To apply the term "Pre-Raphaelite" to the style of Frank Stone's "Milly" illustrations — Milly and the Old Man (page 19), Milly and the Student (page 96), and Milly and the Children (page 159) — in The Haunted Man (1848) is probably inappropriate in the strict sense of the characteristics of the nineteenth-century artistic movement. Since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was being founded by seven artists (notably, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt) at about the time that The Haunted Man was published, it would be a mistake to regard Stone's "Milly" illustrations as consciously Pre-Raphaelite in style.
Stone, already 48 at the time, was a self-taught artist, whereas the Pre-Raphaelites were younger, and were associated with the Royal Academy schools, against the teachings of which they reacted. The impetus behind the Brotherhood was, after all, to revitalize painting rather than illustration. However, in its aims to imbue art with realism, morality, and seriousness by challenging High Renaissance assumptions about appropriate colour, shading, and subject-matter, Pre-Raphaelite art and the Frank Stone plates for The Haunted Man seem consonant. In particular, Stone focuses on the figures, their states of mind, and the foreground, and avoids any suggestion as to background, creating an almost flat picture. The sacred atmosphere of Milly and the Student has affinities with the paintings of the German Nazarenes in that they share Stone's close attention to detail, his rejection of aerial perspective, his almost self-conscious religiosity in the unnatural stillness of the scene, and his avoidance of shadow in order to show everything clearly. There is no doubt that, by the middle of the 1850s, the Pre-Raphaelite style (particularly that of Millais, who was an illustrator as well as a painter) had begun to exert considerable influence on commercial book and magazine illustration, especially in terms of depicting "worthy" subjects and showing all characters as physical beautiful, graceful, and well-proportioned. Finally, Charles Dickens, far from being an exponent of the new style like Ruskin, was utterly opposed to the Brotherhood's "primitivistic" innovations such as nudity, which he attacked during the first six months of his own weekly journal, Household Words, first published on 27 March 1850. It is unlikely, therefore, that in his Haunted Man illustrations Stone (even had he known about the work of the PRB as early as autumn 1848) would deliberately have adopted a style that his friend Charles Dickens detested.
Related Material
- The Last of Dickens's Five Christmas Books: The Haunted Man and The Ghost's Bargain (19 December 1848)
- The Advertiser for Dickens's Previous Christmas Books (1843-48)
- The Cover and Printed Title for Dickens's The Haunted Man (1848)
- A Gallery of Illustrations for The Haunted Man
- The Ratio of Illustration to Letter-Press (Text) in The Haunted Man
- Lighthouses in Dickens's A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man
- The Term "Pre-Raphaelite" as Applied to Frank Stone's in The Haunted Man
- Bibliography of Secondary Materials for The Haunted Man
Created 20 February 2000
Last modified 7 June 2024