SOURCE: Paulson, Ronald. “The Tradition of Comic Illustration from Hogarth to Cruikshank.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 35, nos. 1-2 (1973): 35-60.

[In the following essay, Paulson describes the influence of Hogarth and Rowlandson on Victorian illustration. Paulson suggests that in some cases literary illustration stands as a text of its own, while in other cases illustrations function as a kind of commentary or interpretation of the verbal text.]

I

Sophisticated analysis of book illustration is a recent development, with most attention going to a few special cases like Blake's dynamic marriage of illustration and text in his printed works.¹ Another special case, which is my starting point in this essay, is the illustrations for Dickens' novels. Essays by Michael Steig, Robert L. Pattern, and others have shown that subtle textual interpretations are contained therein and that the same sort of analysis that is brought to bear on Dickens' text can be utilized on the illustrations of Cruikshank and Phiz.² These essays acknowledge the source of graphic “readability” to be William Hogarth but do not go into the question of why he is, as they claim, the “true father of English book illustration.”³ The question of this tradition has become an issue in the light of two recent essays.

John Harvey's Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators⁴ shows beyond any doubt the heavy weight of Hogarth on the Victorian illustrators and above all on Dickens himself. Harvey's central insight about the tradition is that it starts from Hogarth's large independent plates, the “modern moral subjects,” rather than from his book illustrations, and continues through the satiric prints of Rowlandson, Gillray, and Cruikshank, who returned the independent satiric plate to its text in book illustration but with the addition of all the experience accumulated between Hogarth and Gillray.

The second major contribution to the problem of tradition is J. Hillis Miller's “The Fiction of Realism: Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and Cruikshank's Illustrations,”⁵ which goes straight to the heart of the matter and asks first about the author and then about the illustrator: what is the “reality” he imitates? To what extent does a given illustrator imitate a literary text (or an author's hidden intentions), the external world, a tradition of graphic representation, or the artist's own earlier work or private sensibility? Is the distortion that separates this representation from ordinary reality in the figure of Mr. Pickwick or Sarah Gamp the author's or the illustrator's own? Or is it determined by the tradition of representation (whose influence Gombrich has discussed at great length),⁶ which would include by the time of Phiz's illustrations the work of Cruikshank too as well as Hogarth-Rowlandson-Gillray, and later (with Mrs. Gamp) also the work of Daumier?

Miller insists that these are not merely sources but in every case part of the meaning itself. A Phiz illustration is about all of those imitated objects from a Dickens-written scene to a particular kind of figure or sense of space propagated by the graphic tradition of Hogarth. The interdependence of meaning becomes the important issue; for reference moves as well from the text to the illustration as from the illustration to the text. In the case of Dickens at any rate, “Illustrations establish a relation between elements within the work which shortcircuits the apparent reference of the literary text to some real world outside.”⁷ Knowing that an illustration will accompany the text, the author allows his words themselves to bear a certain incompleteness.

Although Miller asked the crucial question for any future study of illustration, he did not attempt to characterize precisely the tradition of illustration which was one source of the imitation—either as to kinds of representation or as to the sort of text-illustration symbiosis he describes. Without knowledge of this tradition it is difficult to say just what part is played by the convention and what by the artist's own sensibility. For example, the spectator outside the central action of many Cruikshank illustrations, connected by Miller with Baudelaire's theory of comedy, is a figure with a long history in the traditions of both illustration and graphic satire.

The present essay will try to clarify the larger issues concerning comic illustration from Hogarth to Cruikshank by answering these questions: what do we mean by illustration, and what are the various possibilities of the relationship between illustration and text (and especially those that led to the situation Miller describes in Dickens)? What do we mean by comic illustration? And how is this different from the moral or satiric tradition of graphic art upon which Harvey places his emphasis?

II

First, let us examine the larger implications of illustration in eighteenth-century England. In Renaissance art as in book illustration the imitated was essentially a written text (assisted of course by objects in the external world, the art tradition of representation, and the artist's own sensibility). The artist's dropping of—or dispensing with, or dissociation from—the “text” is a major development of post-Renaissance art, a part of the larger transition from fidelity to the imitated text to fidelity to nature and ultimately self-expression. With the illustration-painting, as with book illustration, there were always the alternative possibilities of conveying information, merely providing repose or distraction from the labor of reading, developing some aspect of the meaning that was of significance to the artist or his patron, or showing how this particular painter would illustrate this particular text. But a normative element from the world of imagination rather than the real world always remained: the written text.

Book illustration was one of the ways artists in the eighteenth century made their break from great subject, great style, and great patronage. A Poussin refers to, or imitates, a text of Ovid or Virgil (or a complex composite text), as well as those visual precursors who are themselves illustrators of one of these or some other related text. In the eighteenth century through the agency of book illustration an artist could introduce other, more immediate or contemporary texts; he could shift his attention from Homer, Virgil, or the Bible to Cervantes, Molière, or even Butler, and thence to his real interest, the contemporary scene. And with Cervantes and Butler the artist with satiric inclinations had a text that opened up the possibility of the mock-text, a way of juxtaposing the heroic, the romantic, the plainly fictional with the contemporary commonplace. Illustration is as clear a case as exists of literature influencing art, for as literature broadened and dealt with different and more contemporary subjects, and used new strategies of communication, the artist was drawn to develop, or found a sanction through illustration for developing, the same concerns graphically. Hogarth and his tradition are inconceivable without Don Quixote, Pilgrim's Progress, and the works of Defoe, Butler, Swift, and Gay.

Hogarth's own progress was from the actual text on the opposite page in the illustrated book to the large independent illustration for Don Quixote and Hudibras which assumes the text in the viewer's mind and reminds him via a few lines and references underneath. Then he moved on to the assumed general text, a criminal biography beside the life of a harlot, or beside the life of a rake both spiritual biographies and Hogarth's own progress of a harlot. He might include or imply other kinds of progresses and lives, sometimes using scenes from sources like the Bible or Homer, the paintings of Raphael or Rembrandt, which act as ironic commentaries. Perhaps recalling those imaginary texts projected by Cervantes behind Don Quixote, Hogarth supposed a non-existent history painting prior to his “reproductive engraving,” where there was, in fact, only a small, colorful genre painting or oil sketch. Or rather, as a traditionalist (as expressed in his format of historical engravings), he implied a pseudo-text behind his illustration; but as a revolutionary artist he may be thought of as discarding the text entirely.

