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Characters in the Story (engraved title-page)
Harry Furniss
chromolithograph
1910
14.5 x 9 cm, vignetted
Ornamental title-page Characters in the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), facing III, frontispiece.
[Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
In composing the engraved title-page along the lines of those for volumes one and two (Sketches by Boz and the Pickwick Papers), in volume three Harry Furniss could not follow the same procedure, because the novel’s initial publication took a different form, appearing in a magazine rather than in detached monthly numbers. Whereas the monthly parts of the original Dickens serials, beginning with The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Papers in April 1836, were packaged in a green monthly wrapper whose face bore multiple vignettes, often narratively relevant rather than merely allegorical, The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress began life as a magazine serial in the February 1837 number of Bentley's Miscellany. Consequently, Furniss was not able to work either from an earlier title-page containing a vignette or from the wrapper that contained the original serial parts for his elaborately framed title-page. However, for his conception of multiple vignettes framing the title Furniss may have been able to utilize the 1846 Chapman and Hall wrapper which George Cruikshank had designed for the "re-serialisation" of the revised text in twelve monthly parts almost a decade after the initial magazine serialisation.
Cruikshank, Dickens's official illustrator for Oliver Twist in the 1837-38 serial, designed a narrative-pictorial sequence of twenty-four steel engravings, did not have a chance to read the entire novel before he set to work. Since Dickens let him see a single month's install in manuscript, he never know much more than the contents of a single monthly installment. Thus, although the original illustrator had the advantage of the instructions and advice of the author himself, unlike such significant later illustrators as Sol Eytinge, Junior, James Mahoney, and Harry Furniss, he would not have known about the significance of the earlier scenes until the fall of 1838, when he was producing the last few plates needed for the third volume of the Richard Bentley triple-decker.
When Chapman and Hall approached Dickens with the notion of issuing the novel in ten monthly parts for 1846, Dickens — perhaps feeling a little guilty about having compelled the veteran illustrator to replace at short notice the "cancelled" plate— nominated Cruikshank rather than his usual illustrator Hablot Knight Browne to design the green wrapper to contain the ten monthly parts. Significantly, perhaps, then, the wrapper vignettes for the 1846 edition actually represent a more informed reading than many of the earlier allegorical part-publication wrappers. In addition to that possible graphic resource, Furniss had the distinct advantage of having read the entire work prior to receiving the commission. And probably through reading the official, 1871-72 biography by Dickens's lifelong friend and business agent, John Forster, Furniss may have even known about the author's demanding the cancellation of the "Fireside" plate, and Dickens's insistence on the artist's providing the so-called "Church" plate. Then, too, Furniss was also probably familiar with Mahoney's large-scale composite woodblock engravings for the initial volume of the Household Edition. Although Furniss was attuned to the new realism of the sixties evident in that 1871 volume, his own style has affinities with the earlier, caricatural style of Cruikshank and Phiz, so that his vignettes in the engraved title and the full-scale lithographs that follow contain both three-dimensional modelling and a close-up technique, as well as the character comedy and melodramatic poses of the original serial plates. Furniss's thumbnails are both more abundant and more impressionistic than the thirty figures on the 1846 Cruikshank wrapper, which contains only eleven scenes; in contrast, Furniss's ornamental border on the title-page has over forty small-scale, essentially comic figures, lacking only, oddly enough, Charlotte, the Sowerberrys' runaway housemaid.
The 1846 wrapper and the twenty-four serial illustrations from the initial magazine serialisation, then, were Furniss's point of departure for a new series of thirty-four illustrations, in which series the overture which prepares the reader for the characters and situations of the novel is the ornamental title-page. Beginning in the upper right-hand corner, these vignettes include Old Sally at the workhouse; the Sowerberries; Oliver's running off to London; Mr. Bumble's taking tea with Mrs. Corney; and the master of the workhouse serving gruel to the boys; right-hand register: Fagin and his crew of pickpockets, including the cavorting Charley Bates, the publican at Fagin's hangout (The Three Cripples public house), Flash Toby Crackit, smoking (as in Furniss's full-page illustration of him), and Bill Sikes and his dog; Mr. Brownlow, his kindly house-keeper, Mrs. Bedwin, and his constant companion, Mr. Grimwig; the salesman and Sikes in the taproom of the public house at Hatfield; the magistrate presiding at the Dodger's trial; and the Maylie servants at Chertsey looking after the wounded Oliver; bottom register: (centre, rear) Harry Maylie proposing to Rose; and Mr. Grimwig, again; (centre, foreground) Nancy's lifeless body with Rose's handkerchief; Mr. Brownlow and Rose Maylie (again) at London Bridge; left-hand register: Monks in the abandoned warehouse on the river; the rebellious Mrs. Bumble; Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry; the Dodger picking Fagin's pocket in a demonstration lesson for Oliver; Noah Claypole and Mr. Bumble; and the chimney-sweep, Mr. Gamfield, considering the advertisement that the Guardians of the Workhouse have posted for an apprenticeship for Oliver (top left) in a pose that exactly mirrors his likeness (centre, left) at Oliver's hearing before the trustees of the workhouse, Oliver Refuses to be Bound over to the Sweep.
Left: Cruikshank's first monthly wrapper for the ree-issued Chapman and Hall edition (January 1846). Centre: The 1846 title-page. Right: Mahoney's frontispiece vignette of Oliver at the Milestone (1871).
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy's Progress. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Bradbury and Evans; Chapman and Hall, 1838; rpt. with revisions 1846.
_____. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 55 vols. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. New York: Sheldon and Co., 1865.
_____. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Diamond Edition. 14 vols. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.
_____. Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Household Edition. 22 vols. Illustrated by James Mahoney. London: Chapman and Hall, 1871. Vol. I.
_____. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. III.
_____. The Adventures of Oliver Twist. Works of Charles Dickens. The Waverley Edition. Illustrated by Charles Pears. London: Waverley, 1912.
_____.The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Angus Eassone. The Pilgrim Edition. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Vol. I (1820-1839).
Forster, John. "Oliver Twist 1838." The Life of Charles Dickens. Ed. B. W. Matz. The Memorial Edition. 2 vols. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911. Vol. I, Book 2, Chapter 3.
Vann, J. Don. "Oliver Twist." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985, 62-63.
Created 31 December 2014
Last modified 17 February 2020