Charles Dickens

Sol Eytinge

This 1867 frontispiece for the Diamond Edition is similar to the one used by Ticknor Fields for the "Our Young Folks" illustrated version of "A Holiday Romance" (image)

Although no longer the fashionable London "buck" of 1842, for each of his Boston constitutionals in late 1867 Dickens was as beautifully dressed as he was for the stage. [continued below]

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 photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

In contrast to the conventional dark-hued suits of Bostonian middle-class males, for his first pedestrian excursion, for example, Dickens wore

Light trousers with a broad stripe down the side, a brown coat bound with wide braid of a darker shade and faced with velvet, a flowered fancy vest . . . necktie secured with a jewelled ring and a loose kimono-like topcoat with wide sleeves and the lapels heavily embroidered, a silk hat, and very light yellow gloves. . . . [cited in Ackroyd, Dickens, 1011]

The Eytinge portrait, however, casts Dickens as a serious and even sombre man whose careworn features belie his actual age of 55, for he looks a good ten years older. This study is not the same as Eytinge's celebrated portrait, which Ticknor and Fields reproduced in 1868 as a souvenir of the American reading tour (included by William Winter in Old Friends. The portrait still reveals animation and a sense of playing to the audience, whereas this "close up" is highly introspective, like the half-awake writer of Buss's "Dickens' Dream." The strain of nearly a decade of keeping up pretences, of being the champion of family values in All the Year Round while carrying on a clandestine affair with young actress Ellen Ternan, whom he met when she was just a teenager acting in The Frozen Deep (1857) is all too evident.

Bibliography

Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1988.

Cohen, Jane Rabb. "Dickens and His Principal Illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980. Pp. 61-122.

Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Checkmark and Facts On File, 1998.

Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Adventures of the Pickwick Club. Il. Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1869.

Dickens, Charles. "Pickwick Papers (1836-37). Il. Hablot Knight Browne. The Charles Dickens Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.

Dickens, Charles. "Pickwick Papers (1836-37). Il. Hablot Knight Browne. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1873.

Dickens, Charles. "Pickwick Papers (1836-37). Il. Thomas Nast. The Household Edition. New York: Harper and Bros., 1873.

Guiliano, Edward, and Philip Collins, eds. The Annotated Dickens. Vol. 1. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1986.

Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book. London: Educational Book Co., 1910.

Kitton, Frederic G. Dickens and His Illustrators. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004.

Steig, Michael. Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U.P., 1978.

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