Hogarth turned his engraved image into another form, the best model for which is not the illustration but the emblem. He adapted literally the structure of the emblem, in which the visual and verbal are closely related, the meaning (or reading) only emerging through an interplay of the title, the motto, and the visual image; often he added a prose commentary or verbalization of the meaning of all three. If there is a text prior to the emblem, it is known only to the artist, and the reader's duty is to reconstruct it by inference. In other words, the emblem is not merely illustrating a device (motto), a known adage, or an apothegm; it may use one or more of these topoi as its raw material, both visual and verbal, but it does so in order to produce a total image that is more than the sum of its parts, that is independent, problematical, and to be deciphered.

D. C. Allen has pointed out the relation of the Emblemata of Alciati to the Tabula Cebetis, “the prototype of that major Renaissance literary-artistic invention, the emblem.”⁸ Alciati's emblems appear just one generation after the first printing of the Tabula, with its simultaneous description and explanation of the visual symbols. In the emblem each viewer is the equivalent of Cebes, the versifier or commentator on the emblematic image, who educes the meaning from the metonymically or metaphorically-related objects in the picture, silently or not so silently supplying the words; in fact, often talking about them in pairs. This meditation is itself materialized for Hogarth's progresses in later printed commentaries like those of Rouquet, Lichtenberg, Steevens, and the Irelands—in each of which there is so close a cooperation between object and reader that the reality of the object is in the transaction rather than strictly speaking in itself.⁹

In short, what emerges as the Hogarthian “comic history” or “modern moral subject” is not an illustration that completes a text but an image that offers a visual substitute, with its own more or less materialized implied verbal text. The one interprets a text, the other projects its own text. This is not to deny that there is, inevitably, something of a prefigured text as complicated in its way, only more fragmented, than the “Virgil” imitated by Poussin. The mock-heroic painting, for example, may presuppose scenes and figures in the Aeneid juxtaposed with known contemporaries like Thomas Shadwell and their known plays or poems. In A Harlot's Progress the ratio of contemporary reference (Mother Needham, Colonel Charteris, his rape trial of 1730, and other facts of that year) to the heroic past (allusion via composition to a Biblical prototype) is relatively high, which explains Hogarth's heavy reliance on various reading structures—objects of a high denotation, parallels and contrasts between these or between known and unknown figures—in order to make the third element, his own invented text about the life of a harlot in London. When the emphasis falls decidedly on the contemporary prefigurations, it is only a short way to the political satire of Gillray in which current events are seasoned with classical or Biblical myth. Among other differences from ordinary illustrations, the ingredients of the prefiguration—the myths along with the particular people like Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox—are being satirized, and the projected text produced by the “reader” is Gillray's own satiric statement about them.

III

By the “comic” tradition of illustration, in the largest sense of the term, we do not mean “what makes you laugh,” for much of the illustration of comic writing (for example, Cervantes and Molière) was not in itself comic; it merely represented the action described in a comic text. This sense of “comic” is a concern with the low or commonplace, the unheroic or untragic, and ushers in the main concerns of progressive painting in the eighteenth century. But what then is a comic illustration? Obviously it must be amusing either in itself, in its own terms, or in combination with the text.

The Hogarth small illustrations made for Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1726) will serve as an introductory example: they were simply copied from an earlier set (1710) but transformed by Hogarth into comic illustrations. The Hudibras of the 1710 edition is a deformed little old man going through the paces indicated by Butler in his verses; Hogarth, by his play with gesture and facial expression, his grotesque exaggeration and his wavering line, turns him into a creature who is funny-looking.

But a second person is necessary, for although comic illustration, throughout the century, will be largely indicated through grotesque exaggeration alone, something happens when a contrasting figure is added. In Hudibras' encounter with the lawyer, Hogarth changes the latter from a perfectly normal person (in the 1710 plates) into one as corrupt in a bored way as Hudibras. Two kinds of distortion are related. On the other hand, in “Hudibras wooing the widow” the second figure is normative or, perhaps better, a detached observer to Hudibras' deeply involved (passionate, hypocritical, foolish) action. Hudibras' gesture of wooing is expressively comic in itself; but to be understood it needs the patient widow to whom it is made.

One book above all others, Don Quixote, served as a vehicle for the development of comic illustration. The illustrator could, to begin with, introduce the contemporary English settings he really wished to represent and the humble events of everyday life; while dealing with a knight in appearance, he could portray a poor old fool in reality amid inns and sheep and windmills. What Don Quixote embodied was the essence of comic structure, the incongruous. It was constructed on a combined intellectual and formal incongruity, which was to structure much of eighteenth-century comic writing and art, setting both Hogarth and Fielding on their respective ways. This was an incongruity between the aspiration or illusion of a Don Quixote and the reality of his surroundings, between the image of a knight-errant and his heroic steed and the tall, bony, decrepit old shapes of both Quixote and Rosinante; and in formal terms between these lanky shapes and the short, earthy, well-fed shape of Sancho.

In the 1720s both Hogarth and John Vanderbank made illustrations for the Spanish-language edition of Don Quixote sponsored by Lord Carteret, an ambitious piece of book-printing that was trying to live up to parallel editions of Racine and Tasso and emphasize Cervantes' status as classic rather than comic author.¹⁰ Vanderbank, whose obsession with the subject led him to continue painting scenes from Don Quixote for the rest of his life, used Cervantes as a way of delineating the congenial subjects denied him by the decorum of history painting. He substitutes an English for a Spanish milieu, but the only comic shape allowed is the figure of Sancho. Both he and Hogarth juxtapose Quixote and Sancho not as comic extremes but as ideal and real; Quixote wears a dignity quite at odds with the reality around him.

