orking in the new, realistic manner of the 1860s
pioneered by Fred Walker and exemplified by the work
of George Du Maurier in the illustrated magazines
of the decade, Frederick Barnard (1846-1896) faced a daunting task in the commission he
won from Chapman and Hall in 1871: to illustrate over the next eight years nine of the
twenty volumes of the green cloth-covered Household Edition of Dickens's works,
including Bleak House, A Tale of Two
Cities, and Martin Chuzzlewit, outdoing
the narrative-pictorial sequences designed by the venerable
Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz") in collaboration with
the novelist himself. For his mammoth output of roughly four hundred and fifty drawings
over the eight-year life of the project Barnard earned the title "The Charles Dickens
among black-and-white artists" (Kitton, p. 222). And certainly if it may be remarked of
any artist illustrating Dickens after the novelist's death in 1870, it may be said of
Frederick Barnard that he knew his Dickens well, if any artist has ever possessed such
encyclopaedic knowledge.
Scarcely twenty-one when he received this commission, Fred Barnard decided that, rather than attempt to realize the scenes that Phiz and Dickens had originally chosen to realize on steel-etched plates, he would illustrate those textual moments that, for the most part, Phiz had not visualized. Whereas Phiz tended to draw in dramatic tableaux, group scenes for his separately mounted prints, in his illustrations produced through the revitalized medium of large-scale woodblocks and dropped directly into the letterpress, Barnard focused on the relationships between characters (often in pairs). As opposed to Phiz's delightful caricatures, Barnard has given us Dickens's people as they step forth from the pages and into our minds: three-dimensional, substantial, active, and insistently real in settings not crowded with the symbolic details that were Phiz's hallmark.
While Phiz must have wondered (when not so instructed by the writer himself, either in interviews or in letters) where the opening chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit would eventually lead the reader and which characters the novelist would choose to follow and develop (other than the titular young Martin himself), Barnard had the massive advantage of having read the whole novel, probably several times since entering adolescence, prior to planning his program of illustration that would rival Phiz's original schema in thoroughness and length. Furthermore, Barnard, though not having first-hand access to the original author's brilliant visual imagination, advice, and insight as Phiz did, was able to work at his own pace rather than that imposed by the relentless schedule of monthly serialisation. Finally, he would not have to brook Boz's corrections, observations, and interferences: he was free to follow his own pictorial fancies — well, almost free. In the mind of the reading public since before before Barnard's birth, Phiz's images of the Dickensian whimsies such as Sairy Gamp and Seth Pecksniff had engrained themselves so that, for example, Barnard could "flesh out" but could not fundamentally alter the timid Tom Pinch or the hypocritical Pecksniff, their balding pate and spiked hair respectively still being the sine qua non of these Dickens originals. Assimilating Phiz's quaint caricatures with the new realism of photography, Barnard could offer a new generation of readers something radically fresh: Dickens's characters, realised in the round, moving through three-dimensional, uncluttered settings which always keep the eye well forward.
Writing a century ago, the eight-year project of illustrating the Household Edition long completed, art critic J. A. Hammerton, a disciple of Harry Furniss, weighed the relative contributions of E. G. Dalziel, Charles Green, James Mahoney, Harry French, F. A. Fraser, and, of course, Fred Barnard:
of all the artists engaged on this edition Frederick Barnard held the most prominent position, he having fully illustrated no less than nine out of twenty books [including Sketches by Boz, Nicholas Nickleby, Barnaby Rudge, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, the Christmas Books, and several other Dickens novellas]. Barnard ranks as one of England's truly comic artists; but he was not only comic, he was one of the most versatile artists of our time . . . . while the drawings [he produced for the Household Edition] are strictly in his own style, there is just enough resemblance to the figures created by H. K. Browne to save you a shock . . . . Barnard was no mean painter; perhaps his 'Saturday Night in the east End,' and 'The Guards' Band Marching' are amongst his most important works. He also painted a 'Ball-room Scene,' of an elegant character, from one of Dickens' books, that had a very prominent place in the Institute of Painters in Oil Colours. [The Dickens Picture-Book (1910), 23-24]
By the closing decade of the nineteenth century, Barnard, like fellow Dickens illustrator Luke Fildes, had established himself as a successful portrait painter to the aristocracy and royal family. Among his three celebrated series of eighteen lithographic "Character Sketches from Dickens" (1879, 1884, and 1885) is his iconic 1872 representation of Seth Pecksniff as a humbug walking through a woodland glade, a self-satisfied serpent in an Eden (Chapter 30).
