In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the expansion of literacy was associated with pictures since learning the letters of the alphabet always involved pictorial adjuncts or prompts. We cannot underestimate the appeal of pictures in Victorian publications of all kinds. But the phenomenon of inserting "extra" illustrations into a book published either in whole or in parts was connected with just one writer of prose fiction: Charles Dickens. The appearance of a cheap edition of Dickens's works in 1847 meant that each shilling volume (to keep the publisher's costs down) could have but one illustration — a new frontispiece. However, so distinctive visually as well as verbally were Dickens's characters that even purchasers of such cheap volumes had an appetite for illustrations. As Robert L. Patten explains in his compact article in The Oxford Readers' Companion, the original illustrators were not behind in the initiative to supply such "extra" illustrations: Fred Barnard, F. W. Pailthorpe, Sir John Tenniel, and other prominent magazine and book illustrators provided suitable portraits of Dickens's principal characters in sets for the average buyer, while Hablot Knight Browne and George Cruikshank "in old age painted water-colours of their illustrations for eager collectors" (292). Thus, each generation, building on the previous generation's images of such readily recognizable Dickensian figures as Mr. Pickwick and Sairey Gamp (the former distinguished immediately by his baldness, glasses, rotund form, and Regency dress; the latter by her amplitude, mourning dress, bonnet, and "gamp" or umbrella), reinvented Dickens's characters, inserting new likenesses into old books republished cheaply for an ever-widening readership.
Mass circulation of Fred Barnard's woodcuts from the Household Edition volumes occurred when, in 1908, Dickens's original publishers, Chapman and Hall, issued The Dickens Souvenir Book, undoubtedly inspired by similar collections of Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens and the success of "The Household Edition" (1871-79). The new Dickens Picture Book was enthusiastically reviewed in The Dickensian for making widely available so many of the Household Edition's original 866 wood-engraved illustrations in its 584 pages.
Less well known because printed in much smaller quantities are Barnard's three series of "Characters from Dickens," each set involving six pen-and-ink drawings, each image 12 by 16 cm, on artists' board, uniformly mounted within pale lilac frames, with a relevant quotation from Dickens's works. However, the practice of installing "extra-illustrations" originated much earlier, with English biographer James Granger; the concept involved inserting publisher-commissioned additional illustrations into the bound volumes composed of monthly parts. According to J. A. Hammerton,
The variety and excellence of many of them attest to the extraordinary popularity of Dickens's works, for artists of great ability were among those who furnished such illustrations to supplement the etchings of Phiz. Phiz himself was responsible for not a few, Sir John Gilbert, R. A., T. Onwhyn, Kenny Meadows, and Crowquill (Alfred Forrester), were also numbered among them. Occasionally these supplementary plates were published with the permission of Dickens, but in the majority of cases they had no sort of authority. . . . The occasion of their appearance was usually the publication of a new edition, of a particular book, and especially the arrival of the first cheap edition of one of the novels which had previously been obtainable only in the expensive first edition. [39-40]
Hammerton has termed the publisher's making allowance for the insertion of "extra-illustrations" Grangering, after English biographer James Granger (1723-1776):
he published a Biographical History of England . . . adapted to a Method Catalogue of Engraved British Heads (1769), and insisted 'on the utility of a collection of engraved portraits', by publishing later editions with blank inter-leaved paper for inserting extra illustrations. [Chambers 631]
By the end of the nineteenth century, Hammerton could report that "the majority of illustrated books in our time are, in a sense, grangerised by the publishers" (39). Since a cheap edition typically had only an engraved frontispiece, grangerising assured the reader of having access to suitable illustrations — not so much of specific moments in the narrative, as of realisations of noteworthy characters in appropriate backgrounds, such as Barnard's "Pecksniff," shown in his study, surrounded by likenesses of himself to suggest his egotism. Phiz, the redoubtable Hablot Knight Browne, Dickens's principal illustrator, initiated the practise in Dickens's novels when he engraved on wood blocks six extra illustrations for the cheap edition of The Pickwick Papers in 1847; in the following year, Dickens's own publishers, Chapman and Hall, commissioned Phiz to supply four engraved plates for the first cheap edition of The Old Curiosity Shop. Chapman and Hall also commissioned J. Absolon and F. Corbeaux to provide similar "extra illustrations" of Dolly Varden, Barnaby Rudge, Emma, and Miss Miggs from Barnaby Rudge for the first cheap edition in 1849, the pen-and-ink drawings being engraved by Finden on steel plates and marketed at a shilling a set. The novel, originally appearing in Master Humphrey's Clock in weekly periodical serialisation of 43 numbers, appeared in volume form in November 1841, but the cheap edition did not appear until 1846. Clearly, the publishers' intention was to sell as many of the original 21 shilling publications as possible before issuing a "cheap" shilling version; the text would also appear in two extremely cheap formats to attract as wide a range of readers as possible: the weekly part (1.5 pennies per issue) and the monthly part (7 d. each).
