Charles Dickens and Book Illustration

Today celebrates the bicentennial of the birth of English novelist Charles Dickens.  Go anywhere on the web today, and you will see Charley show up.  He is even headlining the Google homepage (although why this doodle is not yet listed on their doodle page and why there is not credit given to the artist, I have no idea).

Thanks to @GaiaBordicchia, I now know this illustration by Mke Dutton.

In my opinion, Charles Dickens has a very interesting relationship with the visual arts.  Not only did he work with some of the most well-known illustrators of his day (George Cruikshank, John Leech), he inspired other incredible illustrators like Arthur Rackham as well as authors and illustrators to this day.  When we say something is "Dickensian," we don't just mean it is like something from his time period.  I don't think the terms Victorian and Dickensian are interchangeable.  With all things Dickens there is this wonderful combination of naive enthusiasm tempered with horrible and dark tragedy.  Draw someone in a top hat and stiff shirt collar and you might say he is a Victorian.  Place a slightly over-sized top hat on a bright-eyed youth and then in the background place a dark and disheveled man lurking and eyeing the youth, and now you have drawn something Dickensian.  Dickens evoked a feeling of narrative and you can picture it with your mind's eye.

"Mr. Fezziwig's Ball" from A Christmas Carol, by John Leech

With regards to book illustration, Dickens novels were episodic and lent themselves perfectly to illustrators who wanted to use a vignette to capture the mood and moment of a scene in his works. Try illustrating a moment in a James Joyce novel.  Good luck! Even fellow writers like Anthony Trollope and George Eliot could not quite come to the level of a captured moment in writing (in my opinion).  For a really wonderful resource and archive of Dickens' illustrators and illustrations, you can visit the link below.

I was trying to think of how Dickens had influences the visual arts and popular culture, and of course, it usually comes back to A Christmas Carol.  Would I have watched every single episode of Disney's Duck Tales if there weren't a Scrooge McDuck from A Christmas Carol?  I think there is something about the way Dickens wrote characters and character types, that when combined with our impressions and visual memory of things from the Victorian Era, create a motif and an imagery that is uniquely Dickensian and something that authors and illustrators have drawn from ever since.  There is plenty of Dickens writing that I do not like and consider supremely cheezy, but he is worth celebrating.  Literature, illustration, and cinema all owe him a debt of gratitude.  Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens!