s David Perdue and others, including J. A. Hammerton and
F. G. Kitton, have noted, the most unusual aspect of the Posthumous
Papers of the Pickwick Club illustrations is that they had an independent life of
their own, as a project developed by young publisher William Hall and assigned to veteran
illustrator Robert Seymour, before becoming adjuncts to a serial novel. Moreover, the
first monthly part (April 1836) contained not two but four full-page etchings. After
completing just seven of what were supposed to be the first of a series of "Cockney
sporting" illustrations for only the first and second monthly instalments, on 20 April
1836 Seymour committed suicide, shooting himself in his back garden, supposedly
distressed that Dickens, at 24 a mere youngster, had assumed the director's role in the
project.
The original Chapman and Hall contract of early 1836 stipulated that Dickens, then a relatively unknown writer, would receive nine pounds for each sheet (i. e., sixteen pages of letterpress) or £14.10s. for every 24-pages of text in the 32-page instalment. With the change in the volume of the text in each monthly instalment to 32 pages (to accommodate the reduction in the number of illustrations) from June 1836 onward, Dickens’s payment per part suddenly rose to twenty guineas. After the introduction of Sam Weller in part five, sales rocketed up from only about fifty per number, so that, by the end of the serial run the publishers netted £14,000 from the sales of the serial parts alone; the last double number achieved a sensational number of sales: 40,000. The November 1837 volume edition featured some of the original illustrations (from what had been part thirteen onward) and some re-engraved by Phiz (or, more properly, his fellow Finden's apprentice, Robert Young) that the editor of the Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910) pronounced "much superior to those issued in the monthly parts" (The Dickens Picture-Book, p. 86). And, of course, Chapman and Hall imposed a more uniform appearance on the narrative-pictorial sequence by replacing Buss’s June 1836 illustrations with a pair by Phiz for Chapters VII and VIII that had not previously appeared, so that ascribing them to the third (June 1836) instalment would be incorrect. Thus, Phiz’s Wardle & his friends under the influence of "the Salmon" and The fat boy awake on this occasion only replaced Buss’s painterly compositions The Cricket-match and The Arbour Scene.
Dickens's search for a new illustrator, as has been noted, led him first to Robert W. Buss, but his engravings for the third monthly instalment did not please either the author or his publishers, who then hired Hablot Knight Browne (who originally signed his work as "Nemo," Latin for "Nobody," but who subsequently adopted the pseudonym "Phiz," by which sobriquet he is still popularly known), not yet twenty-one. Upon the conclusion of the serial run in November 1837, Chapman and Hall replaced the "annexed" plates (that is, plates whose captions were simply the page numbers against which they were to appear) with Phiz's re-drafted and re-etched versions, "much superior to those issued in the monthly parts, and partly with the original illustrations" (The Dickens Picture-Book, p. 86) to create a more uniform effect in the work's illustrations by eliminating entirely the plates by Buss. From the tenth monthly number (January 1837) onward Phiz provided duplicate steels to allow for the increased wear occasioned by the enormous jump in circulation that occurred after the introduction of Sam Weller in the July 1836 instalment.
See Plates, which have no annexed references for Parts 13 through 20
Illustrators of Pickwick Papers in the 1873 Household Edition
- Introduction to the two Household Edition versions
- Phiz's illustrations for the Chapman & Hall British edition
- Nast's illustration for the Harper Brothers American edition
Bibliography
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Chapter 2: "Robert Seymour." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980. Pp. 39-50.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. Chapter 3: "Robert Buss." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio State U. P., 1980. Pp. 51-58.
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. "Pickwick Papers (1836-37). Illustrated by Robert Seymour, R. W. Buss, and Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman & Hall.
Hammerton, J. A. Chapter X, "The Pickwick Papers." The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 17. Pp. 84-128.
Hammerton, J. A. "The Story of This Book." Dickens’s Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book, 1910. Vol. 2. Pp. i-viii.
Johannsen, Albert. "The Posthumous Papers of The Pickwick Club." Phiz Illustrations from the Novels of Charles Dickens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1956. Pp. 1-74.
Lester, Valerie Browne. Phiz: The Man Who Drew Dickens. London: Chatto and Windus, 2004.
Steig, Michael. "Chapter II. The Beginnings of 'Phiz': Pickwick, Nickleby, and the Emergence from Caricature." Dickens and Phiz. Bloomington & London: Indiana U. P., 1978. Pp. 24 to 50.
Vann, J. Don. "The Pickwick Papers, twenty parts in nineteen monthly instalments, April 1836-November 1837." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985. P. 61.
Created 20 November 2019 Last modified 26 April 2022