Hogarth's images are far more elevated than his small Hudibras plates, in which cheap printing and a popular audience allowed him a freer rein. “The Adventure of Mambrino's Helmet” contrasts the heroic figures of Quixote and Rosinante (a surprisingly well-formed horse) and those of the shaggy donkey and cringing barber, and the effect is pathetic rather than comic. However, Hogarth also introduces a larger contrast between the encounter itself and, at a great distance, the round figure of Sancho on his roundish mule merely watching, quiet observers from another world. Hogarth has not only made the point nicely but suggested something of the difference in shape as well as distance and attitude. One possible element of a comic incongruity then would seem to be an audience or observer of some sort who is set off against the adventure in which the comic hero is caught up. As Miller has put it, referring to Cruikshank's illustrations, the realm of time and memory is contrasted with that of the immediate chaotic moment.¹¹

Only in “The Curate and Barber disguising Themselves” (a scene which Vanderbank did not choose to illustrate) did Hogarth find a more congenial subject. The costuming of these unprepossessing figures, and the comedy of juxtaposed objects in the antlers above the inn door, the chamber pot on a shelf, the coat of arms, and the mirror in which the barber regards himself, broach one of Hogarth's own central themes. Decorum seems to have limited the extensive use of such detail to large independent plates like those by C.-A. Coypel imported from France (1724), and Hogarth made only one such independent illustration for Quixote, which follows the interest of the “Curate and Barber.” However, as if unwilling to sully the Don's dignity, he chose a scene involving Sancho's delusion. Here a group of genuinely outlandish characters are participating in a scene of plainly unheroic action. The regally-placed Sancho, who cannot however hide his Sancho-ness, amid regal food and service, in what is clearly a palace, is nevertheless starving. The court physician stays his eager hand from lifting a single morsel to his mouth, the waiters withdraw the plates, and one courtier uses the tablecloth (which is supposed to hold food) to stifle an irreverent laugh. Sancho, who is himself playing a king, is in the midst, unknown to himself, of play-acting. As a witness to the whole charade, a fat woman laughs outright. If Hogarth had continued a set of illustrations on this scale, we can be sure he would have included “Don Quixote and the Puppet Show”; he alludes more than once to Coypel's illustration of the scene, taking from it the figure of the amused bystander to madness.¹² Such scenes carried the authority of Coypel's popular series, but the difference is instructive. Coypel's plates are expressive too, showing a wide variety of comic response, but within the conventions of French art, which means of a fairly rigid decorum. The figures are only as expressive, we might say, as comic actors on a stage; whereas Hogarth's figures exist in a purely graphic realm of the grotesquely comic.

The next stage of development can be seen in Francis Hayman's illustrations for the Smollett translation of 1755.¹³ Taking Chapter 16, concerning the adventures in the inn, Hogarth had illustrated the scene of the wounded Quixote being covered with poultices by Maritornes and the innkeeper's wife while Sancho watches. The comedy, such as it is, rests in the almost unpleasantly deformed figures working on Quixote, and perhaps also in the juxtaposition to Sancho's quiet observation, which seems to be Hogarth's version of the Quixotic situation. Hayman, however, has taken the later scene in which Sancho finds Maritornes, who is fleeing from Quixote's deluded embraces, in his bed. “There was the mule driver [Maritornes' jealous lover] pounding Sancho, Sancho and the wench flaying each other, and the landlord drubbing the girl; and they all laid on most vigorously, without allowing themselves a moment's rest.”¹⁴ Hayman has chosen to portray slapstick action, which allows for violent movement, exaggerated postures, and facial distortion that goes beyond a scene of stasis or more formal activity. But it is also noteworthy that he has chosen the moment just prior to the passage quoted: the innkeeper is not yet quite involved in the struggle but only an interested bystander, holding up his candle to observe the combatants. (His figure is complemented by the completely detached figure of the sleeping man on a nearby bed.) Hayman initiates the tradition of comic illustration that goes straight to Rowlandson, who in fact copied his illustration. Rowlandson has merely simplified (by omitting the sleeper) and exaggerated the violence and put the bed covers over Maritornes in order to make explicit the fact that her place of concealment was in bed with Sancho. This is as much a part of his personal subject matter as the costuming was of Hogarth's.

Hayman as well as Hogarth avoids the central scene of the chapter, in which Quixote himself wrestles with Maritornes, thinking she is Dulcinea (to which the struggle with Sancho is only a postscript).¹⁵ This scene involves a psychological comedy which Hayman is quite incapable of transmitting, but it is the one that Hogarth develops in his large Hudibras plates, where he has a less high-minded hero to deal with. Hudibras allows him to develop not only the formal contrasts that Cervantes set in motion but also the intellectual and moral ones, which grow into the allusive structures concerning the wit of mingled objects and milieu that lead to the “comic history paintings,” and explore comic possibilities far beyond anything in the tradition of comic illustration per se. The play begins with the contrasting shapes of Hudibras and his squire Ralpho but goes off into the juxtaposition of different kinds of reality, different sources of imitation, different texts and interpretations of the text (or of individual words). The plates are all drawn and composed in a heroic style which is a graphic equivalent to the Quixotic situation and the “Hudibrastic” style of Butler's poem. The exaggeratedly baroque and baroque-classical compositions act as reflections of Hudibras' heroic interpretation of what is in fact commonplace; if Hogarth had chosen to illustrate in the same way the scene in which Quixote embraces Maritornes while thinking she is Dulcinea, he would presumably have conveyed the psychological comedy by embodying the scene in the style of the Carracci. From the emblematic title page onward, he introduces us into a world of illusion and fantasy which is the context or medium of Hudibras' crazy actions. Far beyond the comic situation, this is an exploration of moral illusion and reality. In a way the whole world of the Civil War is an unheroic one seen here in both its gross reality and the illusions of heroism projected by the combatants and those who remembered and sentimentalized it. Hogarth's plates, like the poem they illustrated, were about a specific political situation whose repercussions were still felt in the England of the mid-1720s; and this is one reason the series was to be of particular importance to Gillray when he created his mock-histories, mythologies, and fantasies of the age of the younger Pitt.

These large independent plates also contribute the complex sense, which Hogarth of all his contemporaries grasped best, of a page of engraving versus a page of type and the intricate relationship of words and images, of verbal and visual structures. Each plate is his reconstitution of the poem itself in his own visual terms. In “Hudibras sallying forth,” the overtones are of a heroic progress, with the knights dominating the picture space, haughtily posing in the middle of a balanced heroic composition (the house to the right was in fact added late to emphasize the balance); and these are contrasted with the grotesque shapes of the quixotic pair. The idea of an admiring crowd has been reduced to a pair of rustics and a dog who respond in their different ways to the heroic progress. Hogarth is literally illustrating only the lines (which he prints beneath his plate) “Then did Sir Knight abandon Dwelling, / And out he rode a Colonelling” (I.1.13-14) and the following lines which describe Hudibras and Ralpho, but he includes the general lines (I.1.1-2 and 9-12), which set the scene for the satire, and illustrates them too in his own characteristic way. “When civil Dudgeon first grew high, / And Men fell out they knew not why” (I.1.1-2) refers in Butler's poem to upheavals both physical and political, to the King and Parliament, the High Church Anglicans and Puritans, and so forth. But Hogarth transforms “high” into the size and position of the two figures, Hudibras and Ralpho, in relation to the rustic spectators, and “Men fell out they knew not why” is dramatized in the literally falling fruit baskets and the figurative falling out between the two rustics. The latter is a result of the farmer's awe of the heroes; he backs into his wife's table, spilling the produce, for which she blames him; and so indeed he will never “know why” they began their quarrel. In a domestic metaphor Hogarth projects a small tableau of the country, its produce, its simple tenants, and its civil war, caused in fact by the grandiloquent gestures of heroic fools.¹⁶

