Does this picture remind you of anybody in particular? I really hope it does, but for those of you who can’t recognise this man, he is Charles Dickens, portrayed in 1836 by the well-know artist George Cruickshank.
As you already know, one of the aim of this blog is to give you some tips on British authors and books that I consider important for you to read in order to get a broader knowledge of English literature, so let’s start our ‘literary route’ with the author, whom both in his private and public life and works embodied the Victorian Age.
Today we will deal with the famous Victorian writer, whom I am sure almost all of you can associate to a couple of books, at the very least. Do not worry, I have made up my mind to make Dickens more ‘consumable’ for you, whilst trying to educate you on something that is sadly considered not worth teaching to our students.
Now watch this video by BBC to brush up on Charles Dickens’s biography. It will only take you a couple of minutes to do it and I promise you, you wont’ get bored.
To begin our exploration of Dickens I will provide you with some more information about the begining of his working career that will help us approaching the text that I have chosen for you.
Before becoming a renowed and wealthy writer, Dickens had struggled to make his living (his family financial situation had forced him to live school at a very young age and work in order to support the family). In the late 1820s he undertook a few jobs – working first as a law clerk, and then as court stenographer – until he finally became a shorthand freelance reporter (1828-1833) at the law courts of London. During his parliamentary reporting days he began writing fiction. His first sketch was published in 1833 in the Monthly Magazine. The next year he secured for himself a job at the Morning Chronicle, doing both parliamentary and general reporting, whilst dashing about the country. During that time, he set up submitting other sketches to several London newspapers and magazine (the Monthly Magazine, Bell‘s Weekly Magazine, the Morning Chronicle, the Evening Chronicle, Bell ‘s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle) under the pseudonym “Boz“. The sketches were a resounding success, both with the critics and the general reading public: his career as a writer – and a very prolific one in the many years to come – had officially started.
So now let’s go back to the picture of the young Dickens that I have include in this page. I haven’t picked it up randomly among the many portrait of the author available online. The one that I chose was portrayed by George Cruickshank, an highly regarded artist at the time when Dickens was trying to make a name for himself. But how did the two of them, an artist at the height of his fame and a novice writer got to know each other and work together?
In 1836, Jonh Macrone, the editor of the Monthly Magazine asked Cruikshank to collaborate with Dickens by illustrating those very same sketches appeared between 1833-35. They would be later collected in a volume form (the first series appeared in February 1836 and the second one in December of the same year).
Did you know that almost all Dickens’s books were illustrated; that the author was very fuzzy about the illustrations to accompanying his writings; and that he had a very close personal as well as personal relationships with the artists that over the years provided the images for his own texts?
«Even when his reputation was secured, his sales steady, and his audience literate enough to permit his to publish his text unadorned […], he usually retained the illustrated format clearly convinced, despite the difficulties of coordinating text and pictures, of its advantages to himself, his publishers, his illustrators to a lesser extent and, above all, to his readers».
This accounts very well for the pervasiveness of the graphic element to integrate the textual one within the Victorian fiction and the strict relationships of this particular phenomenon with general book marketing strategies (PLEASE NOTE that still many other Victorian authors didn’t draw upon pictures to match their texts, but for a novelist such as Dickens this was a significant factor in the process of creation and in the total form of his large literary output).
So, Dickens was asked to collaborate with Cruikshank for the making of the two series of Sketches by Boz. For all that I have said so far, it is clear the the modern shape in which we know the sketches is by no means the original one in which they first appeared. Macrone had to pay Dickens the royalities for the previously published sketches and the writer engaged in an extensive work of revision of his own texts, cutting parts, re-writing paragraphs and changing style and punctuation when necessary. Being just an ‘unknown Boz’ at that time, he was obviously flattered by the fact that his texts were to be illustrated by the acclaimed Cruickshank, whom he highly admired. Despite being aware of the indebteness of his texts to the pictures, since the very beginning of their partnership, Dickens attempted to subordinate Cruikshank’s work to his own; this led to a series of misunderstainings between the two that affected the very shape of the work and obviously delayed the deadlines for its publication).
Original manuscript of The Sketches by Boz at the Dickens Museum in London
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