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The Monthly Wrapper
Phiz (Hablot K. Browne)
Vol. XIII: March 1853
Etching
Page size 22 cm high by 12.8 cm wide (8 ⅝ by 5 inches)
Wood engraving
[Return to text of Steig]
The book was published in the customary twenty monthly parts, March 1852 through September 1853, by Bradbury and Evans in London, and by Harper and Brothers, New York, with a blue-green wrapper and forty plates designed by Phiz.
Scanned image and text by George P. Landow.
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As Michael Steig has noted, Phiz probably designed the wrapper without a complete knowledge of the novel's trajectory and complete cast of characters. He perhaps had, at best, a detailed knowledge of chapters 1 through 4 (which he would have read in manuscript rather than in proof) prior to March 1852, when the first monthly number appeared. However, Steig speculates, based on his analysis of the vignettes in the wrapper for the monthly parts, Phiz had seen "at least a portion of the second number — which was already in proof, with illustrations completed, by 7 March" (132), before he completed the woodblock engraving for the monthly wrapper. Steig further conjectures that Dickens must have explained his intentions for the whole novel in sufficient detail for Phiz to design appropriate vignettes, including Lady Dedlock walking beside her carriage (instalment 4, chapter 12, June 1852), and Nemo, the law-writer — in fact, Captain Hawdon, Esther's natural father (instalment 3, chapter 10, May 1852). These highly detailed vignettes include such key places as Tom-All-Alone's (chapter 16) and even such secondary characters as the rag-and-bone merchant Krook and his cat, who first appear in chapter 5.
Valerie Browne Lester reinforces the point that, unlike the situations that governed his designs for previous monthly wrappers, Phiz was equipped from some advanced understanding of this novel. He seems to anticipate many of the main themes and characters for the entire novel in this 1852 wrapper design:
In November 1851, Dickens began Bleak House and so firm were his ideas for the novel that he was able straight away to give Phiz a clear outline for the wrapper of the monthly parts. Phiz laced the image with satire, and in his hands the wrapper became the playground of judges and lawyers cruelly using their clients as pieces in games of chess, battle-dore, and blindman's buff. Dickens was filled with righteous anger against the labyrinthine wranglings of the law courts, and in Bleak House he railed against a society that so thoroughly exploited its people. [150]
"Bleak House — Sixty-one Illustrations by Fred Barnard." Scenes and Characters from the Works of Charles Dickens, Being Eight Hundred and Sixty-six Drawings by Fred Barnard, Gordon Thomson, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz), J. McL. Ralston, J. Mahoney, H. French, Charles Green, E. G. Dalziel, A. B. Frost, F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853.
_______. Bleak House. Ed. Andrew Lang. Illustrated by "Phiz" (Hablot Knight Browne). The Gadshill Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1897. 2 vols.
_______. Bleak House. The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens. London: Oxford University Press. 1948.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Steig, Michael. Chapter Four. "Bleak House: Iconography of Social and Sexual Satire." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. 86-112.
Vann, J. Don. "Bleak House, twenty parts in nineteen monthly instalments, October 1846—April 1848." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985. 69-70./
Created 7 February 2019
Last modified 5 April 2023