The next two lines—“When Gospel-Trumpeter, surrounded / With long-ear'd Rout, to Battel sounded”—refer of course to the Puritan soldiers (the “Roundheads”) and their habit of cutting their hair short, and imply an accompanying bestiality: they are a pack of curs. Hogarth reduces the “Gospel Trumpeter” and the “long-ear'd rout” to a barking dog with extra-long ears, who is trying to “rout” or re-rout the two knights rather than herald or support their advance. “And Pulpit Drum Ecclesiastick, / Was beat with Fist, instead of a Stick” are Butler's own translation of the ecclesiastical podium of the Puritans into a military drum, on which the preacher beats a call to arms. This Hogarth translates into the rustic's liquor keg, suggesting that ecclesiastical words are the ranting of drunkards, the pulpit an intoxicating place, and so on.

The lines are reprinted to allow a comparison between verbal and visual texts, in effect to serve as part of an emblematic riddle to be solved by the reader. The viewer, with Butler's text in mind, goes from the lines quoted to the visualization, each stage producing an incongruity or metamorphosis which should amuse as Hogarth reveals his own interpretation of Butler's words. In linguistic terms, the text begins as signifier to Hogarth's illustration as signified, but Hogarth's transformation is so thorough that another text is projected forward which is read emblematically out of the constituents of Butler's text, Hogarth's quotation, title (motto), and image—which is now the signifier to a signified put together by the viewer.

The next stage of dissociation of illustration from text is Hogarth's The Punishment inflicted on Lemuel Gulliver (1726). This is a purely imaginary projection from Swift's text; the scene portrayed appears nowhere in the book, and yet it is true to the spirit of the satire, in fact translating what Swift says by indirection and understatement into an emblematic image of Gulliver's subservient “liberty”-loving folly in a country run by Hanoverian and Walpolian pygmies in the year 1726. The Punishment inflicted on Lemuel Gulliver represents the sort of relationship between a text and a visual image that informs much of Gillray's work: he takes a well-known literary source and interprets it in terms of an immediate political situation.

IV

These examples represent Hogarth's greatest contribution to the art of comic illustration. Their experiments are reflected in the huge illustrations for the comedies in Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery but had little or no influence on book illustration per se. Books required a small, simple scene that was not so readable as to divert attention from its text.

The development of comic book illustration can be partly at least credited to the St. Martin's Lane group of artists, of whom Hogarth and Hubert Gravelot were the most influential members, who turned to “comic” art in my first sense of a lower, more ordinary and less “literary” or fancy subject and style. These artists used contemporary and non-Biblical or mythological subjects for their wall and stage decorations. Their chief source of income, however, was book illustration and other designs for engraving—and the tastes of booksellers and their middle-class clientele led them to experiment with relatively contemporary subjects.

Gravelot, arriving from France in 1732, brought with him a cultivated sense of the rococo style, which became a trademark of the St. Martin's Lane group and their academy. One form the rococo took for these artists was the fragmentation of an action. Reacting against the elaborate seventeenth-century histories and illustrations which, like a Tabula Cebetis, presented all the events of a story or a chapter in pictorial space (one of Hogarth's own large Hudibras plates might be included), they insisted on a highlight, a fleeting moment, a mere detail picked out of a larger fabric. Diminutive size becomes quite literally part of the “comic,” and development has to be not from the large but from the small Hudibras plates.

The second sense of comic also found nourishment in the rococo style, one aspect of which, accompanying the smaller size, was an emphasis on contrasted shapes, playfully distorted or stylized, expressed in S and C curves. At first embodied in representations of shells, scrolls, and cartouches, these shapes produced a large number of decorative designs that by the mid-1730s were shading off into small “capricci” of grotesque trees, landscapes, and architectural structures. Meissonier and La Joue in France published books of such grotesque designs in 1734 and 1736,¹⁷ and while their main influence was on chapter-heads and -tails, in England their untrammeled grotesque found its way into book illustration.

Hogarth quickly absorbed these ideas and from the late 1730s onward explored the possibilities in contrasting shapes based on serpentine lines versus circles, squares, and other geometrical or “ungraceful” shapes. In his Analysis of Beauty (1753) he sums up the comic experience largely in terms of incongruous shapes given to incongruous representations: “When improper, or incompatible excesses meet, they always excite laughter … the ideas of youth and age [are] jumbled together” to produce such an effect; in all instances, it is the “joining of opposite ideas,” “the Inconsistency and mixture of incompatible matter that causes involuntary laughter.”¹⁸

The rococo interest in formal exaggeration and play was fed by the academic tradition of l'expression des passions. In a way the door was opened for comic illustration by the French academic critics of the seventeenth century when they determined that the expression of the participants was more properly the subject of illustration than a mere imitation of the action. The manuals of expression by Le Brun and others doubtless contributed to the development of comic expression, and in the 1830s Hogarth's greatest popular reputation was for his skill at delineating facial expression. It was for this that the novelists invoked his aid in their comic scenes; and this still applied to Cruikshank, who, contemporaries claimed, was “the most perfect master of individual expression that ever handled a pencil or an etching-needle.”¹⁹ The more extreme examples in Le Brun's spectra of expressions, their extensions into animal heads, the recollection of the “gothic” figures of Bosch and “Rabelais,” and perhaps the imported prints by Teniers and others of animal heads on human bodies, all set the stage for the next development, which was the introduction of caricature.

In the mid-1730s the caricatures of Pier-Leone Ghezzi, the latest fashion from Italy, were introduced to England in Arthur Pond's etchings, and whether one accepts “caricatura” or Hogarth's alternative “character,” the result was a much greater concern with facial expression. Indeed Hogarth is “father” of the tradition less by virtue of his large elaborate plates, in which expression in face and gesture is complemented by the use of objects and elements of milieu, than by virtue of the small designs, beginning with the small Hudibras, and ending with the illustrations for Tristram Shandy.

