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Household Edition: Uncaptioned Frontispiece, "Mr Pickwick" [p. 162
Thomas Nast
1873
composite woodblock engraving
13.8 cm high by 9.1 cm wide, framed
The Works of Charles Dickens, "Household Edition": The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Society. New York. Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Now, the screaming had subsided, and faces were in a glow, and curls in a tangle, and Mr. Pickwick, after kissing the old lady as before mentioned, was standing under the mistletoe, looking with a very pleased countenance on all that was passing around him, when the young lady with the black eyes, after a little whispering with the other young ladies, made a sudden dart forward, and, putting her arm round Mr. Pickwick’s neck, saluted him affectionately on the left cheek; and before Mr. Pickwick distinctly knew what was the matter, he was surrounded by the whole body, and kissed by every one of them.
It was a pleasant thing to see Mr. Pickwick in the centre of the group, now pulled this way, and then that, and first kissed on the chin, and then on the nose, and then on the spectacles, and to hear the peals of laughter which were raised on every side; but it was a still more pleasant thing to see Mr. Pickwick, blinded shortly afterwards with a silk handkerchief, falling up against the wall, and scrambling into corners, and going through all the mysteries of blind-man’s buff, with the utmost relish for the game, until at last he caught one of the poor relations, and then had to evade the blind-man himself, which he did with a nimbleness and agility that elicited the admiration and applause of all beholders. [Chapter XXVIII, "A Good-Humored Christmas Chapter, Containing an Account of a Wedding, and Some Other Sports Beside: Which Although in their Way, Even as Good Customs as Marriage itself, are not quite so Religiously kept up, in these Degenerate Times," pp. 169-70]
As a De Paul University (Chicago) exhibition some twenty years ago of images of Dickens's characters deployed for commercial purposes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has shown, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired businessman and amateur scientist, was a fast favourite in the United States of America. Thomas Nast, born long after the initial mania for all things Pickwickian, would have been thoroughly aware of Samuel Pickwick's iconic status, an image so revered by American Bozophiles that Nast dare not alter it too much: his Pickwick must adhere to the visual standards which Nast's British predecessors established forty years earlier. Consequently, his treatment had to be at least nominally consistent with the treatments of Robert Seymour and Hablot Knight Browne from the original 1836-37 serialisation by Chapman and Hall. And here, at least, in this image in the book's second frontispiece Nast captures Pickwick's affability and his love of long-established customs; for Mr. Pickwick, perpetually seen in the garb of the Regency, is no iconoclast. He barely smiles as he waits under the mistletoe at Dingley Dell in the good-natured Christmas chapters that won young Charles Dickens so many devoted readers and made him an overnight sensation in the London literary scene — and across the Atlantic, too. Perhaps, there is not enough of "Mr. Pickwick's affectionate good-nature" (165), very much in evidence as he kisses Bella on the forehead in the mistletoe scene on page 165, and then participates in a more general kissing with the young ladies at the party on page 169 (not 162 as the caption under the frontispiece announces).
However, readers of the American Household Edition volume almost immediately confront two problems in the frontispiece of Mr. Samuel Pickwick, retired English businessman, standing underneath the mistletoe at Dingley Dell Farm, not far from Muggleton (Rochester), Kent. Its juxtaposition with the book's opening chapter seems intended to complement the full-length portrait in the text of Pickwick that occurs in the incorporation of the society that will henceforth bear his name:
A casual observer, adds the secretary, to whose notes we are indebted for the following account — a casual observer might possibly have remarked nothing extraordinary in the bald head, and circular spectacles, which were intently turned towards his (the secretary’s) face, during the reading of the above resolutions: to those who knew that the gigantic brain of Pickwick was working beneath that forehead, and that the beaming eyes of Pickwick were twinkling behind those glasses, the sight was indeed an interesting one. There sat the man who had traced to their source the mighty ponds of Hampstead, and agitated the scientific world with his Theory of Tittlebats, as calm and unmoved as the deep waters of the one on a frosty day, or as a solitary specimen of the other in the inmost recesses of an earthen jar. And how much more interesting did the spectacle become, when, starting into full life and animation, as a simultaneous call for "Pickwick" burst from his followers, that illustrious man slowly mounted into the Windsor chair, on which he had been previously seated, and addressed the club himself had founded. What a study for an artist did that exciting scene present! The eloquent Pickwick, with one hand gracefully concealed behind his coat tails, and the other waving in air to assist his glowing declamation; his elevated position revealing those tights and gaiters, which, had they clothed an ordinary man, might have passed without observation, but which, when Pickwick clothed them — if we may use the expression — inspired involuntary awe and respect; surrounded by the men who had volunteered to share the perils of his travels, and who were destined to participate in the glories of his discoveries. [Chapter I, "The Pickwickians," p. 10]
Thus, Nast confuses readers by seeming to illustrate two widely separated moments from Chapters 1 and 28. The second, allied problem lies in Nast's deviating from the pleasing images of Samuel Pickwick that Robert Seymour and especially Hablot Knight Browne or "Phiz" had provided in the Chapman and Hall monthly serialization of 1836-37. In caricaturing the iconic image of Pickwick so familiar to two generations of American readers Nast has unfortunately exaggerated his corpulence, and throughout the volume often reduces the protagonist's bespectacled countenance to a distorted mask incapable of showing any emotion. In this notable respect, Nast's background as a political cartoonist and caricaturist should probably have disqualified him as a Dickens illustrator in the new, realistic style of the sixties since his species of caricature often involves distortion with an intent to belittle or ridicule. Moreover, Nast subjects the faces and forms of such amusing and one-dimensional Pickwickians as the romantic Tupman and the inept Winkle to a far kindlier visual satire than the book's focal character.
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The Household Edition. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. New York: Harper and Brothers 1873.
Dickens, Charles. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The Household Edition. Illustrated by Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne). London: Chapman and Hall, 1874.
Last modified 27 May 2019