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American-born but European-trained artist C. S. [Charles Stanley] Reinhart's sixteen plates for Charles Dickens's Uncommercial Traveller appeared in the single-volume, American version of the Household Edition published in 1876 by Harper and Brothers. His "Parisian" style of illustration, just in vogue when the American Household edition of Hard Times was published in 1876, is a severe departure from the careful detailism of Fred Walker and Harry French, the novel's previous (British) illustrators, but is perfectly consistent with the new realism of the British Household Edition's lead illustrator, Fred Barnard. Simon Houfe's remarks about C. S. Reinhart's penmanship conveying a sense of colouring without the actual use of any pigmentation are certainly appropriate to his work on this volume, which includes the essays published under the title The Uncommercial Traveller in Dickens's new weekly periodical All the Year Round in the 1860s. By the time that Chapman and Hall published the Library Edition volume in 1874, thirty-six of the thirty-seven essays and sketches had appeared in volume form. Curiously, the Household Edition publishes only twenty-eight of these short pieces, concluding with "The Italian Prisoner" (misnumbered "XVIII").

• Title-page vignette: Time and His Wife
• No Caption: The Uncommercial Traveller visits the Foul Ward at Wapping Work-House in Chapter 3
• She turned up the young woman's face as she spoke
• Lemonade. Bal-loon say, and Swing." Running Head: The Witches Waiting
• Nor is it, indeed, a style of business Mr. Jairing wishes
• And shook all his ten fingers in his face
• And with his eyes going before him like a prawn's
• He lies on the broad of his back, with his face turned up to the sky, and one of his ragged arms loosely thrown across his face
• And twice I saw him stalk in, take out his pudding, stab his pudding, wipe the dagger, and eat his pudding all up
• I ask your pardon," said the stranger, "But do I see in there any small article of property belonging to me?
• And the bride looked up at the glass, just in time to see the Captain cutting her head off
• I have seen him, in a pepper-and-salt jacket and drab trousers, with his arm around the waist of a boot-maker's house-maid
• Looking over too, I saw, lying on the towing-path, with her face turned up toward us, a woman." Running Head: A London Waif

• "Are you all here?" Glancing at the party over his spectacles
• "Are you aware, Sir, that you've been trespassing?"
• The face-maker . . . . becomes the village idiot
• Title-Page and Vignette
• [detail] Title-page Vignette: Sissy Jupe as a girl, holding her father's bottle of nine oils

References

Dickens, Charles. The Uncommercial Traveller, Hard Times, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Il. C. S. Reinhart and Luke Fildes. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876.

Houfe, Simon. The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1978.

Pennell, Joseph. The Adventures of An Illustrator Mostly in Following His Authors in America and Europe. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1925.

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Last modified 10 April 2013