The first of the Tristram Shandy illustrations (1760) is the characteristic Hogarth comic illustration for the tradition, but it is also unique; it could only have been made by Hogarth and only for Tristram Shandy. To begin, Sterne is quite unillustratable; he writes in such a way as to preclude the possibility of illustration. He is himself constructing an emblem rather than an illustration, an emblem which must be puzzled out and filled in by his “judicious readers.” There is, however, one point in his book where an illustration positively enforces his meaning, and that is where he summons up Hogarth's verbalized theory of the visual in The Analysis of Beauty to convey to his reader how Corporal Trim stands as he reads the “Sermon on Conscience.”

The comedy of the plate probably begins with the fact that it is an illustration by the person whose theory is being verbalized in the text—rather as if Fielding, after writing, “I would attempt to draw [Bridget Allworthy's] picture, but that is done already by a more able master, Mr. Hogarth himself” (in Morning), had then recruited Hogarth to draw Bridget. Hogarth's illustration becomes a commentary on his own writing as well as on Sterne's. Following his own visual forms which he had verbalized in the Analysis, and which Sterne has verbalized in his novel, Hogarth shows the comic grotesque swelling of Dr. Slop, who is all circles; the long S-curves of Trim, which are less a sign of beauty than of support (as Sterne notes, without them he would simply fall on his face); and, contrasted to these shapes, the geometrical forms of the map and the walls of the room, the “transverse zig-zaggery” of the trenches displayed on the map of fortifications (to which he added in a second state the straight lines and circular face of a clock) and the half-circle of the garland over the fireplace. The faces themselves, of Slop, Toby, Walter, and Trim, offer four different shapes of what Hogarth would have called “character.” The drawing is, as it should be, a study in the relationship between different lines and shapes for a comic effect, which also involves the meaningful juxtaposition with a comic text.

Among other things, Hogarth's practice indicates that built into any illustration of a comic text is the slight incongruity which results from going from text to illustration, from verbal to visual version; from comparing your own visualizations with the surprise of the artist's.²⁰ Even plates as unfunny in themselves as many of the Don Quixote illustrations (or as the 1710 plates to Swift's Tale of a Tub or early illustrations to Gulliver's Travels) produce this simple form of comic incongruity. But beyond this, two general truths about the great comic illustrators of the eighteenth century become clear. One is that the illustration almost invariably followed the text in a subsequent edition, and so the effect was a visualization of a known verbal text.²¹ Even the first (though not the second) of Hogarth's illustrations for Tristram Shandy was after the fact, added to the second edition. Sterne and Hogarth were saying in effect: this is how this scene will look illustrated by the great Hogarth. Which brings us to the second point, which is that the tradition that flowered in the Dickens illustrations of Cruikshank was to some extent an emblematic rather than an illustrative one, made up of artists whose greatest work was in independent satiric plates. Part of the effect therefore involved the illustrator's prior reputation as a comic artist. A certain amount of the comic effect depends on the knowledge that this is Hogarth illustrating Sterne, Rowlandson illustrating Smollett, or Cruikshank illustrating Dickens—on the sense of one reality seen by two comic artists. The effect is related to the pleasure of hearing a story by Bernard Malamud read by Zero Mostel.

V

Rowlandson is the one comic illustrator of stature in the graphic tradition between Hogarth and Cruikshank.²² The other great figure, Gillray, was not an illustrator of books. As Harvey has shown, his contribution was strictly through the general tradition of the comic in which Cruikshank was brought up before being subjected to collaboration with an author. We might, simplifying, say that the formal experiments of Hogarth were carried on by Rowlandson while the intellectual ones—the use of allusion, mock-heroic picture frames, animistic surroundings—were carried on by Gillray in his political cartoons. Rowlandson sometimes retained the intellectual tricks, but without much cognitive significance; usually more for their shape than for their refinement of meaning. Though he experimented in his early work with the caricature of Ghezzi and George Townshend, Rowlandson (unlike Gillray) developed his most characteristic figures out of the mode of “character” Hogarth established in the Four Groups of Heads and Simon Lord Lovat.²³

Rowlandson devoted only his left hand to the illustration of other people's texts, and he carries over into his illustration a quite independent comic element of his own, showing how he would illustrate a scene from, say, Joseph Andrews (1805). Take, for example, the scene in which Lady Booby has summoned Joseph to her bed and is trying to seduce him, with Slipslop a Peeping Tom in the doorway. Unlike his other illustrations for Joseph Andrews, this one comes to life, and the reason is that the situation is one Rowlandson has developed independently: a boy and girl having an assignation, with a third party pruriently observing them. The only trouble is that Fielding's text shows an older woman trying to seduce a youth, and Mrs. Slipslop is only eavesdropping. It would not be a Rowlandson scene if Slipslop were not using her eyes. In the hands of Hogarth (or perhaps Gillray) the Biblical parallels Fielding has implied between Joseph and Lady Booby and Joseph and Potiphar's Wife, or the mock-heroic similes surrounding Lady Booby's and Slipslop's passion, would have been conveyed by a picture on the wall or the style of the composition.

In general, Rowlandson simply copies the action the novelist describes, exaggerating where possible the figures and their gestures. When he goes beyond this he projects his own text, creating a kind of Rowlandson mythology concerning old husbands (or teachers or fathers or duennas), young wives (or nieces or charges), and virile young men, with someone watching them (sex enjoyed versus merely looked at or read about).

The Beauties of Sterne (1809) was a collection of the sentimental excerpts from Tristram Shandy and Sentimental Journey. The latter might have seemed a reasonable book for Rowlandson to illustrate, because it adhered to the basic situation of the sentimental observer confronted with a picturesque scene. In Rowlandson's prints and drawings everything from landscape to sex play is watched by an observer of the sort William Gilpin advocated in his studies of the Picturesque.²⁴ These observers, however, have usually been grotesque little Rowlandsonian people, as picturesque as the scene observed. Here the observer is Parson Yorick, whom Rowlandson presents as an idealized, attenuated version of Sterne himself, a frail-looking sentimental figure who is not part of his ordinary repertoire. Some years later he was to develop into the comic figure of Dr. Syntax, but carried more directly into Cruikshank's repertoire he will become the model for the convention of figures like Oliver Twist in a world of Fagins and Bill Sikeses. The scenes, at any rate, call for a rearranging of the usual Rowlandson formula, moving the ideal figures into a position of more prominence than usual.

These designs have for us the further virtue of being invented by another comic artist, Richard Newton, and executed by Rowlandson; which means that Newton interpreted the action and Rowlandson interpreted Newton's sketch. Sterne's text is envisaged in a “comic” way by Newton, and then Newton's idea is transformed by Rowlandson into his own forms and myth.

