[Victorian Web Home —> Visual Arts —> Illustration —> Thomas Nast —> American Notes —> Charles Dickens —> Next]
Uncaptioned Frontispiece for the Household Edition of American Notes
Thomas Nast
1877
composite woodblock engraving
vignette, 19 cm high by 12.5 cm wide; page, 17.5 cm wide by 24.5 cm high
The Works of Charles Dickens, "Household Edition": Pictures from Italy, Sketches, and American Notes.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Frontispiece: The British Lion, dressed as John Bull and seated at an organ, plays and sings "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" as the American Eagle, attired as Uncle Sam, smokes a cigarette just outside the doorway.
New York Harper & Brothers, Ltd. 1877
My readers have opportunities of judging for themselves whether the influences and tendencies which I distrusted in America had, at that time, any existence but in my imagination. They can examine for themselves whether there has been any thing in the public career of that country since, at home or abroad, which suggests that those influences and tendencies really did exist. As they find the fact, they will judge me. If they discern any evidences of wrong-going, in any direction that I have indicated, they will acknowledge that I had reason in what I wrote. If they discern no such indications, they will consider me altogether mistaken — but not willfully. [283]
Perhaps Thomas Nast is mocking the title of the national anthem "The Home of the Brave and the Land of the Free" when he juxtaposes the sheet-music with a poster (Slavery) which advertises a reward for the apprehension of a runaway slave, the sort of "wanted poster" common enough in the Southern or "Slave" States at the time of Dickens's initial visit to America in 1842. Other embedded texts and images include the motto of the Order of the Garter ("Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense") as part of the organ itself, "American Notes By C. D.," "The National Spittoon," "Universal Distrust." By the framed image designated Aesop Nast may be implying the cautionary nature of both Dickens's descriptions of pre-Civil War America and his own illustrations, several of which feature that iconic couple, the American Eagle and the British Lion. These heraldic beasts seem to be getting along as friends rather than rivals on the world stage, despite a few hiccups in the relationship such as The Pig War, an 1859 confrontation between the two powers in the San Juan Islands of the Pacific North-West (to which Nast is apparently alluding in All's Well That Ends Well — see below — although the pig beside the lion may in fact be a bulldog), Britain's financing blockade-runners during the Civil War to continue the importation of Southern cotton and tobacco, and pro-Confederacy politicians in Britain who advocated more direct European intervention on behalf of the South. Mercifully, President Lincoln's signing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 removed a major irritant in Anglo-American affairs reduced the possibility of British intervention as Britain had abolished slavery throughout the Empire in 1863 and the South's plantation economy, supported by slave labour, was repugnant to most of the British population.
Composing his illustrations in 1872-73, Nast had the virtue of hindsight in highlighting Dickens's abolitionist sentiments and his admiration for America's democratic institutions that he expressed throughout American Notes for General Circulation, written immediately after his initial American reading tour of 1842.
Left: A. B. Frost's portrait of a phlegmatic Yankee, characteristically puffing on a cigarette, Title-page Vignette (1878). Centre: Marcus Stone's epic opening illustration, The Emigrants (frontispiece for the 1868 edition). Right: Harry Furniss's psychological study The Solitary Prisoner in the Philadelphia Penitentiary serves as the frontispiece in the 1910 Charles Dickens Library Edition.
Above: Nast's imaginative tailpiece of the British Lion and American Eagle amicably drinking together as the bird completes reading the book, All's Well That Ends Well. [Click on image to enlarge it.]
Above: Nast's imaginative headpiece for the "Preface" in which the British Lion, dressed as John Bull, presents a copy of American Notes to a dignified but cigarette-smoking American Eagle in an uncaptioned plate, Preface, The British Lion & American Eagle.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes. Works, New York: Peter Fenelon Collier & Son, 1890.
__________. Pictures from Italy, Sketches by Boz and American Notes. Illustrated by Thomas Nast and Arthur B. Frost. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877 (copyrighted in 1876).
__________. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by J. Gordon Thomson and A. B. Frost. London: Chapman and Hall, 1880.
Created 15 May 2019
Last modified 8 June 2020