.

Notes

1. “Leech's ‘The Rising Generation’” (Examiner, Dec. 30, 1848), Miscellaneous Papers, I, Gadshill edition, XXXV, p. 148.

2. Quoted by Thomas Wright, History of Caricature and the Grotesque in Literature and Art (1865; New York, 1968), p. 435.

3. Ibid., Introduction, p. xlvi.

4. “The Drunkard's Children” (Examiner, July 8, 1848), Gadshill edition, XXXV, pp. 113-17.

5. The relation between particular illustrations and passages or general themes has been demonstrated by John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson in Dickens at Work (London, 1957), pp. 92-6, 224-5; Joan Stevens, “‘Woodcuts Dropped into the Text’: The Illustrations in The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge,” Studies in Bibliography, XX (1967), 113-34; Robert L. Patten, review of the Clarendon edition of Oliver Twist, Dickens Studies, III (1967), 165, and “The Art of Pickwick's Interpolated Tales,” ELH, XXXIV (1967), 349-66; Michael Steig, “Phiz's Marchioness,” Dickens Studies, II (1966), 141-6, and “The Iconography of the Hidden Face in Bleak House,” Dickens Studies, IV (1968), 19-22.

6. W. J. Fitzpatrick, The Life of Charles Lever (London, 1879), II, p. 51n.

7. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, Everyman's ed., II, p. 29.

8. Forster, II, pp. 22-34, cites letters from Dickens in which directions for illustrations in Dombey and Son, parts 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 16 (Forster says the “fifteenth,” p. 34, but the subjects described appear in Part 16) are either given or referred to; David Croal Thomson quotes directions for the fourth and seventh parts, in Life and Labours of Hablôt Knight Browne, “Phiz” (London, 1884), pp. 63-4, 68-9.

9. A letter to the publisher, Evans, 10 July 1849, says “I send you … 9 slips of copy, containing Mr. Browne's second subject” (for Copperfield, Part 4), Letters, Nonesuch ed., II, p. 17; Browne's son Edgar printed for the first time a letter from Dickens to the illustrator that includes the words, “I send the subjects for the next number,” and “I am now ready with all four subjects for the concluding double number”—the date is 29 June 1853, and the novel must be Bleak House—see Edgar Browne, Phiz and Dickens (London, 1913), p. 292; finally, David Croal Thomson cites two letters regarding Little Dorrit, in both of which it is clear that Dickens has specified the subjects of illustrations—Life and Labours, pp. 141-2.

10. Butt and Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London, 1957), p. 19.

11. Thomson, Life and Labours, pp. 63-4.

12. The manuscript is undated, as are the others preserved with it in the Huntington, containing Dickens' directions for Plates 37, 38 and 40, as well as Plate 18. Only the latter has been published, with a note by John Butt, in REL, II, iii (1961), pp. 49-50, but all will appear in Volume III or IV of the Pilgrim Edition of Dickens' letters.

13. “Charles Dickens and His Illustrators,” Nonesuch Dickensiana (Bloomsbury, 1937), pp. 33-4.

14. My text here and throughout is that of the New Oxford Illustrated Dickens.

15. Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre (Oxford. 1965), pp. 63-9.

16. Cf. Lee Byron Jennings, The Ludicrous Demon (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963), Chapter I, passim.

17. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” Collected Papers (New York, 1959), IV, p. 405; Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (Bloomington, Indiana, 1963), p. 184.

18. For the references, see note 5, above.

19. See Raymond Lister, Victorian Narrative Paintings (London, 1966), pp. 58-9.

20. The variant plates are reproduced in Albert Johannsen, Phiz Illustrations from the Novels of Charles Dickens (Chicago, 1956), pp. 24-5.

21. “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers's,” Sewanee Review, LVIII (1950), 419-38.

22. We know from the letter of 29 June 1853 (see note 9, above) that Dickens specified the subjects for at least four of the dark plates, those in Parts 18, 19 and 20 (“The Night,” “The Morning,” “The Mausoleum at Chesney Wold,” and “Frontispiece,” Numbers 35, 36, 38 and 39, respectively).

23. Arthur Waugh in Nonesuch Dickensiana, pp. 41-2; Johannsen, Phiz Illustrations, p. 412.

24. “The Drunkard's Children,” Gadshill edition, XXXV, p. 115.

25. Speech of 5 October 1851, in K. J. Fielding, The Speeches of Charles Dickens (Oxford, 1960), p. 128.

26. Steven Marcus, Dickens from Pickwick to Dombey (London, 1965), p. 23.

27. Johannsen, Phiz Illustrations, pp. 421-3.

28. Letters, Nonesuch edition, II, p. 814 (undated).