The Bird of Prey
Sol Eytinge
Wood engraving
3 x 1.5 inches"
Frontispiece Illustration for Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in the Lee & Shepard (Boston), and Charles T. Dillingham (New York) 1870 Illustrated Household Edition.
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Sol Eytinge, Ticknor-Fields' house illustrator who completed all of the plates for the Diamond Edition, met Dickens over dinner in the Parker House, Boston, at the start of the great writer's second American reading tour in 1867. Eytinge at that time completed four thumbnails (embellished initial-letter vignettes) for the Our Young Folks serialisation of the four-part Dickens children's story "A Holiday Romance." At Dickens's death in 1870, Chapman and Hall decided to issue the entire sequence of Dickens's novels and novels in a large-scale format and illustrated by contemporary artists in what it called "The Household Edition." Given the fluidity of American copyright in that era, it should have come as no surprise that the Household Edition would be imitated across the Atlantic as "The Illustrated Household Edition" by a consortium of New York and Boston publishers, with plates by gifted American illustrator Sol Eytinge, Jr., to lend the venture legitimacy — and secure American copyright. The initial woodcut sets the tone for the work; rather than capturing a moment in the action, apparently Eytinge's intention was the provide the first in a series of sixteen character studies in a quasi-realistic manner that both looks back to the caricatures of Hablot Knight Browne and forward to the thorough-going realism of Fred Barnard, lead illustrator for Chapman and Hall's forthcoming Household Edition. Lizzie Hexam is the reluctant companion and helper of her father, the Thames waterman Gaffer Hexam, who preys upon the victims of the polluted river.
Last modified 19 October 2010