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The Uncommercial Traveller
Harry Furniss
1910
14.8 cm high x 9.2 cm wide, framed
Dickens's Christmas Books and The Uncommercial Traveller, the Charles Dickens Library Edition, VIII, following 411.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
As a town traveller, I am never to be seen driving a vehicle externally like a young and volatile pianoforte van, and internally like an oven in which a number of flat boxes are baking in layers. As a country traveller, I am rarely to be found in a gig, and am never to be encountered by a pleasure train, waiting on the platform of a branch station, quite a Druid in the midst of a light Stonehenge of samples.
And yet — proceeding now, to introduce myself positively — I am both a town traveller and a country traveller, and am always on the road. Figuratively speaking, I travel for the great house of Human Interest Brothers, and have rather a large connection in the fancy goods way. Literally speaking, I am always wandering here and there from my rooms in Covent-garden, London — now about the city streets: now, about the country by-roads — seeing many little things, and some great things, which, because they interest me, I think may interest others. [Chapter One: "His General Line of Business," 1-2]
In the Household Edition of the late 1870s, the illustrator of the Harper and Brothers volume, Charles Stanley Reinhart, does include among his initial wood-engravings a picture of the fictitious Joe Specks, the narrative voice of the essays published throughout the 1860s in Dickens's weekly journal All the Year Round. Here, Reinhart has given us merely a respectable, middle-aged bourgeois in a tailcoat, whereas Furniss has based his figure on actual photographs of Dickens taken in the 1860s, such as Charles Dickens by J. Gurney and Sons, 1867.
Although the Household Edition illustrators avoid the precise subject of the identity of the roving sound-camera and commentator of the essays, Harry Furniss has boldly identified the ageing Charles Dickens himself, valise in hand, as the Uncommercial Traveller, whereas C. S. Reinhart's version of the avid journalist visiting a workhouse in the American Household Edition looks nothing like Dickens circa age fifty. Whereas the facing title-page contains Furniss's usual range of character vignettes for the title-pages of the volumes in the Charles Dickens Library Edition, including Samuel Pickwick, Sydney Carton, Captain Cuttle, and Seth Pecksniff, the study of Dickens, in formal tail-coat and silk hat in hand, as if to introduce himself and welcome the reader to the second half of the eighth volume, is surrounded by vignettes of lesser-known characters specifically from essays in The Uncommercial Traveller, including the male and female tramp (centre, below Dickens's top-hat) and the police officer with the donkey. In total, to complement the twenty-nine essays, Furniss has incorporated twenty-one such groups of characters and a pair of ships, perhaps The Calais Night Mail and, foundering in the waves, The Royal Charter, whose catastrophic wreck on the Isle of Anglesey was the subject of Dickens's initial Uncommercial Traveller essay in All the Year Round on 28 January 1860.
Omitting mention of Marcus Stone's illustrations for an Illustrated Library Edition, J. A . Hammerton in "The Story of This Book" in volume 8 notes that, prior to the twin Household Edition volumes of the 1870s, The Uncommercial Traveller had not received an extensive series of illustrations:
. . .in 1868 a new edition of the book was published by Chapman & Hall, containing eleven papers of the second series in addition to the original seventeen. A frontispiece by the artist Pinwell was given to this edition, the last that appeared in the lifetime of the author. Two of the sketches in the second series, together with six of the "New Uncommercial Samples," were not included in his collected works until the publication of the Illustrated Library Edition in 1875, when Pinwell and other artists supplied eight illustrations. [ii]
Harry Furniss provided some thirty illustrations for this eighth volume of The Charles Dickens Library Edition, but only one each for Uncommercial Traveller and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices.
Left: Edward Dalziel's "The wind blows stiffly from the Nor-East, the sea runs high, we ship a deal of water, the night is dark and cold, and the shapeless passengers lie about in melancholy bundles"; right, C. S. Reinhart's Uncaptioned [Scene from "The Wapping Work-House"]. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
Dickens, Charles. The Christmas Books and The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book Company, 1910, VIII, i-292.
Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Illustrated by C. S. Reinhart and Luke Fildes. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876.
Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller. Illustrated by Edward Dalziel. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1877.
Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings, by Fred Barnard, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz); J. Mahoney; Charles Green; A. B. Frost; Gordon Thomson; J. McL. Ralston; H. French; E. G. Dalziel; F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes; printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." New York: Chapman and Hall, 1908. Copy in the Robarts Library, University of Toronto.
Slater, Michael, and John Drew, eds. Dickens' Journalism: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers 1859-70. The Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens' Journalism, IV. London: J. M. Dent, 2000.
Created 4 August 2013
Last modified 5 January 2020