The typical Newton device seems to be to represent the scene itself, as in “Yorick and the monk at Calais,” and to add a pair of comic porters carrying a trunk in the background. Rowlandson's delineation then puts the sentimental figures of the monk and Yorick into a comic, and so real world, placing and distancing them. Sterne's scene is itself comic, but in a quite different way: the subtle Sternean undercutting of Yorick's sentiment is probably untranslatable. If Hogarth, on the other hand, had illustrated the scene in one of his large plates, he would have filled it with detail, perhaps including the comic porters, which contributes intellectually to the theme of charity or false charity. Newton-Rowlandson merely present two incongruous worlds, and their meaning has to do with the subsuming of the one—it is not very clear which—within the other.

“Yorick and the grisset” is another scene, difficult to convey visually, in which the comedy is psychological. Newton takes the scene at the stage where the grisset's husband has entered, which gives Rowlandson a peculiarly congenial situation to depict: Yorick is still the thin sentimental figure, the milliner is the usual sexy Rowlandson girl, and her husband is the grotesque Rowlandson husband who is always being cuckolded. In the drawing itself the contrast, I suppose, is comic between the grotesque husband and the handsome young couple. However, there is also introduced, with no authority in the text, a fat friar in the distance, out in the street with the traffic, observing this little scene. Once again the scene is made meaningful by the presence of a viewer like us who sets it off as something special from the world of flux in the street.

Rowlandson was, of course, another case of a famous artist who in middle age illustrated novels of half-a-century earlier, already classics in themselves, and the reader is amused to find him developing his own themes in a scene invented by Sterne. His only compromise with an uncongenial text is to restrain his exuberant distortions. But occasionally and perhaps fortuitously illustrator and author meet on the same ground. This happens when he illustrates Smollett. In his drawings for Roderick Random and Humphry Clinker (and the splendid Comforts of Bath, which though independent plates draw on Clinker) his own characteristic shapes, actions, and situations, correspond to those described by his author. (But it is of course possible that he learned his form and content from his own earlier reading of Smollett's novels.)

Rowlandson's illustrations for Smollett raise the question of whether the illustration is imitating what the author sees, what a contemporary familiar with the tradition of comic illustration would see, what Rowlandson himself sees, or what a character immersed in the action would see. In Roderick Random, a first-person narrative, the exaggeration, the Rowlandsonian-Smollettian grotesque, is due to Roderick's point of view: this is the way these people look to him, under the stress of fear, hatred, and revengefulness; and Rowlandson's illustrations (1805), where a thin, nondescript Roderick appears among swaggering, threatening grotesques, reflects the novel's own epistemology.²⁵Gulliver's Travels was an earlier book that might have raised the issue: should the illustrator imitate its deadpan style or its horrible reality? should he show us the action the way Gulliver sees it or Swift? Hogarth's mock illustration for Gulliver avoided the issue by inventing a new fable which rephrased the deep structure of Swift's fable. Characteristically, he ignored the epistemological problem here and exploited it in his independent prints, where a style of representation as well as of furnishings and decoration represents his graphic equivalent of the protagonist's way of looking at his world. But, with Hogarth at least, this is equally the general context of fashionable assumptions about art and morality in which the poor protagonist, seeking an identity, finds himself trapped; and so can be expressed in furnishings.

Harvey is getting at this distinction when he remarks that Gillray produces poetic metaphor, while “the lucid naturalism of Hogarth's manner frustrates metaphor. If Hogarth paints a wooden leg it must look exactly and only like a firm piece of timber,” while Gillray's wooden leg, in John Bull and his Dog Faithful, chewed on by a dog, can resemble a bone.²⁶ One should, however, look at Hogarth's bed curtains turning into a screaming face or horns apparently sprouting from a husband's brows: he is as metaphorical as Gillray but within his naturalistic means. Hogarth's is a kind of higher reality inherent in an ordered universe. The lover sneaking out, sword under his arm, by an accident of perspective does what he has already done symbolically, stabbing the cuckold in the back; the room's wallpaper, if we try to separate figure from ground, proves to consist of antlers (Harlot,). In Gillray, Harvey observes, “The lively brevity of [the] notation makes metaphorical transformations easy.” But it is the artist's imagination—his insight, as satiric artist, into the situation—that is bringing about the change. Hogarth's scenes have the stability, the solidity of reality; Gillray's are sketchy, unfocused, metamorphosing because the artist's mind is at work on the scene as an active participant.

This reference to the subject-object relationship, whether it involves a character (as with Roderick) or the artist, is perhaps a more meaningful way of describing the transaction in a Rowlandson and a Gillray scene than to enumerate and arrange the sources of imitation. For the larger fiction is the interaction of an artist and his material, a satirist and contemporary folly, or a well-known comic artist and an author's well-known book.

VI

Rowlandson went from illustration of the semi-independent type I have described to a series of collaborations in which the visual image preceded the verbal. He produced the images himself of typical Rowlandson situations, and William Combe versified them. This was also the way Cruikshank began and, with some of his authors at least, continued, giving them visual ideas to verbalize. He was the last of a series of very special cases of artists who pursued a career of independent emblematic art parallel with one of illustration. Coupled with Cruikshank's compatible versatilities was the popularity in the 1830s of travel books or sporting scenes in which illustration may have priority over text, and in which both text and illustration contribute different perspectives.

Finally, with the advent of the serial publication of the Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, which launched the remarkable Dickens combination of text and illustration, the two became chronologically co-present for the first time. The illustration was usually not based on a written text but either on a few verbal or written hints or on some sort of common agreement between artist and author. The mixed-media effect of monthly serial publication involved the physical priority of the visual image. The reader ordinarily saw first the illustrations, sewn in at the front of the monthly part, and then read the text and related the two versions of the story. The earlier procedure of illustrating a subsequent edition, with “illustration” meaning representation of something in a known text, has now been replaced by a writer-artist collaboration for a visual-verbal effect with more the structure of emblem than illustration. Punch was founded in 1841, and the cartoon that was developed in its pages worked in a similar way: one looked at the picture, wondering what it meant, interested and puzzled; then read the caption, which was sometimes quite long; and then returned to the picture, which now meshed with the caption to make a joke.

