Now largely forgotten, despite his prolific output during the course
of a relatively brief career (1852-1865), John McLenan was one of
America's finest caricaturists and realists in the decade preceding the
Civil War. Although he worked for numerous New York publishing houses,
and even a few of Boston's publishers, he produced some of his finest
work for the New York house of Harper & Company, illustrating two Wilkie
Collins novels (The Woman in White and No Name) and two
Dickens novels (Great Expectations and Great
Expectations for that house's large-scale format, wide-circulation
magazine Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilisation.
John McLenan, although just 34 at the time he worked on the series
for Great Expectations, was a seasoned veteran who was regarded
as 'The American Phiz' for both the quality and quantity of his
illustrations of such works as Dickens's Great Expectations in
Harper's Weekly (7 May through December 3, 1859). Sinclair
Hamilton describes (in terms reminiscent of Italian Renaissance artist
Cimabue's discovery of young Giotto tending sheep) the start of
McLenan's fourteen-year career in book illustration:
Discovered by DeWitt C. Hitchcock working in a
pork-packing establishment in Cincinnati and making drawings on the tops
of barrels, McLenan became one of the most prolific of our [i. e.,
America's] early illustrators. . . . . He was also well known as a comic
draftsman. His work will bear comparison with the best of his time.
[180]
Before undertaking the illustration of The Woman in White,
A Tale, and Great Expectations for Harper & Company, he
already had enjoyed a certain vogue among other leading New York
publishers: Charles Scribner; H. Long & Brother; D. Appleton; J. C.
Derby; DeWitt and Davenport; Sheldon, Lamport & Blakeman; Dick &
Fitzgerald; Stringer & Townsend; Bunce & Brother; A. Ranney; Edward
Livermore; T. W. Strong; Mason Brothers; J. Q. Preble; Carlton &
Porter; E. D. Long; Rudd & Carleton; and Derby & Jackson. His
relationship with Harper & Company began in 1856, and by 1859 he appears
to have become a frequent contributor. Aside from Harper's
Weekly, his work appeared in The New York Picayune, the
Jolly Joker, and Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Although
neither a deliberate emulator of Hablot Knight Browne ("Phiz") nor a
highly innovative illustrator, McLenan was certainly as prolific an
illustrator in mid-nineteenth-century New York as Phiz was in London;
and of course neither Phiz nor McLenan worked in the somewhat academic,
professional, and naturalistic style of the Sixties School to which
Marcus Stone belonged.
The unique feature of the 1861 American single-volume edition of
Great Expectations is the frontispiece, signed "H. L. S.," and
therefore not by McLenan, and probably by the Philadelphia-born house
illustrator for Harper & Brothers, Henry Louis Stephens (1824-1882),
whom Sinclair Hamilton credits with seventeen major illustrated works,
including American editions of W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair (New
York: Frank J. Thompson, 1859-1860) and Charles Reade's Very Hard
Cash (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1864: 18 plates). In contrast,
Hamilton credits McLenan with fifty-six major illustrated works,
including a great many travelogues, the Harper's serialization
of Great Expectations (1859: 64 plates), and both Wilkie
Collins's The Woman in White (Harper's, 1860: 74 plates)
and No Name (Harper's, 1863: 63 plates).
Unfortunately, Great Expectations was among the last works
that McLenan illustrated; because he died four years later, at the
comparatively early age of thirty-eight, he missed the opportunity to
meet Charles Dickens on his 1867 American reading tour, an opportunity
enjoyed by Sol Eytinge (1833-1905), illustrator of Ticknor & Fields' new
six-volume Diamond edition of CD's works:
The memorial which appeared in the May [1865] number of
Yankee Notions called him "one of the best draughtsmen America
has ever produced" and said of him: "Equally at home in caricature and
in sketches from the life, with a quick perception of the ridiculous and
a fine appreciation of the picturesque, he soon took his place among the
illustrators of our current literature, second to none." (Cited by Frank
Weitenkampf in his "Foreword" to Early American Book
Illustration, xli)
Reference
Hamilton, Sinclair; "Foreword," Frank Weitenkampf. Early American
Book and Wood Engravers 1670-1870. Vol. 1, Main Catalogue.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. P., 1968.
Last updated 28 November 2006
