[Victorian Web Home — Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Marcus Stone —> Next]
Civil and Military
Marcus Stone
Engraver: E. Dalziel
1862
Wood engraving
8.6 cm wide by 13 cm high
"Through France and Italy," Chapter 1 in Dickens's Pictures from Italy in the Illustrated Library Edition, facing 305.
Related Material
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
On a fine Sunday morning in the Midsummer time and weather of eighteen hundred and forty-four, it was, my good friend, when — don't be alarmed; not when two travellers might have been observed slowly making their way over that picturesque and broken ground by which the first chapter of a Middle Aged novel is usually attained — but when an English travelling-carriage of considerable proportions, fresh from the shady halls of the Pantechnicon near Belgrave Square, London, was observed (by a very small French soldier; for I saw him look at it) to issue from the gate of the Hôtel Meurice in the Rue Rivoli at Paris.
I am no more bound to explain why the English family travelling by this carriage, inside and out, should be starting for Italy on a Sunday morning, of all good days in the week, than I am to assign a reason for all the little men in France being soldiers, and all the big men postilions; which is the invariable rule. But, they had some sort of reason for what they did, I have no doubt; and their reason for being there at all, was, as you know, that they were going to live in fair Genoa for a year; and that the head of the family purposed, in that space of time, to stroll about, wherever his restless humour carried him.
And it would have been small comfort to me to have explained to the population of Paris generally, that I was that Head and Chief; and not the radiant embodiment of good humour who sat beside me in the person of a French Courier — best of servants and most beaming of men! Truth to say, he looked a great deal more patriarchal than I, who, in the shadow of his portly presence, dwindled down to no account at all. [Chapter I, "Going through France," pp. 304-305]
Upon the death of Frank Stone, Charles Dickens took nineteen-year-old artist Marcus Stone under his wing so to speak, arranging for him to receive a number of Chapman and Hall commissions in the 1860s, after Dickens's break with Phiz at the close of the serial publication of A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Marcus Stone made significant contributions to the popular reception of two novels of Dickens's last period: Great Expectations in 1862 (8 wood-engravings), and Our Mutual Friend in 1864 (40 illustrations plus the serial wrapper). However, for the Dalziels he provided eighteen further designs to be engraved in the new composite woodblock mode of the 1860s:
Necessarily Marcus Stone's significant program of illustration for the initial serial publication of Our Mutual Friend over nineteen months has since overshadowed his slight contributions to the lesser works of non-fiction which Dickens wrote twenty years earlier. Among these minor compositions of the early 1860s, in Pictures from Italy, Stone has — presumably with Dickens's endorsement — produced a series of four dual character studies that depart dramatically from the 1846 illustrations by landscape water-colourist Samuel Palmer. In particular, although Stone's The Chiffonier accompanies the text, it does not actually illustrate the text in sense of realizing and commenting upon a textual moment of some importance. To a lesser degree one encounters a similar problem with the tall street-sweeper and the short soldier in Civil and Military and with the Genoese elder and child in Italian Peasants; in each, the artist has not provided a strong connection between the facing text and the picture. We can therefore hardly term these "illustrations," but should rather consider them "visual adjuncts" or "complements" that extend the text, in the process restoring Dickens's original intention to react against the established conventions of travel-writing and guidebooks by avoiding such architectural studies as Palmer's classical vista The Street of the Tombs, Pompeii (1846). Dickens deliberately eschews many of the classical sites which the aristocratic Grand Tourists of the eighteenth century visited, and instead focusses on the contemporary lives of such working-class Italians as the Victorian traveller might frequently encounter, particularly in the streets of Genoa, where the Dickenses lived over eleven months in 1844 through 1845. Although the travel-letters which Dickens as editor subsequently published in The Daily News in 1846 do not entirely lack panoramas and picturesque landscapes, frequently in the resulting book Dickens moves in for the closeup. Consequently, Marcus Stone's four pictures seem to reflect Dickens's penchant for describing local characters rather than classical ruins and monumental Renaissance architecture. As Francesca Orestano has succinctly remarked, in Pictures from Italy "The point of interest lies elsewhere" (50):
Dickens’s lack of interest in assuring his readers of dutiful groundwork is evident in the fact that Pictures from Italy is singularly poor in references to the Italian travel book palimpsest, apart from twice mentioning Simond’s Tour of Italy and Sicily (PI 48, 107) and treating dismissively the relevant Murray guides (PI 17, 189 n.4) as he does in front of Lyons cathedral: "If you would know all about the architecture of this church, or any other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr. Murray’s Guide-Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him, as I did?" (PI 17). [Orestano, p. 50]
Left: Samuel Palmer's ornamented initial page in the 1846 edition, The Reader's Passport (p. 1). Centre: Sol Eytinge, Jr.'s study of the initial foreign in the book, The Brave Courier, who guides the Dickenses throughout their European tour (1867). Right: Harry Furniss depicts the friar as less sombre and more enthusiastic friar who beckons Dickens's party to follow him further into the Roman underground, The Guide in the Catacombs (frontispiece, 1910). [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Samuel Palmer. London: Chapman and Hall, 1846; rpt., 1850.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy in Works. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall: 1862, rpt. 1874.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist, also, Pictures from Italy, American Notes for General Circulation. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.
Kitton, Frederic G. "Marcus Stone." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: George Redway, 1899. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004. Pp. 192-203.
Orestano, Francesca. "Charles Dickens and Italy: The 'New Picturesque'.” Dickens and Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy, ed. Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Pp. 49-67.
Paroissien, David, ed. A Companion to Dickens. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Last modified 20 January 2019