Thus two independent views were brought together—Dickens and Cruikshank, Dickens and Seymour, Dickens and Phiz—and a kind of marriage was effected between an emblematic writing and an impressionistic, pointed, selective, moment in the illustration.²⁷ The writer could be as interpretative as he liked, in fact creative in the emblem-reader's sense; the illustration singled out one crucial moment, though the artist might employ in it emblems of his own. In this sort of collaboration the illustrator has access of his own to the emblem tradition and can introduce pigs and donkeys as emblems of sloth and stubbornness that do not appear in the text, as Dickens introduces emblems of his own that do not appear in the illustration.²⁸ One of the elements of the Dickensian comedy is the incongruity of the isolated, frozen moment of fleeting action and expression versus the duration suggested by the pictures on the walls, and even lower levels of transient action by the parallel cavorting of animals. And this is reflected in the style of the text set against that of the illustration, the rhetorical flourish of Dickens' prose style against the austerity, the “meanness,” of Cruikshank's line.²⁹ For it is not, as Chesterton said, as if Fagin drew his own picture, but rather that Cruikshank develops one aspect of the Dickensian whole, which Dickens can fit into the larger formulation of his prose. Even if we include the memories of anti-semitic cartoons in his depiction, a minimalist Fagin appears in Cruikshank's drawings; Dickens' Fagin only begins its onion-like growth from this meager figure.

In Sketches by Boz, Miller has noticed, “London was for the young Dickens, in his disguise as Boz, … a set of signs, a text to interpret.” This is precisely as if Dickens moved from a Hogarth print to the London around him and read it in the same way; both are images of a hidden text, and the writer's task is to interpret it. “What he sees at first are things, human artifacts, streets, buildings, vehicles, objects in a pawnbroker's shop, old clothes in Monmouth Street. These objects are signs, present evidence of something absent. Boz sets himself the task of inferring from these things the life that is lived among them.”³⁰

This is in general the role Dickens assumes in his early works. But it is also the way a character himself comes to terms with a place and situation. Fagin assumes the role in Oliver Twist and projects the stages of analysis the reader follows in “reading” a Hogarth print. His first impression entering a tavern is only of obscurity and confusion:

the place was so full of dense tobacco smoke, that at first it was scarcely possible to discern anything more. By degrees, however, as some of it cleared away through the open door, an assemblage of heads, as confused as the noises that greeted the ear, might be made out …

(Chapter xxvii)

Then, “as the eye grew more accustomed to the scene, the spectator gradually became aware of the presence of a numerous company, male and female, crowded round a long table.” The level of Fagin's perception has now reached “male and female”; the next stage is to make out one person from another, and finally to distinguish them in moral terms—by which time Fagin has been replaced by Dickens himself as our interpreter: “countenances, expressive of almost every vice in almost every grade, irresistibly attracted the attention, by their very repulsiveness. Cunning, ferocity, and drunkenness in all its stages, were there, in their strongest aspects.”

Fagin's and/or Dickens' perceptual process recreates verbally the visualizing and then verbalizing that is followed by anyone moving about in one of Hogarth's large compositions, which deny the eye stable focusing points around which the rest of the composition can be organized, as opposed to the “good” gestalt with its simple, stable, compact structure. An example is the sixth plate of A Rake's Progress, which is almost a visual source for Fagin's account; but Hogarth habitually uses the effect first as an expression of a complex moral disarray, and second as a flickering forest in which the viewer's eye roams discerning an increasing intensity of moral significance without coming to a final rest.

This—the Hogarth way—has become the method of Dickens' written text, while the illustrations focus on one single aspect; the multiplicity of the experience and its meaning, which requires a gradual exploration in time, is interpreted in the text, and the instantaneous immediacy of the bare detail appears in the illustration. Dickens' text, like the commentary of a Rouquet or Lichtenberg, moves from objects to people to a gradual revelation of meaning.³¹ A Cruikshank illustration is one detail of a Hogarth plate cut away, quite clearly a fragment with its edges circular and hazy, unframed. By contrast Hogarth's viewer saw the picture as itself taking place on a stage, a complete action; Cruikshank's picture is seen as if by a participant who can take in only one thing at a time.

Compression, intensity, and pointed facial-bodily expression are the chief characteristics of Cruikshank's small plates. “Fagin in the condemned Cell” is plainly by a contemporary of Goya rather than of Gillray or Hogarth. Book illustration with its small format was a boon to Cruikshank; with a few exceptions the large rectangular plate was not the most congenial form for him. His tendency was to divide it up into small units of single isolated figures in intense focus, and the over-all effect is diffuse. His proper form is the small vertical rectangle or square with the image growing increasingly clear, dark, and concentrated as the center is approached.

Though the power of “Fagin in the condemned Cell” is exceptional, its intensity is shared by the illustrations that are comic in the sense of laughable. Their comedy relies on the copresence of dissimilar realities in the text and the illustration, on an intense graphic realization of a figure with a verbal life of his own in the text, and, to a lesser degree, on the simple participation in the tradition of comic illustration. For the conventions of detached observers, pictures on the walls, dog or cat-human parallels were by the time of Cruikshank and Phiz so much a part of the tradition,³² that for most readers they probably served less their moral or intellectual function of parallelism than to create sheer comic incongruity. Mr. Pickwick and the pigs, Mr. Pickwick and emblems of slothfulness, were doubtless regarded as equally amusing for their own sake, and among Dickens' more learned readers amusing for the added incongruity of moral iconography jostling the world of comic book illustration and nineteenth-century farmyards.

Dickens, like Hogarth, was consciously deserting the texts of contemporary novelists and their conventions, turning back to the streets of London, its popular theater, and its popular prints (with a long look back at Hogarth). His particular sort of amalgam of literary and graphic conventions with contemporary sign systems occurs when a writer or artist consciously reacts against old texts and topoi. Dickens himself represents the verbal equivalent of the beginning of the comic tradition in Hogarth's Hudibras and A Harlot's Progress, while Cruikshank represents the end of it, the artist returning from emblem to illustration and putting himself back in the hands of his author.

Notes

1. Even with Blake, the best analysis of the relationship of his illustrations to a text other than his own is Irene Tayler's recent book, Blake's Illustrations to the Poems of Gray (Princeton, 1971). The first indication of what novel uses illustration might be put to was Ralph Cohen's demonstration that the various eighteenth-century illustrations for Thomson's Seasons could serve as critical commentaries on the poem (The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's The Seasons and the Language of Criticism [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964], pp. 248-314). This was followed by Jeffrey P. Eichholz's sensitive study of Kent's illustrations for Gay and Thomson (“William Kent's Career as Literary Illustrator,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 70 [1966], 620-46). Scholarly and bibliographical rather than critical, but equally important, was the work of the late H. A. Hammelmann on Hayman, Vanderbank, and other illustrators of the St. Martin's Lane group of artists, and of Marcia R. Pointon on the changing conventions reflected in illustrations of Milton. In particular, see Hammelmann, “Early English Book Illustrators,” TLS [Times Literary Supplement], 20 June 1968, pp. 652-53; his essays on Hayman, etc., are in The Book Collector; for his essays on Vanderbank, see below, n. 10. For Pointon: Milton & English Art (Manchester, 1970).

