International studio (27.1905/1906(1906))

George Alfred Williams

George aefred Williams
A NEW ILLUSTRATOR OF
DICKENS
Scrooge in his counting-house mood
had no use for Christmas. He would have had still
less use for the Christmas Carol, if he could be
imagined existing outside it. and being made the
victim of its lesson. And if it had ever come his
way to know that any one wasted time drawing pic-
tures to illustrate such a piece of nonsense, the
descent from “Bah!” to “Humbug!” would have
been easy and prompt.
But there is no humbug about the Illustration of
Dickens’s works; there never has been. Hardly a
writer has lived who took the whole problem of the
pictorial interpretation of his scenes with such a
downright fervour of earnestness. He should have
been his own illustrator, like Thackeray, who, it
is not to be forgotten, competed for the task of
illustrating Pickwick. Then, at any rate, we should
have missed the quarrels as to whether the story of
Oliver Twist and the proceedings and fortunes of
the famous club arose out of the wooclcuts, or vice-
versa. But who does not know what eise we should
have missed far too good to lose ?
If, however, he was not his own illustrator, he
was, not to speak it in bated breath, his own illus-
trator’s boss. If Sergeant Snubbin looked too old
compared to Mr. Pickwick, his yearswere lightened;
if the Major looked too young for Dombey, he
improved. Or if the author was out of reach
in Switzerland and some irritating blunder was cut
and printed, he experienced a “hot sweat.” All
this is merely to say that Dickens saw everything
that went on in his stories—actually saw it. He did
not write as at hearsay, but as having been on the
ground at the time. So it happened that he was
always ready with a “subject” for the monthly
block and a page or two of directions as to how it
was to be handled. Hablot K. Browne once made
a bonfire of Dickens’s notes and old papers when he
moved to another dwelling; and quantities besides
of these memoranda may have been lost, but
enough remain to show them thorough.
And if Dickens rather saw than fancied his fic-
titious creations, or perhaps because he did, his
readers likewise see. Characters in his books are
familiär as your friends and acquaintances and
enemies are familiär. You don’t so much remem-
ber the unlovely disposition and unconscionable
behaviour, say, of Quilp, as you recall his horrid
appearance, though you may not be seeing the same
Quilp Dickens had in his mind’s eye, or, except


Copyright, 1905, by The Baker and Taylor Company

“A MERRY CHRISTMAS, UNCLE!”
ILLUSTRATION BY GEORGE ALFRED WILLIAMS FOR
“A CHRISTMAS CAROL” (THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO.)
that your picture is bound to be formecl somewhat
by the notion of an illustrator or two, the same any
other reader sees. The text itself, indeed, shows oc-
casional lapses. JoeWillet,forinstance,wasdeprived
of an arm “in the defence of the Salwanners,” but
which arm the author omits to mention. This
might be a failure in visualisation, or a careless
record of visualisation, or, except that all the other
testimony points the other way, the very opposite
quality of imagination, the Substitution of the
abstract for the concrete, the mental for the visual
fancy. The illustrator, Phiz, working on Barnaby
Rudge in 1841, could not, in the nature of things,
be so indefinite. But he, too, apparently, had a
hazy impression. In four of the cuts showing Joe
after the war he lacks a right arm, in one the left.
To investigate the impressions of readers would
probably lead into an inquiry of the sort that Pro-
fessor James propounds 011 the question whether at
rising in the morning you draw on regularly the
right or the left shoe first.
This characteristic visual quality in the fiction of
Dickens makes trouble. He is .pre-eminently the
author to illustrate. Yet he has to be done over and
over. The bibliophile, along with one Thackeray

xxv