The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery: A New On-line Assortment Presents The entire Unique Illustrations from Charles Dickens’ Novels

On the top of his fame, Charles Dickens might have commanded any illustrator he preferred for his novels. However in the beginning of his literary profession, it was he who was charged with accompanying the artist, not the opposite manner round. His first serialized novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Membership, higher often called The Pickwick Papers, started as a sequence of comical “cockney sporting plates” by  Robert Seymour. Trustworthy sufficient to confess his ignorance of the cockney sporting life however shrewd sufficient to know a chance when he noticed one, the younger Dickens accepted the writer’s request for tales meant to elaborate on the pictures.

Even then, Dickens possessed irrepressible expertise as a preferred storyteller, and it was his writing — which evidenced scant curiosity in adherence to the present artwork — that made The Pickwick Papers into an awesome success, a mass-cultural phenomenon akin to successful sitcom avant la lettre.

187 years later there stays a whiff of scandal round this chapter of literary historical past, Seymour having dedicated suicide early within the serialization course of the day after an argument with Dickens. Finally the writer discovered a everlasting substitute for Seymour in Hablot Knight Browne, or Phiz, who would go on to offer the paintings for many of his novels.

You possibly can see all of Phiz’s work for Dickens at the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery, a venture of Michael John Goodman, whom we’ve beforehand featured right here on Open Tradition for his Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive (and his collection of AI-generated Shakespeare art). “The world of Dickens illustration is beset with poor reproductions of the supply materials, so for this venture I’ve searched out what I think about to be a number of the finest editions that function the unique illustrations printed to an honest high quality,” Goodman writes on his venture’s About page. These are likely to date from the early twentieth century and include “coloured frontispieces (which the unique novels didn’t have).”

One such frontispiece seems on the prime of this publish, depicting the primary look of The Pickwick Papers‘ most beloved character, the cockney valet Samuel Weller (who overtook the title character in reputation in a lot the identical method as Dickens’ writing overtook the illustrations). The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery incorporates numerous plates from that book, in addition to from all the remainder: Oliver Twist (a collaboration with not Phiz however George Cruikshank), A Christmas Carol (with John Leech), Bleak House (its grim environment heightened by Phiz’s “darkish plates”), even the never-finished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. At the moment’s readers are more likely to dismiss these illustrations, nevertheless well-rendered, as extraneous to the textual content. However we should keep in mind that almost all had been seen and accredited by Dickens himself, who knew what he needed — and much more so, what his readers needed.

Enter the The Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery here.

Associated content material:

An Animated Introduction to Charles Dickens’ Life & Literary Works

An Oscar-Winning Animation of Charles Dickens’ Classic Tale, A Christmas Carol (1971)

The Code of Charles Dickens’ Shorthand Has Been Cracked by Computer Programmers, Solving a 160-Year-Old Mystery

Behold Illustrations of Every Shakespeare Play Created by Artificial Intelligence

3,000 Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Complete Works from Victorian England, Neatly Presented in a New Digital Archive

A Free Shakespeare Coloring Book: While Away the Hours Coloring in Illustrations of 35 Classic Plays

Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and tradition. His tasks embody the Substack e-newsletter Books on Cities, the e book The Stateless Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The City in Cinema. Comply with him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.