Title-page vignette [Dickens as a boy having fallen asleep over a desk, pasting labels] from Household Edition of Forster's "Life of Dickens" (1872)

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Title-page vignette: Asleep in the blacking factory

Fred Barnard

1870s

Woodblock engraving by the Dalziels

8.5 x 6.1 cm (3 ¼ by 5 ¼ inches), vignetted.

Frontispiece for Forster's Life of Charles Dickens in the Household Edition: Dickens as a boy having fallen asleep over a desk, pasting labels

[Complete page]

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham

[You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image, and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Commentary: An Autobiographical Connection to David Copperfield

In the first volume of The Life of Charles Dickens, published in the same year as the Household Edition of David Copperfield, 1872, John Forster revealed in Chapter 2, "Hard Experiences in Boyhood. 1822-1824," that the Murdstone and Grinby warehouse episode in the mid-century novel was but thinly disguised autobiography, and had originally been composed in the spring of 1847:

the poor little lad, with good ability and a most sensitive nature, turned at the age of ten into a 'labouring hind' . . . and conscious already of what made it seem very strange to him that he could so easily have been thrown away at such an age, was indeed himself. [1872 edition: Vol. I, 15]

According to biographer Forster, Dickens soon afterward abandoned the notion of writing his autobiography in favour of David Copperfield.

Bibliography

Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1990.

Barnard, Fred, et al. Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings by Fred Barnard, Hablot K. Browne (Phiz), J. Mahoney [and others] printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household edition". London: Chapman & Hall, 1908. Pp. 561-584.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. London: Chapman & Hall, 1872 and 1874. 3 vols.

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1879. Vol. XXII.

The copy of the book from which these pictures were scanned is in the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Created September 2009

Last modified 15 July 2022