American-born but European-trained artist C. S. [Charles Stanley] Reinhart's fifty-two plates for Charles Dickens's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby appeared in the Harper & Brothers' Household Edition (New York, 1875). His "Parisian" style of illustration, just in vogue when the American Household edition volumes appeared in the 1870s, is a severe departure from the careful detailism of Dickens's original illustrator of the novel, Hablot Knight Browne. Reinhart's brand of Sixties realism is perfectly consistent with the new style of the British Household Edition, particularly the work of its principal illustrator, Fred Barnard, who worked on Nicholas Nickleby in the same year. 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 initial American Household Edition volume.

Dickens's third serial novel first appeared under the title The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby in nineteen monthly instalments between April 1838 and October 1839 (the last a double-number). But in those instalments and the subsequent Chapman and Hall volume, as was the case with most of this author's monthly serials, the illustrations were steel engravings intended to be juxtaposed against the relevant pages of text, and not (as was the case in the sixteen Household Edition volumes issued by Harper and Brothers) integrated into the text itself.

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Related material by other illustrators (1838 through 1910)

Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Bibliography

Barnard, J. "Fred" (illustrator). Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, with fifty-nine illustrations. The Works of Charles Dickens: The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1875. Volume 15. Rpt. 1890.

Barnard, Fred, et al.. Scenes and Characters from Dickens. London: Chapman & Hall, 1908.

Dickens, Charles. Nicholas Nickleby. Illustrated by F. O. C. Darley and John Gilbert. The Works of Charles Dickens. The Household Edition. 55 vols. New York: Sheldon and Company, 1862. Vols. 1-4.

_______. The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. With fifty-two illustrations by C. S. Reinhart. The Household Edition. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875. I.

_______. Nicholas Nickleby. With 39 illustrations by Hablot K. Browne ("Phiz"). London: Chapman & Hall, 1839.

_______. Nicholas Nickleby. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. 18 vols. London: Educational Book, 1910. IV.

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.


Created 20 December 2019

Last modified 1 September 2021