"Dickens as a Children's Author," facing page 1 in <span class="bcbook">A Holiday Romance</span> (January 1868)

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Portrait of Charles Dickens, aged fifty-five (1867)

Sol Eytinge

Wood engraving

Illustration for Dickens's A Holiday Romance in Our Young Folks, An Illustrated Magazine For Boys and Girls, Vol. IV

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.

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The likeness of Dickens two years before his death is melancholy and care-worn, yet intense in its inner gaze and self-assorption; unlike other initial plates in the Our Young Folks series, it amounts to a psychological study.

The other pictures tend to depict the honoured author (and well-remunerated) full-length, either self-consciously posing (as with the 1865 portrait of Thomas Hughes in Vol. I, No. 1, and "The Walter Scott of the Juveniles," Mayne Reid in Vol. III, No. 1, 1867), writing at home (as with the 1866 portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Vol. II, No. 1) or at work (as with the 1869 portrait of Dr. Isaac Hayes in Vol. V, No. 1). Only the last of the series, the 1870 head-and-shoulders study of Louis Agassiz (Vol. VI, No. 1), is comparable to the study of Dickens in pose, although one would probably characterize the professor as merely thoughtful. Here we have the Dickens that Edgar Johnson's biography gives us, a portrait emphasizing the qualities of "feverish depression and growing disillusionment of the writer in dissolution" (Kappel and Patten 3).

Abstracted and brooding, the image of the author that introduces the first episode of A Holiday Romance seems better suited as a frontispiece to Bleak House. It is the introduction of Hamlet with Yorrick's skull into the curtain-raising of a pantomime. Unsigned, it is not likely the work of John Gilbert, who was commissioned to do the four full-page plates, each a scene from one of the novella's four parts (furthermore, Gilbert always signed his work with his characteristic "J" through a "G"). Since the head here resembles very much that in R. W. Buss's Dickens's Dream (c. 1870), it is probably the work of Sol Eytinge, Junior, noted for his black-and-white sketches designed to illustrate Child-pictures from Dickens (1867) and A Christmas Carol (1869).

Dickens was not, strictly speaking, a children's author at all, despite his celebrated studies of children beginning with Oliver Twist. However, Fields must have been delighted to present the latest addition to his stable of authors the best-selling British novelist who had just agreed to give Fields, Osgood an exclusive contract for American publication.

The Illustrator

Born in Philadelphia on 23 October 1833, at the age of thirty-four Eytinge through Boston publisher James T. Fields (1817-1881) met Dickens at the outset of the second American tour in 1867, and subsequently accompanied Fields in the spring of 1869 to Gad's Hill, Kent, to discuss the illustrations for forthcoming volumes of the Diamond Edition.

Other plates by Eytinge: Initial-letter Vignettes

Bibliography

Allingham, Philip V. "The Original Illustrations for Dickens's A Holiday Romance by John Gilbert, Sol Eytinge, and G. G. White as these appeared in Our Young Folks, An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. IV." Dickensian 92, 1 (Spring 1996): 31-47.

Charvat, William. "James T. Fields and the Beginnings of Book Promotion, 1840-1855." Huntington Library Quarterly, 8, 1 (November 1944): 75-94.

Dickens, Charles. Christmas Books and Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People [Seven Sketches from "Our Parish"]. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. The Diamond Edition. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875 [rpt. of the 1867 Ticknor & Fields volume].

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol — A Ghost Story of Christmas. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Jr. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1868.

Dickens, Charles. A Holiday Romance in Our Young Folks, An Illustrated Magazine For Boys and Girls, Vol. IV. Boston: Ticknor Fields, 1868.

Kitton, Frederic George. Dickens and His Illustrators: Cruikshank, Seymour, Buss, "Phiz," Cattermole, Leech, Doyle, Stanfield, Maclise, Tenniel, Frank Stone, Landseer, Palmer, Topham, Marcus Stone, and Luke Fildes. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Re-print of the London 1899 edition.

Schlicke, Paul, ed. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 1999.

Winter, William. "Charles Dickens" and "Sol Eytinge." Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days. New York: Moffat, Yard, & Co., 1909. Pp. 181-202, 317-319.

Created 8 December 2002

Last modified 1 February 2023