A Souvenir of Dickens, or Dickens's Dream by Robert W. Buss (1875). Source: William Glyde Wilkins and B. W. Matz. Charles Dickens in Caricature and Cartoon. Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1924. Scanned image by George P. Landow; additional text by Philip V. Allingham. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]

Commentary from Stephen Jarvis's Death and Mr. Pickwick (2015)

'Tell me — do you know the print that appeared about eighteen months after Dickens's death, showing his empty chair at his writing desk?' [The Graphic, 9 June 1870]

'I have seen it, yes.'

'What a funny combination of names Dickens and I would have made — The Pickwick Papers, written by Boz, drawn by Buss.'

Over the succeeding weeks, 'written by' was omitted from the artist's thinking, but 'Boz, drawn by Buss' was his obsession, judging by the numerous sketches of Dickens's characters which he drew while still in bed, for often he did not have the strength to rise. The sketches concerned Dickens's entire career, from Pickwick onwards, as though Buss were determined to prove not only that he was worthy to be Seymour's successor, but that he could draw the whole of Dickens's work, a feat accomplished by no other illustrator who had partnered the author.

Buss's conception was a grand watercolour portrait of Dickens, with characters from the novels in the background, beginning with Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller in the very positions they adopted in Browne's drawing, with Sam half-turning, and Mr. Pickwick admiring — the drawing that Buss would have made, had he not been dismissed.

With great exertion, he pulled himself out of the blankets one morning and started work on the watercolour, the easel having been placed in readiness beside his bed. He used a photograph of Dickens as his model, and gradually, over a number of weeks, his picture of Dickens materialised, with the author sitting in a chair in the library, while the characters floated among the books on the shelves as if emerging from Dickens's imagination.

Robert Buss died on 26 February 1875. At the time of his death, barely a quarter of the picture had been coloured, and that mostly of Dickens himself. [Jarvis, pp. 746-747]

A Souvenir of Dickens (also known as Dickens's Dream) by Robert William Buss. Image credit: Charles Dickens Museum, London. Reproduced via Art UK under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (CC BY-NC-SA). [Click on image to enlarge it.]

Leon Litvak's Analysis: "a swirling cloud of over 75 of his characters" (2025)

Leon Litvak in his recent Dickensian article notes that illustrator Robert William Buss (1804-75) worked only briefly with Dickens on a single monthly number after the suicide of the first Pickwick collaborator, Robert W. Seymour (1798-1836). Nevertheless, shortly after Dickens's death, Buss reflected on that brief relationship, and planned a fitting visual memorial to the great novelist. However, it remained a work in progress at Buss's death on 26 February 1875.

He studied the images of artists who had longer-term collaboration with Dickens, especially Phiz (Hablot K. Browne), who had illustrated most of the major works), as well as George Cruikshank, who worked on Oliver Twist, Marcus Stone, who produced drawings for Our Mutual Friend, and finally Sir Luke Fildes, illustrator of Dickens's last complete novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. [Litvak, 201]

Buss's tinted version of Fildes' Jasper's Sacrifices (originally, August 1870).

Buss made trial sketches, and carefully worked out the placement of figures, fixed in the poses they adopt in the original images. To paint Dickens he turned to a famous photograph taken by John Watkins in 1861 an iconic engraving, depicting the author in a serious pose, as if lost in thought. To reproduce the study, he turned to an iconic engraving by Luke Fildes, entitled The Empty Chair published in The Graphic soon after Dickens's death, and presenting a vacated seat in the author's beloved country home. [Litvak, 201]

As there is no record of its having been commissioned, it seems that Dickens's Dream was a deeply personal work, representing Buss's last chance to create and engage with Dickensian subjects. [Litvak, 202]

Litvak identifies specific figures in a roughly chronological sequence of texts [links to these figures have been added in the following list]:

Bibliography

Jarvis, Stephen. Death and Mr. Pickwick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. vii + 802 pp.

Litvak, Leon. "Stories from the Charles Dickens Museum Collection: Dickens's Dream." The Dickensian, No. 526, Vo1. 121, Part II (Summer 2025): 200-202.

Wilkins, William Glyde and B. W. Matz. Charles Dickens in Caricature and Cartoon. Boston: The Bibliophile Society, 1924. No. 50.


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Created 19 July 2007

Last modified 13 January 2026