"Frontispiece" and "Half-Title Vignette" for "Sketches by Boz" — Cruikshank's opening illustration for John Macrone, St. James's Square (1836)

Seven Dials (frontispiece: 9.6 cm high x 7.6 cm wide; 3 ¾ by 3 inches) and Sketches by Boz (half-title vignette: 14.8 cm high x 8.3 cm wide; 5 ¾ by 3 ⅛ inches) by George Cruikshank. Copper plate engraving. Cruikshank's original pair of opening illustrations for the 1836 Second Series of Dickens's Sketches by Boz, duodecimo (20.3 cm high x 12.9 cm wide; 8 by 5 inches). First published by John Macrone, St. James's Square, London, in August, 1836. The later half-title vignettes (November 1837 and June 1839) in octavo exhibit certain changes that Cruikshank made in the crowd of well-wishers below the hot-air balloon compared the original 1836 version. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]

The Forty Cruikshank Illustrations and the Half-Title Vignette

Between 1833 and 1836 Dickens's journalistic studies or "sketches" of London life seized the public's imagination, appearing in such periodicals as Bell's Life in London, The Morning Chronicle, and The Evening Chronicle before being anthologized, first by John Macrone in two volumes in February 1836, with sixteen illustrations by veteran caricaturist George Cruikshank. The "Second Series Macrone edition, "Complete in one volume," contains just twenty sketches but just nine half-page plates which now complemented sketches published previously in such unillustrated journals as Bell's Life in London:

When Chapman and Hall re-issued the London sketches in monthly parts, each instalment included two of Cruikshank's copper-plate engravings; however, the change in format from the Macrone two-volume duodecimo to the Chapman and Hall octavo required that Cruikshank re-engrave the entire series of illustrations for the monthly parts and the single-volume edition of 1839. Those illustrations, whether humorous or pathetic, did not merely constitute a "value-added" feature to the text; rather, they guided the reading of highly disparate material, providing a focal point (whether comic or tragic) for nearly half of the fifty-six pieces that now constitute Sketches by "Boz," Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. The character comedy, farce, immediacy, and topicality of the texts illustrated rendered them doubly popular with a broad readership, focussing the reader's attention on key moments in the forthcoming action and principal characters, shedding light in advance on characters' relationships and motivations, and signalling in the short stories (under "Tales") important points in the plot.

The first edition of the John Macrone, two-volume duodecimo set of 1836, is illustrated throughout with just ten copper-plate engravings by George Cruikshank. Volumes I and II each have a frontispiece and seven subsequent illustrations, for a total of sixteen illustrations in the Macrone second edition (dated 1836, but in fact published in 1837, as the regular title-page indicates). The Second Series has a frontispiece, engraved title-page, and eight subsequent illustrations. Thus, Cruikshank engraved a total of twenty-five illustrations before the monthly serialisation by Chapman and Hall, November 1837 through June 1839, a twenty-month project involving two illustrations for each monthly number, as had been the case in their Pickwick Papers.

Although most of the sketches in this work were originally published as separate entries in various magazines and journals between 1833 and 1836, the later edition does represent the first appearance of five of the sketches: "A Visit to Newgate," "The Black Veil," "The Great Winglebury Duel," "Our Next-Door Neighbours," and "The Drunkard's Death."

During the following year (1837) Macrone published a Second Series of the "Sketches" in one volume, uniform in size and character with its predecessors, and containing ten etchings by Cruikshank; for the second edition of this extra volume two additional illustrations were done, viz., The Last Cab-Driver and May-day in the Evening [sic]. It was at this time that Dickens repurchased from Macrone the entire copyright of the "Sketches," and arranged with Chapman & Hall for a complete edition, to be issued in shilling monthly parts, octavo size, the first number appearing in November of that year. The completed work contained all the Cruikshank plates (except that entitled The Free and Easy, which, for some unexplained reason, was cancelled) and the following [twelve] new subjects:

Scanned image, image correction, formatting, and caption by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. Sketches by Boz. Second series. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: John Macrone, 1836.

Hammerton, J. A. "The Story of this Book." Charles Dickens's Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-Day People. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. i-v.

Kitton, Frederic G. "George Cruikshank." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: Chapman & Hall, 1899. Pp. 1-28.

Created 31 March 2017

last updated 3 July 2023