2. Michael Steig, “Dickens, Hablôt Browne, and the Tradition of English Caricature,” Criticism, 11 (1969), 219-33; Robert L. Pattern, review of the Clarendon edition of Oliver Twist, in Dickens Studies, 3 (1967), 165, and “Boz, Phiz, and Pickwick in the Pound,” ELH, 36 (1969), 575-91.

3. Patten (in ELH, p. 590), quoting Frederick Antal's Hogarth and His Place in European Art (London, 1962), p. 175.

4. (New York, 1971). For another perceptive essay along the same lines, see John Dixon Hunt, “Dickens and the Traditions of Graphic Satire,” in Encounters: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Hunt (London, 1971), pp. 124-55.

5. In Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1971), pp. 1-69.

6. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London, 1960).

7. Miller, pp. 45-46.

8. Mysteriously Meant (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 282-83.

9. This effect is related to the modern concept of “feedback,” for an “articulated reaction of a spectator to a work of art … modifies the work, i.e. by conditioning how it is perceived” (G. L. Hersey, “Associationism and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Architecture,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 4 [1970], 71-89).

10. See Hammelmann, “Eighteenth-Century English Illustrators: John Vanderbank,” The Book Collector, 17 (1968), 285-99; “John Vanderbank's ‘Don Quixote,’” Master Drawings, 7 (1969), 3-15; and Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (New Haven and London, 1971), I, 161-67, and Hogarth's Graphic Works (New Haven, 1965; revised edn., 1970), cat. nos. 146-51, Pls. 158-63. The Vanderbank illustrations first appeared in the 1738 Spanish-language edition and were used thereafter in the Jarvis translation (1742 et seq.). Hogarth's plates were issued only after his death (see Hogarth's Graphic Works, I, 176).

11. Miller, p. 61.

12. The figure of Sancho observing Quixote attacking the puppets from Coypel's “Don Quixote and the Puppet Show” was literally transplanted by Hogarth in The Mystery of Mock Masonry (1724) and later in The Analysis of Beauty (1753).

13. The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote (London, 1755).

14. Samuel Putnam translation (New York, 1949), I, 120.

15. Vanderbank does illustrate this scene, but he only shows Quixote taking hold of Maritornes with the mule driver watching suspiciously. Nothing of the Don's confusion of Maritornes with Dulcinea is conveyed.

16. For the insights in this and the next paragraph, I am indebted to a chapter by Laurel Brodsley, “Hogarth's Illustrations to Hudibras,” in her unpublished doctoral dissertation (UCLA, 1970), pp. 92-102.

17. See Juste-Aurèle Meissonier, Livre d'ornamens (1734) and Jacques de la Joue, Livre nouveaux de divers morceaux de fantaisie (1736), reproduced in Hermann Bauer, Rocaille: zur Herkunft und zum wesen eines ornament-motivs (Berlin, 1962), Pls. 34, 48.

18. The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford, 1955), pp. 48-49, p. 180; the second from an unused page of Hogarth's manuscript. Although Alexander Gerard calls it “ridicule,” he is defining the same effect in An Essay on Taste (London, 1759), pp. 66-73. His analysis of Butler's method is particularly relevant.

19. Blanchard Jerrold, The Life of George Cruikshank (London, 1882), I, 14.

20. This aspect of illustration is connected with what came to be called “novelty” or the pleasant surprise of discovery, versus the Beautiful and the Sublime (in Addison, Gerard, and later in Uvedale Price, who developed it into the Picturesque).

21. Harrington explained this as the function of the illustrations in his translation of Orlando Furioso: “The use of the picture is evident, which is that (having read over the booke) you may reade it (as it were againe) in the very picture” (“An Advertisement to the Reader,” 1591 edn.).

22. Blake was a great comic illustrator in a few instances, but he had no influence whatever on the Victorian illustrators. Outside anything we can call a comic tradition, and yet the only genuinely comic illustrations between Hogarth and Cruikshank—and more complex as illustrations than the work of either—are Blake's drawings for Gray's “Death of a Favourite Cat”: if comic means leading to laughter and adding new dimensions or drawing out comic potentials from the source. See Tayler, pp. 55-70.

23. See Paulson, Rowlandson: A New Interpretation (London and New York, 1972), pp. 15-18.

24. Ibid., pp. 71 ff., 80 ff.

25. In subsequent novels, however, where Smollett uses a third-person narrative, the exaggeration becomes again the way these people are in the visual vocabulary of a Rowlandson.

26. Harvey, p. 28.

27. On the emblematic nature of Dickens' writing, see Harvey, pp. 54-55.

28. Cf. Patten, ELH, p. 580.

29. Cf. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (New York, 1935), p. 112.

30. Miller, p. 10. Moreover, the form this tends to take as a point de départ is the Hogarthian list: “the lists are often the starting point of an act of interpretation which moves beyond them to the hidden ways of life of which they are signs (p. 10). Apparently random lists, they must be “read” by Boz and their meaningful connections discovered. The whole procedure starts with “first the scene, with its inanimate objects, then the people of whose lives these objects are the signs, and finally the continuous narrative of their lives, which may be inferred from the traces of themselves they have left behind” (p. 12).

31. Dickens himself saw the tradition of English graphic humor to culminate in Leech, or at least return in him to the “realism” of Hogarth. This he regarded as a relief from the excess of “grotesque” distortion of the Rowlandson-Gillray tradition. He cannot accept their equation, carried through by Cruikshank and early Phiz, of “personal ugliness” with evil and beauty with good. See his “Leech's ‘The Rising Generation,’” Examiner, 30 December 1848; see Steig, p. 220.

32. See, for example, G. M. Woodward's illustration in Eccentric Excursions (London, 1796, facing p. 81) showing justices in an ale house with prints of Daniel in the Lions' Den and The Judgement of Solomon on the walls. Here, as in Rowlandson, the pictures are only used when occasion demands to make something clear, and are primarily engaging in the comedy of contrasting shapes.