According to F. G. Kitton, Barnard died dramatically in September 1896, not yet fifty, of smoking in bed. Under the influence of "a powerful drug" such as laudanum, his pipe still alight, he fell asleep, and, when the bedclothes caught fire, was suffocated and his body charred.
Commentary: From the "Introductory Note" to "Scenes and Characters from Dickens" (1908)
Commissioned by Dickens's chief publishers, Chapman and Hall, to illustrate a wholly new, uniform edition of his works, Fred Barnard, Charles Green, Harry French, Gordon Thomson, A. B. Frost, James Mahoney, Edward Dalziel, and other "Illustrators of the Sixties" from 1871 through 1879 produced
a series of Dickens illustrations, now [i. e., in 1908] in some danger of being unduly neglected, in which the artists were wonderfully happy in preserving [ix/x] the original features of Phiz and Cruikshank's interpretations, while they toned down the more extravagant details and brought imagination into closer harmony with reality. These were the illustrations to the square-shaped "Household Edition," published in 1870 [i. e., 1871-79], just after the great novelist's death — and now reissued in the Dickens picture-book, in the hope that those who love the stories may like to possess in separate form what is, perhaps, the best pictorial accompaniment that the novels ever received. At the time of its first publication, the "Household Edition" enjoyed an enormous success. At the moment the name of Dickens was on every one's lips, and the fact that this splendidly illustrated reprint was issued in penny numbers and sixpenny parts placed it within reach of even the most humbly stocked purse. Its sale was stupendous, and the familiar green-covered pamphlets percolated through every town and village where the English tongue is spoken. The original copies may still be met with, under many a country timbered roof, carefully treasured as one of the most cherished household possessions.
Undoubtedly, a great part of the success was due to the art of the illustrators. To begin with, there was an unusually liberal display of pictures — the edition, as a whole, containing close upon nine hundred. But more important than the number were the truth and sincerity of the interpretations — qualities which helped to give a new life to characters already secure of immortality. First and foremost, of course, the edition will always be associated with the memory of Fred Barnard, whose pictures are the outstanding feature of the present volume. Barnard seemed destined by nature to illustrate Dickens; the spirit of "Boz" ran again in his veins. And nothing in his work is more impressively ingenious than the skill with which he took the types already created by his predecessors, preserved [x/xi] their characteristics, so that each was unmistakably himself, and yet by the illuminating touch of genius transferred them every one from the realm of caricature [i. e., the style of Robert Seymour and the other early Victorian illustrators] to that of portraiture. — "Introductory Note," pp. ix-xi.
Related Material: The American Edition by Harper & Bros.
- A Gallery of Title-Pages for the Household Edition of Charles Dickens's Works
- The Illustrators of the Household Edition
- The Old Curiosity Shop by Thomas Worth; (1872)
- Dombey and Son by W. L. Sheppard (1873);
- Nicholas Nickleby by C. S. Reinhart (1875);
- Pickwick Papers by Thomas Nast (1873);
- Christmas Stories by E. A. Abbey (1876);
- Hard Times by C. S. Reinhart (1876);
- Pictures from Italy and American Notes by Thomas Nast (1877).
Bibliography
Cook, James. Bibliography of the Writings of Dickens. London: Frank Kerslake, 1879. As given in Publishers’ Circular The English Catalogue of Books.
Davis, Paul. Charles Dickens A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998.
Dickens, Charles. The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, with 59 illustrations by Fred Barnard. Household Edition, 22 volumes. London: Chapman and Hall, 1872. Vol. 2.
Hammerton, J. A. The Dickens Picture-Book. The Charles Dickens Library Edition, Vol. XVII. London: Educational Book Co., 1910.
Kitton, Frederic G. Dickens and His Illustrators. 1899. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004.
Scenes and characters from the works of Charles Dickens; being eight hundred and sixty-six drawings, by Fred Barnard, Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz); J. Mahoney; Charles Green; A. B. Frost; Gordon Thomson; J. McL. Ralston; H. French; E. G. Dalziel; F. A. Fraser, and Sir Luke Fildes; printed from the original woodblocks engraved for "The Household Edition." London: Chapman and Hall, 1908.
Created 1 February 2008
Last modified 4 December 2024