So great did the popular taste for extra illustrations from Dickens prove between the 1840s and 1870s that, at the close of the publication of the Household Edition in 1879, the principal illustrator, Fred Barnard, contracted with Cassell, Petter, and Galpin to produce his first series of six extra illustrations, "Character Sketches from Dickens," in lithograph (including portraits of some of Dickens's best-loved early characters: Samuel Pickwick; Alfred Jingle; Bill Sikes and dog, Bull'seye; Sairey Gamp; Little Dorrit; and Sydney Carton); a second series, in photogravure, which appeared in 1884, contained portraits of three paired characters (Tony and Sam Weller; Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter, Bertha; Little Nell and her grandfather), and Rogue Riderhood, Dan'l Peggotty, and Seth Pecksniff; and similarly a third and final photogravure series appeared in 1885, with portraits of Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim; Uriah Heep; Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness; Betsy Trotwood; Captain Cuttle; and the indefatigable Wilkins Micawber (the last of whom was a part of Joseph Clayton Clarke's Characters from Charles Dickens in 1889, although these extra illustrations by "Kyd" as Clarke signed himself do not contain any background elements). The Barnard extra illustrations were frequently reprinted by such firms as Thomas Archer, and Gebbie and Husson (Philadelphia); in December 1896 to mark its expansion Cassell's Family Magazine reproduced sixteen of the original eighteen illustrations. Occasionally one finds for sale an item such as "A set of ten 19th century pen and ink drawings of Dickensian characters by M. Walton after F. Barnard, subjects including Mr. Peggotty, Dombey and Son, Sydney Carton, etc., 16 x 12 cm in carved frames and blue linen style mounts." Walton was a well-known watercolourist who reissued Barnard's eighteen pen-and-ink studies as "colourised" illustrations, suitable for framing or grangerising.
Frederick G. Kitton in the second appendix of his exhaustive survey of Dickens and illustration in the nineteenth century catalogues the work of some of the best known "extra" illustrators, including the extra illustrations of the two principal end-of-the-century Dickensian artists F. W. Pailthorpe and Fred Barnard:
That there must have been a fairly constant demand for them is proved by their number and variety, including steel-engraving, etching, wood-engraving, lithography[,] chromo-lithography, photogravure, &c. [227]
Among the most prolific of the "extra illustrators," according to Kitton, was J. Clayton Clarke ("Kyd"), whose Characters of Charles Dickens probably exceeds 330 drawings; a collection of these, 241 in total, done in water-colours and signed with the monogram J. C. C., was auctioned for ten guineas in 1890. The Fleet Street Magazine published a few of Kyd's studies "of the leading personages in the novels" (233) in 1887. Honouring Kyd's achievement, in the Dickens bicentennial year the British Post Office issued six coloured postage stamps on 19 June featuring Mr. Bumble the beadle, Mr. Pickwick, The Marchioness, Mrs. Gamp, Captain Cuttle, and Wilkins Micawber (all signed "Kyd" and all available from the Royal Mail as elegantly coloured postcards), complementing a black-and-white miniature sheet of scenes from the novels Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and A Tale of Two Cities by Phiz. This mammoth series dwarfs F. W. Pailthorpe's select series of twenty-four engravings "from original drawings, of scenes not previously illustrated" (Kitton 235) in the style of Cruikshank and Leech for The Pickwick Papers in 1882, published by the London firm of Robson and Kerslake, who also issued the Pailthorpe-illustrated volumes of Great Expectations (21 illustrations, 1885) and Oliver Twist (21 illustrations, 1886). As only fifty sets of Pailthorpe's latter two collections of "Characters from Dickens" were printed, these are highly valuable; of these fifty sets, only a few were "coloured by hand in the daintiest possible style" (Hammerton 43), making the colourised illustrations of Pailthorpe the most highly prized of any "extra illustrations" by collectors of Dickensiana.
References
Barnard, Frederick, and M. Walton. Ten Characters from Dickens. Ten original pen & ink drawings, after Barnard: Dombey & Son; The Two Wellers; Mr Pecksniff; Sydney Carton; Alfred Jingle; Mark Tapley & Tom Pinch; Mr Peggotty; Mrs Gamp; Rogue Riderhood; Mr. Pickwick. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1879.
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; Charles Green; A. B. Frost; Gordon Thomson; J. McL. Ralston; H. French; E. G. Dalziel; F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes; printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition". London: Chapman and Hall, 1908.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1999.
Dickens, Charles. Il. Fred Barnard, et al. The Dickens Souvenir Book. London: Chapman & Hall, 1912.
Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture Book: A Record of the Dickens illustrators. London: Educational Book, 1912.
Kitton, Frederic G. Dickens and His Illustrators. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004.
McGovern, Una, ed. Chambers Biographical Dictionary. 7th edition. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap, 2002.
Patten, Robert L. Charles Dickens and His Publishers. University of California at Santa Cruz. The Dickens Project, 1991. rpt. from Oxford U. p., 1978.
Schlicke, Paul, ed. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999.
Last modified 4 July 2012