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The Engraved Title-page — “Eight Vignettes and The Author”
Harry Furniss
1906
13.8 cm by 8.3 cm, or 5 ½ by 3 ¼ inches, framed
Lithograph
Dickens's Little Dorrit, facing A. A. Dixon's frontispiece.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
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The second of the book's illustrations suggests that the readers to whom Collins' Clear-Type Press was marketing the pocket-book would have been familiar with the better-known characters and titles of Charles Dickens. Veteran illustrator Harry Furniss depicts the great Victorian author as the British readership would have thought of him, as the Victorian sage drawn by Harry Furniss, whose signature appears directly below the central portrait of Dickens as he would have looked in the final decade of his life. This image is somewhat misleading, however, as the author was just 28 and 29 when he wrote the novels which he published in Master Humphrey's Clock (1840-41). Accordingly, he would have looked much younger, as in Samuel Lawrence's 1837 portrait. Here, the illustrator has chosen to present an image of the author more consistent with the 1867 photograph by J. Gurney & Sons and as depicted by American illustrator Sol Eytinge, Junior, in the frontispiece for the Diamond Edition volume of The Pickwick Papers (1867).
Furniss appears to have based the other vignettes surrounding the image of the author not so much on those in the Household Edition volumes of the 1870s, as on the original editions illustrated by George Cruikshank and Hablot Knight Browne. Groome presents the dozen figures in the vignettes surrounding the portrait as the coinage of Dickens's brain, suggesting that Groome here alludes to R. W. Buss's Dickens's Dream (1875). Harry Furniss's signature beneath the cameo of the fifty-eight-year-old Dickens may indicate that Collins Clear-type Press had either borrowed the image from Furniss, or had commissioned him to do all the engraved titles for the series:
Furniss has apparently based the portrait of the aged novelist in the centre of the 1906 title-page on an 1868 caricature by André Gill. The remaining twelve figures have the following origins:
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illustrated by A. A. Dixon. With an engraved title by Harry Furniss. London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1906.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz"). The Authentic Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1901 [rpt. 30 May 1857 volume].
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Frontispieces by Felix Octavius Carr Darley and Sir John Gilbert. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1863. 4 vols.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867. 14 vols.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illustrated by James Mahoney. The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1873. Vol. 5.
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 12.
Created 3 September 2026