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The engraved title: Dickens and eight scenes from various novels
A. H. Buckland
1900
13.8 x 8.2 cm, framed
Lithograph
Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (pp. 680), facing frontispiece.
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[Compare to engraved title by A. H. Groome.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The second of Buckland's illustrations suggests that the readers to whom Collins' Clear-Type Press was marketing the pocket-book would have been familiar with the better-known characters and titles of Charles Dickens. Buckland depicts the great Victorian author as the British, approaching the centenary of his birth, would have thought of him, as the Victorian sage drawn by Harry Furniss, whose signature appears directly below the central portrait of Dickens as he appeared in the final decade of his life. This image is somewhat misleading, however, as the author was just 28 and 29 when he wrote the novels which he published in Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-41). Accordingly, he would have looked much younger, as in Samuel Lawrence's 1837 portrait. Here, the illustrator has chosen to present an image of the author more consistent with the 1867 photograph by J. Gurney & Sons and as depicted by American illustrator Sol Eytinge, Junior, in the frontispiece for the Diamond Edition volume of The Pickwick Papers (1867). Groome appears to have based the other vignettes surrounding the image of the author not so much on those in the Household Edition volumes of the 1870s, as on the original editions illustrated by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne. Groome presents the dozen figures in the vignettes surrounding the portrait as the coinage of Dickens's brain, suggesting that Groome may have been familiar with R. W. Buss's Dickens's Dream (1875). Harry Furniss's signature beneath the cameo of the fifty-eight-year-old Dickens suggests that Collins Clear-type Press had either borrowed the image from Furniss, or had commissioned him to do all the engraved titles for the series:
Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge. Illustrated by Hablot K. Browne ('Phiz') and George Cattermole. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1849.
_______. Barnaby Rudge. Illustrated by A. H. Buckland. London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-type Press. 1900.
Created 7 August 2020
Last modified 16 December 2020