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Commentary: Groome's Dickensian Character Vignettes

The second of Groome'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. Groome 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 would have looked 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 here alludes to R. W. Buss's Dickens's Dream (1875). Harry Furniss's signature beneath the cameo of the fifty-eight-year-old Dickens may indicate 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:

1. Oliver and Fagin (upper left)
2. Samuel Pickwick addresses the Club (upper centre)
3. The Wanderers: Little Nell and Her Grandfather (upper right)
4. Seth Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit (centre left) as depicted by Phiz and Fred Barnard
5. Wilkins Micawber from David Copperfield (centre right)
6. Joe the Crossing-sweeper from Bleak House (bottom centre)
7. Little Paul and Mr. Dombey (bottom right)

Related Resources

• Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop — Some Discussions
• The Old Curiosity Shop Illustrated: A Team Effort by "The Clock Works."
• Kyd's Characters from Dickens (1889)

Bibliography

Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Illustrated by William H. C. Groome. The Collins' Clear-Type Edition. Glasgow & London: Collins, 1900.

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Created 7 August 2020

Last modified 23 November 2020