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The Chiffonier
Marcus Stone
Engraver: E. Dalziel
1862
Wood engraving
8.9 cm wide by 13.3 cm high
"By Verona, Mantua, and Milan, Across The Pass of the Simplon into Switzerland," Chapter 9 in Dickens's Pictures from Italy in the Illustrated Library Edition, facing 408.
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The business of these recollections being with Italy, and my business, consequently, being to scamper back thither as fast as possible, I will not recall (though I am sorely tempted) how the Swiss villages, clustered at the feet of Giant mountains, looked like playthings; or how confusedly the houses were heaped and piled together; or how there were very narrow streets to shut the howling winds out in the winter-time; and broken bridges, which the impetuous torrents, suddenly released in spring, had swept away. Or how there were peasant women here, with great round fur caps: looking, when they peeped out of casements and only their heads were seen, like a population of Sword-bearers to the Lord Mayor of London; or how the town of Vevey, lying on the smooth lake of Geneva, was beautiful to see; or how the statue of Saint Peter in the street at Fribourg, grasps the largest key that ever was beheld; or how Fribourg is illustrious for its two suspension bridges, and its grand cathedral organ.
Or how, between that town and Bâle, the road meandered among thriving villages of wooden cottages, with overhanging thatched roofs, and low protruding windows, glazed with small round panes of glass like crown-pieces; or how, in every little Swiss homestead, with its cart or waggon carefully stowed away beside the house, its little garden, stock of poultry, and groups of red-cheeked children, there was an air of comfort, very new and very pleasant after Italy; or how the dresses of the women changed again, and there were no more sword-bearers to be seen; and fair white stomachers, and great black, fan-shaped, gauzy-looking caps, prevailed instead. [Chapter 9, "By Verona, Mantua, and Milan, Across the Pass of the Simplon into Switzerland," page 407]
The mid-Victorian reader of the republished and re-illustrated text that combines the travelogues American Notes (1842, originally without illustration) and Pictures from Italy (1846, originally with just four scenic woodcuts) must certainly have noted that three of the four Marcus Stone full-page woodcuts for the second half of the book have very little to do with the passages they face. Indeed, Stone really illustrates only Dickens's descent into the catacombs, focussing on the friar who serves as an animated and voluble tour-guide in In the Catacombs. The Poesque accompaniment at least has the virtue of accurately reflecting the narrator's manifest anxieties about leaving the upper world of the present for the subterranean maze of Rome's past. The fact that Stone has entitled the picture of the town's lamplighter with the French equivalent of "lamplighter" suggests that the picture marks a transition from Italian- to French-speaking Alpine regions; however, as its placement within the book suggests, it neither amplifies nor comments in any way on what Dickens has written. Search as you will, you will not find Dickens's description of a "chiffonier."
This, then, points to what Jane Rabb Cohen terms the "new aestheticism" of the 1860s as practised by a new generation of academically trained artists that had supplanted the Hogarthian caricaturists Cruikshank and Phiz: Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and Arthur Hughes, born, respectively, in 1827, 1828, 1829, and 1832, making all of them contemporary models for Marcus Stone. With twenty-two-year-old Stone Dickens had the advantage of collaborating with a neophyte who would readily take direction, but who would also reflect the latest thinking and technical developments in book illustration, particularly an interest in investigating the psychology of the figures and the use of studio models to create a three-dimensional reality typical of the New Men of the Sixties:
Unlike Dickens's early illustrators, who tended to draw from memory, Stone worked from models, and his naturalistic portrayals of characters suited the academic tastes of the times. Most important, perhaps, of all, Dickens knew that the young man, so indebted to him, would not question his authority. [Cohen, page 204]
An 1856 photograph of the adolescent artist reveals the sort of brooding intensity one finds in his portraits of the friar and the lamplighter in Pictures from Italy six years later. Here the artist, not yet a professional, exudes passionate intensity and a high seriousness — a sense of his mission and purpose in the graphic arts that will quickly metamorphose him from book-illustrator to painter. Although Dickens doubtless valued his enthusiasm and the freshness of his approach, Dickens did not accordingly update his style in either Great Expectations or Our Mutual Friend, both of which would have been better served by an artist working in what Cohen calls "the Hogarth-Cruikshank-Browne tradition" (p. 204). However, in the two travelogues from the 1840s Stone's pictures extend Dickens's texts in novel ways, re-engaging the reader to compare what Dickens's writing with what Stone is showing as a visual adjunct.
Cohen, Jane Rabb. "The Illustrators of Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood." Chapter 16, "Marcus Stone." Charles Dickens and His Original Illustrators. Columbus: Ohio Sate U. P., 1980. Pp. 204-209.
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy. Illustrated by Samuel Palmer. London: Chapman and Hall, 1846; rpt., 1850.
Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation and Pictures from Italy in Works. Illustrated by Marcus Stone. Illustrated Library Edition. London: Chapman and Hall: 1862, rpt. 1874.
Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist, also, Pictures from Italy, American Notes for General Circulation. Illustrated by Sol Eytinge, Junior. Diamond Edition. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1867.
Kitton, Frederic G. "Marcus Stone." Dickens and His Illustrators. London: George Redway, 1899. Amsterdam: S. Emmering, 1972. Rpt. Honolulu: U. Press of the Pacific, 2004. Pp. 192-203.
Orestano, Francesca. "Charles Dickens and Italy: The 'New Picturesque'.” Dickens and Italy: Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy, ed. Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Pp. 49-67.
Paroissien, David, ed. A Companion to Dickens. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Last modified 21 January 2019