Sarah Solberg in "'Text Dropped into the Woodcuts': Dickens' Christmas Books"(Dickens Studies Annual 8: 103-118) notes that the editors of the New Oxford Illustrated Edition "perverted" the original form of The Haunted Man with respect to the juxtaposition of illustration and text
Volume Two of the Penguin edition (1971) shows the relationship more effectively, but is not faithful to the original (see Appendix II for a detailed breakdown of the altered proportions of text to illustration). For example, although Penguin II, 245, corresponds to page 1 of the 1848 text of The Haunted Man, the print is larger, the spacing between lines greater, and the amount of white-space more generous in the Bradbury and Evans text. Whereas the Penguin edition has 50 words (exclusive of the chapter heading) on this page, the original contains 21 words, according greater prominence to its illustration.
While the first edition of The Haunted Man over the fifteen plates that combine text and illustration (as "plates dropped into text") averages 35 words per page, the comparable figure in the Penguin edition, despite Michael Slater's obvious attempt to have the paperback emulate the first edition's formatting, is 105.67 for each of the twelve pages that contain plates and text Slater eliminated the text entirely for plates 2, 6, and 7. The balance that the first edition sets between letter-press and illustration has been seriously disrupted in the Penguin edition, which has even altered the original order of the plates (Plate 9 occurs ahead of Plate 8). In the Penguin edition, the words that originally accompanied the plates appear eight times�in other words, for only half of the illustrations do we have the simultaneous presentation of pictorial and narrative moments. Although this overlap is not precise, it occurs in Plates 3, and 10 through 16. For a paperback, however, the Penguin edition offers high resolution copies of the original plates, and, in fact, has enlarged the scale slightly so that, for example, in the first edition p. 34's "Redlaw and the Phantom" is 12 cm high by 7.6 m wide on a page 16.5 cm high by 9.1 cm wide, on page 265 (unnumbered) of Penguin the same illustration is 13.1 cm high by 8.2 cm wide on a page 18 cm high by 11 cm wide. Eleven of the Penguin pages with illustrations are unnumbered, and ten do not have a running head. In terms of clarity, however, Penguin's running heads are an improvement, naming the chapter on the odd-numbered pages, whereas the 1848 edition gives The Haunted Man on the even- numbered pages and "And The Ghost's Bargain" on the odd-numbered pages.
Created 19 October 2004
Last modified 6 June 2024